Chocolate is a comfort food, there’s no getting around it. Many of us find ourselves reaching for a Hershey bar on a down day, or grabbing a chocolate donut from the office coffee room as if it was a life preserver in a sea of stress. But now researchers have proven that higher consumption of chocolate and depression go hand in hand.
"Depressed mood was significantly related to higher chocolate consumption," Dr. Natalie Rose of the University of California, Davis, and University of California, San Diego, and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week.
The researchers studied 931 men and women who were not taking anti-depressants. The participants were also given a depression screening test. The scientists found that people who scored highest on the mood tests – those with a possible major depression – ate an average of 11.8 servings of chocolate a month.
Those whose score showed them as being possibly depressed averaged 8.4 servings of chocolate a month, and those who were not depressed compared with 5.4 servings a month. A serving was defined as one ounce of chocolate.
Do you eat a lot of chocolate when you feel stressed or down? Do you notice yourself craving it in hopes you’ll feel better?
What still must be defined is the exact nature of the link. Which comes first, the chocolate or the depression?
From the Los Angeles Times:
“It's not clear how the two are linked, the authors wrote. It could be that depression stimulates chocolate cravings as a form of self-treatment. Chocolate prompts the release of certain chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine, that produce feelings of pleasure.
“There is no evidence, however, that chocolate has a sustained benefit on improving mood. Like alcohol, chocolate may contribute a short-term boost in mood followed by a return to depression or a worsened mood. A study published in 2007 in the journal Appetite found that eating chocolate improved mood but only for about three minutes.
“It's also possible that depressed people seek chocolate to improve mood but that the trans fats in some chocolate counteract the effect of omega-3 fatty acid production in the body, the authors said in the paper. Omega-3 fatty acids are thought to improve mental health.
“Another theory is that chocolate consumption contributes to depression or that some physiological mechanism, such as stress, drives both depression and chocolate cravings.
"It's unlikely that chocolate makes people depressed," said Marcia Levin Pelchat, a psychologist who studies food cravings at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. She was not involved in the new study. "Most people believe the beneficial effects of chocolate are on mood and that they are learned. You eat chocolate; it makes you feel good, and sometime when you're feeling badly it occurs to you, ‘Gee, if I eat some chocolate I might feel better.' "
Dina Khiry tells CNN about her relationship with chocolate.
"I like Reese's peanut butter cups, Hershey's bars, and chocolate cake batter," says the 24-year-old public relations associate. "I feel better in the moment -- and then worse later on, when I realize that I just consumed thousands of calories."
“Although gorging on chocolate and sweets to beat the blues has become a cliché thanks to sitcoms and romantic comedies, there's been "little prior scientific literature linking chocolate and depression," says the lead author of the study, Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine. The study, she said, provides evidence to support "the popular perception that when people need a pick-me-up, they pick up chocolate."
From ABC News:
"Whether there is a causal connection, and if so in which direction, is a matter for future prospective study," the researchers wrote in conclusion.
Cultural traditions have long associated chocolate with mood benefits, as reflected in almost 6 million results the authors retrieved in a Google search of "chocolate" and "mood."
One 2007 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry showed that half of 3,000 people with depression said that chocolate actually made them feel better.
In general, however, associations between chocolate and mood have attracted little scientific interest, Rose and coauthors wrote. The scant published information on the issue has come from studies that had design flaws that limited interpretation of the results.
The Archives of Internal Medicine (must sign in):
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/
The Los Angeles Times story:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-chocolate-20100427,0,7927541.story
The CNN story:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/26/chocolate.depression/?hpt=C2
The ABC News story:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/chocolate-depression-connection/story?id=10480501