Depressed? You must like chocolate
People who are depressed eat more chocolate than people who are not, U.S. researchers said recently in a study that puts numbers behind the link between mood and chocolate. They said people who were depressed ate an average of 8.4 servings of chocolate per month, compared with 5.4 servings among those who were not. And people who had major depression based on results of a screening test ate even more — 11.8 servings per month. A serving was considered to be one small bar, or 1 ounce (28 grams), of chocolate. "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. Rose and colleagues studied the relationship between chocolate and mood among 931 women and men who were not using antidepressants. People in the study reported how much chocolate they consumed and most also completed a food frequency questionnaire about their overall diet. Their moods were assessed using a commonly used depression scale. What they found was a marked association between chocolate consumption and depression. And unlike other studies that looked only at women, the link was true of both men and women. It may be something physiological about chocolate, such as providing additional antioxidants. Or the mood-boosting effect of chocolate could be fleeting, like the temporary euphoria from drinking alcohol, leaving people feeling even lower after the brief euphoria has passed.
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