Be more healthy - eat more chocolate

Is chocolate really the worlds perfect food?

Chocolate can also strengthen the immune system: scientists have discovered that just the aroma of chocolate stimulates the production of secretory immunoglobulin A – an important component of the body’s antiviral defence.

So it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to researchers at the National Heart & Lung Institute at Imperial College, London, to discover that chocolate could be more effective in treating coughs than traditional cough medicines.

 

 

Chocolate cough medicine. Why not?

In tests on healthy non-smokers, it was found that giving theobromine (a compound found in chocolate) to ease artificially-induced coughs was more effective than codeine, which is traditionally used in cough medicines.

Britons spend approximately £100 million a year on cough medicines but
there is little evidence to show how effective they are, and with the number of people in the UK with a chronic cough increasing, further research into theobromine could significantly affect the development of future treatments.

Here comes the science

Whether chocolate will ever come full circle and be prescribed as medicine again, as it was more than 200 years ago, remains to be seen. Nutrition researcher, Michael Levine, said, “Chemically speaking, chocolate really is the world’s perfect food."

Analyze a cocoa bean and you’ll find that it is 50% fat, 20-25% carbohydrate, 5% water, 1.5 % theobromine (mild caffeine-like stimulant), tyramine (has an action similar to adrenaline) and 3.5% minerals and vitamins; these include: potassium, copper, calcium, iron, magnesium, sodium, phosphorous, vitamin A, thiamine, riboflavin and niacin. Yes chocolate could be considered nature’s multi-vitamin tablet.

All things in moderation

On the other hand, George Lucas, (yes Mr Star Wars) contracted mononucleosis in his first year at university from subsisting solely on chocolate bars and chocolate chip cookies. So for those of you who were thinking of prescribing yourself chocolate to be taken three times a day to stay in good health and keep up your strength, just remember, all things in moderation because real “strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands --- and then eat just one of the pieces.” (Judith Viorst.)

 

© 2004 Chris Chung & seventypercent.com