The report the chocolate study was conducted for Chocolate with high Cocoa content as a weight-loss accelerator. In actually, it was flawed from the start. It was a science journalist with a PhD, who wanted to uncover how bad nutrition science gets publicized in mainstream media. Bohannon changed his name, lied about credentials, and published a study that misleading. He actually hired a doctor who was in on the prank. He also paid for the publishing of his study, knowing that it contained corrupted data. He had it ship to various magazines, and websites. This was to see how far the whole process would go before someone spotted fallacy of the study.
There was several ethical issues on how this research was reported. First, study desigan