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Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

Just a matter of concentration. 80% of 100g is more than 40% of 100g. It's that simple.

How do we know that? I'd ask both us and NYT to be scientific about it.

Cargo culting science: "We tested dark chocolate and it was bad" => avoid dark chocolate and no further conclusions. (Media is full of this pattern.)

More rational investigation: "We tested dark chocolate and it was bad" => Find the problematic ingredient => What are the other places we use this ingredient?

Read reports and don't expect media to throw numbers and mathematical proofs. They are a business and have to cater to general public who don't really understand or care.

Great media stories bring the reports to a scientist in the field and have them contextualise it. In fact neither the journalist or the laypeople (us here) can do better than that by themselves, in general.

But yes, stories are mass produced and nobody has the time for that.

The metals come from the cacao, and milk chocolate has much less cacao by volume, because it is diluted by lots of milk solids and sugar. Unless there are also surprising amounts of metal in milk/sugar, why would they need to be more rigorous about investigating milk chocolate?

One could speculate around cocoa butter, which is replaced by cheaper fats in cheaper and milk chocolate. But that's just me wondering, trying to make sense of why dark chocolate in particular.

It’s because the contamination is in the cacao beans. Dark chocolate is 70 or more percent cacao, while milk chocolate is much, much less.

Read the article

Article is painful to read thanks to sentences like "0.8 micrograms in ounce". Ouch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com