Cocoa has been studied extensively because, well, who wouldn't want that job.

[ashling]

http://www.sciencealert.com/chocolate-boosts-your-brain-power

[JHan]

1. A friend of mine is a cocoa researcher (agriscience )

I envy her job.

Her focus are the microbial ingredients responsible for the unique flavor or some beans.

and yeah she's always going on about cocoa - but she doesn't see it as a superfood. She's skeptical of crazy claims.

[Towlie]

2. There's a lot of voodoo in the nutrition field.

The proper, scientific, way to identify health benefits in a type of food would be to form an hypothesis that something produces benefits for one or more specific plausible reasons. Then test that hypothesis with carefully controlled experiments.

But I'm afraid that a lot of these nutrition claims come from examining sets of data and looking for correlations. That's the sort of research that leads to conclusions like US spending on science, space, and technology causes suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation.