I WAS never a big fan of Lent. As one of only two non-Catholics at my Jesuit school (my wee brother being the other), I always felt like I should partake in my fellow students’ abstinence but was aware it might seem like an overly needy desire to fit in. But then again, in this age of increasingly conspicuous consumption and the Mammon of materialism, any exercise eschewing excess can only be a good thing.

I’ll never forget that night last summer when I met for dinner with my pal Joe and his school friend Nazeem. It was Nazeem’s birthday, mid-Ramadam; we'd ordered food for fear of the kitchen closing. I was counting down the seconds while poor Nazeem, who hadn’t had a crumb of food or a drop of water since sunrise, was the picture of serenity. As the anointed hour arrived and bread was broken I cheekily suggested he convert to Catholicism, saying:“You only have to give up chocolate for a month.”

Little did I know that less than a year later the British Heart Foundation (BHF) would jump on the chocolate-free bandwagon and launch the very cleverly titled DeChox, which challenges you to give up chocolate throughout March. “Give the finger to chocolate,” says their website, in an obvious broadside directed at KitKats and Twixes. The idea is that the money you'd have spent on Lion Bars, Boost and the like should instead be donated to BHF research initiatives.

“Any sort of cocoa is a no-no, which means chocolate bars, treats, biscuits, ice cream, cake – and even the chocolate sprinkles on your cappuccino – are off limits during March.”

Last year the charity raised more than £1m through DeChox. Impressive. And undoubtedly there's much work to be done. Glasgow and Scotland top the charts for heart disease. Almost two decades ago The Monica Project, a 10-year worldwide study involving 15 million people in 21 countries over four continents, found that Glasgow men had the second-highest heart attack rate. (The only place to record a worse record was North Karelia in Finland. Since then, it male heart disease-related mortality rate has reduced by about 73 per cent with life expectancy for men rising on average by six and a half years.)

And while the trend has definitely improved, heart and circulatory disease will still cause more than a quarter of all deaths in Scotland, over 15,000 mortalities each year. That’s almost one death every half-hour. And if that wasn’t cheery enough for my Caucasian sisters and brothers, according to Stanford Health Care: “People from South Asia have a four times greater risk of heart disease than the general population and have a much greater chance of having a heart attack before age 50 ... Heart attacks strike South Asian men and women at younger ages and the attacks are more deadly compared to any other ethnic group. Almost one in three in this group will die from heart disease before age 65.”

Is there any point in me having a pension, I wonder?

Basically as a Brown Weegie I am considerably closer to the end than the beginning; if anyone was going to be gung-ho keen on the BHF getting more money for research than surely it would be me.

But here’s the rub. What has chocolate got to do with heart disease? Unlike deep-fried food, smoking and a sedentary lifestyle there seems to be no actual link between the denial of chocolate and the prevention of cardiac issues. In fact there has been some academic research (albeit inconclusive) that “chocolate is a highly popular dietary food throughout the world, and has gained increasing attention for its potential benefits in cardiometabolic health”. (I’m fairly sure that that is a good thing.)

Maybe I’m being too logical; perhaps I’m expecting things to make sense. But it seems unnecessarily confusing to conflate unrelated matters just to fulfil a clever word play like DeChox. Maybe the idealist in me believes that any campaign to raise funds should also raise awareness, suggesting a better way of living rather than a bandwagonesque month of marketing.