The paper Effect of Cocoa  and Tea Intake on Blood Pressure, Dirk Taubert, Renate Rosen, and Edgar Schömig, Archives of Internal Medicine, 167, 626–634, 2007, is attached.

Please give me a full critical and thoughtful analysis of the statistics in this paper. That should include discussion of the data collection, the statistical methods used, and the method of reaching conclusions. Note that some of the analysis is beyond the scope of this course. There you aren't required to study the methods or to reproduce analysis. However, if a term or notation is used, you should find out what it means and you should understand it well enough so that you can explain it to someone else in the class.

Quote the conclusions of the paper. Tell me whether they are supported by the analysis in the paper. Are they supported well enough so that if you had high blood pressure, you would be willing to change your diet as suggested?

Now, assume your answer is "yes". That is, assume you will add chocolate to your diet as suggested in the paper. Tell me how much chocolate per day you would have to consume. It would be a good idea to go to a store and actually buy a one-day supply. Are you comfortable consuming that much chocolate every day for the rest of your life? Now calculate the daily caloric content of that chocolate. Find your recommended daily calorie consumption. (Note that this will vary with your age, your sex, your size, your activity level and other factors. I recommend making an estimate appropriate to you [to the nearest 100 calories]. However, use an average if you wish.) If the recommended chocolate consumption is trivial with respect to the calories you need, then you're done. (It's not.)  If it's not, then you're in trouble, because you are adding many empty calories to your diet, which means you'll probably gain weight, which means you may cancel out the health benefit of the chocolate. Thus you need a strategy to pack the vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber, and whatever else you need into fewer calories. Tell me specifically what it is. (Here, even if it's true, I won't accept your telling me you will eliminate other empty calories in the form of candy, pastry, or booze. [Not that eliminating that junk is a bad idea, except for beer, of course.] [While you're doing things related to empty calories, though, it could be useful to calculate the caloric content of one "shot" of alcohol, so approximately 50 milliliters of pure alcohol.])

For this assignment you are expected to adhere to the very highest standards of logic, analysis, and statistics. In addition, I expect complete, neat and professional presentation in the form of a report with perfect grammar and spelling. Only very strong work will receive full credit. For formatting, I assume that there is a standard for your major or professional field. You should use that.

Professional standards for referencing are required. Even a hint of plagiarism or manufacturing of data is fatal in this professional context. Remember that Wikipedia is not an acceptable reference.

You are encouraged to interact with your fellow students in doing this work. The final paper, presentation, and ideas, however, must be your own.

Note that the term "calorie" can be ambiguous. The international standard for the calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water 1 degree Celsius. That isn't much in terms of nutrition. The common unit there is the kilocalorie, 1000 calories, also sometimes denoted as "Calorie". However, sometimes "calorie" means "Calorie", so be careful. If your answers don't seem to make sense, they probably aren't correct.

Price: $15.73

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 7 pages, 873 words.
Deliverable: Word Document