"Eat Chocolate, Live Longer?"

That's the title of an article in the NYT Magazine about research indicating that chocolate makes you live longer. What is this scientific reason? Oh, I don't know. I didn't read the article. The title alone convinced me to eat chocolate. What if the text raised doubts about the value of eating chocolate? If it was a title about eating brussels sprouts, I would examine the text quite carefully.



I did notice this big pull-out quote:

If the flavanol research holds up, do you applaud a mammoth multinational corporation that probably spent tens of millions in an effort to ''capitalize'' (as Jim Cass put it) on a product that may help confront a leading cause of mortality in America?

Is it too much to ask that writers drop this medical jargon use of the word "mortality"? Life itself is the cause of mortality. The cause of this usage of "mortality" (the word) is, in my view, the fear of "death" (the word).