The chocolate that cures donkeys and similar quackery – 06/16/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

There are people dumb enough to believe that overpriced chocolate will make them smart. Interesting, isn’t it? It’s buying a certificate of stupidity and hanging it on the living room wall as if it were a Nobel diploma.

This bonbon is defined as nootropic – a word that is not in the dictionary and that I came to learn this week. Nootropics are drugs, herbs, and foods that claim to enhance intellectual performance.

The manufacturers of the candy in question are immodest: “We created the first bonbon in Brazil with actives capable of increasing your cognitive capacity, metabolism, energy and focus”. Whoa.

To do so, just mix two types of mushrooms and blueberries –”they protect your brain from oxidative stress”–, cover them with 70% cocoa Belgian chocolate and sell seven bonbons for a modest R$90.

The race for the so-called “smart drugs” (literally, “intelligent drugs”) began with the demand of the geniuses of Silicon Valley.

In their eagerness to outperform their co-workers, earning more money and power, they went after substances that would make them smart and awake – sleep is for losers.

It never fails: where there is a sucker looking for fantastic solutions, groups of charlatans appear to sell them.

This manifests itself in food with the offer of “functional” or “super foods”. Prodigies that perform a specific function –always benign and on the verge of a miracle– in the body of the individual who ingests them.

Self-deception ranges from the traditional “bananas prevent cramps” that almost made me puke in swim practice, to the chocolate maker of serial Einsteins.

There are people who believe in red wine as a protection against all heart ailments. And he doesn’t hear the liver asking for relief after the umpteenth bottle.

There are people who bet on tomato sauce to scare away prostate tumors. It doesn’t matter if, in the family, three generations have had prostate cancer.

Well, there are people who believe in supernatural entities like the functional brigadeiro and the coxinha fit. This makes making money easy.

Belief in superpower nutrients is wishful thinking that ignores the complexity of food. That disdains the importance of genetics in health. That despises the effects of physical activity, sleep, smoking, alcoholism, the whole handsome lifestyle that invests everything in gingko biloba.

Just wander around the market to find drinks and foods that promise to cure hangovers, kill PMS, boost the immune system and even protect against baldness.

The legislation is full of loopholes that the industry takes advantage of to print absurd claims on packaging.

Bodies such as Idec (Brazilian Institute of Consumer Protection) torment the smart guys and win some battles. It’s like trying to scoop up trash from the ocean with a pool net.

Do Muggles deserve to be tricked? I don’t know, who am I to judge?

It turns out that the state exists, among other things, to protect idiots from themselves.

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