Depressive chicken, meet chocolate egg

According to this BBC report, chocolate lovers 'are more depressive', say experts. The BBC story is a digest of an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Mood Food: Chocolate and Depressive Symptoms in a Cross-sectional Analysis. (You have to be a subscriber to read the full report.)
The abstract of the article tells us:

Conclusion  Higher CES-D depression scores were associated with greater chocolate consumption. Whether there is a causal connection, and if so in which direction, is a matter for future prospective study.

It's fun, kinda, to see how the headlines from various media outlets try to parse this correlation, but not necessarily causation result. IMO, the best summary comes from Medscape (free registration required): Mood Food? Depressed People Eat More Chocolate.

• An article in the Daily Mail (UK) promises to explain How the blues make you crave chocolate, when the study clearly doesn't. 
• The headline in Chocolate may cause depression | Psych Central News leads us to a conclusion that isn't quite there.
  And there's this:
  
  
  
• Chocolate a Sweet Pick-Me-Up for the Depressed - BusinessWeek isn't. The study  says that it's drawing no conclusion about whether chocolate relieves the symptoms of depression in any significant way.
  As reported in the Medscape article, "The study," one of the researchers emphasized, "does not address the issue of whether chocolate is beneficial or harmful in terms of mood, as this is an observational and cross-sectional study."
• Depressed? You must like chocolate | Reuters - No, it doesn't say that. The study doesn't conclude that all depressed people eat more chocolate.
  The people in the study, folks who'd not been diagnosed with depression but who scores on a depression screening test indicated that they met the criteria for depression, ate more chocolate. Th study was not a review of chocolate-eating among people with depression.
• Study: Chocolate Can Relieve Depression - cbs4denver.com - This is seriously wrong.  The study makes no such claim and, in fact, suggests the opposite, that chocolate may trigger symptoms of depression.
• And, we mustn't overlook the PG-13 pictures of women eating chocolate in Is chocolate linked to depression? | The Money Times
  The researchers deliberately included more men than women in the study because previous inquiries typically focused on women and their alleged love of chocolate.

There's a lot of bad journalism out there, people who have access to scientific and medical research who then write articles that are cute, clever, and dangerously wrong.