| In: Scientific Research
Study Links Chocolate Cravings to Intestinal Bacteria
The chocolate cravings you have may not be strictly your own, a new study reports:
A small study links the type of bacteria living in people’s digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate’s allure.
That may be the case for other foods, too. The idea could eventually lead to treating some types of obesity by changing the composition of the trillions of bacteria occupying the intestines and stomach, said Sunil Kochhar, co-author of the study. It appears Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Proteome Research.
Read the article for more details and tentative conclusions about the study, which was funded by Nestle SA. We found this to be an amusing tidbit:
In fact, the study was delayed because it took a year for the researchers to find 11 men who don’t eat chocolate.
Kochhar compared the blood and urine of those 11 men, who he jokingly called “weird” for their indifference to chocolate, to 11 similar men who ate chocolate daily. They were all healthy, not obese, and were fed the same food for five days.
Health benefits of dark chocolate are becoming widely known, although it is important to remember to avoid the sugar and fat that often goes along with chocolate consumption.
