SeniorSeeker
Active member
It's the middle of January - the holidays are behind you, yet the holiday bills lay before you. The back-to-work grind is wearing on your patience, and two weeks into the New Year, you've failed on your resolutions, whatever they might be.
Sound familiar? There's a reason the most depressing day of the year falls in January.
The solution? Eat more chocolate. And no, we're not kidding. "There's no better food to connect the dots between mind and body than the deliciously emotional, palpably physical response we all have to eating pure chocolate," writes Will Clower, PhD, neurophysiologist, neuroscientist, and nutritionist in his new book, Eat Chocolate, Lose Weight. As gimmicky as it might sound, eating chocolate might be the best natural remedy for anxiety you're not using, and science has shown that it goes beyond the mere buzz you get from gobbling up a Hershey bar in your car on the way home from work.
More from Rodale News: 11 Mood-Boosting Foods
The Cortisol-Cocoa Connection
Stress prompts your body to produce cortisol; research has shown that obese women have higher levels of cortisol than women of normal weight, and cortisol also triggers the accumulation of abdominal, or visceral, fat, which builds up around your organs and can contribute to depression, along with heart disease and stroke. Yet a 2009 study found that people who ate 40 grams (about an ounce) of chocolate every day for two weeks saw decreases in cortisol in their systems compared to its levels at the start of the study. Another study a year later showed that, over the course of 30 days, people who ate cocoa daily had 10 percent lower levels of anxiety and considered themselves 10 percent calmer than they had been at the start of the study.
But the key to their success, Clower writes, is all in prevention, not reaction. Studies finding that the sweet stuff has a positive impact on mood and anxiety all looked at consumption over the course of 30 days, he adds, while studies looking at people who consume chocolate in response to stress find those people generally feel as depressed after their chocolate fix as they did before it. They experience what he calls a "mood massage" that lasts roughly three minutes
Sound familiar? There's a reason the most depressing day of the year falls in January.
The solution? Eat more chocolate. And no, we're not kidding. "There's no better food to connect the dots between mind and body than the deliciously emotional, palpably physical response we all have to eating pure chocolate," writes Will Clower, PhD, neurophysiologist, neuroscientist, and nutritionist in his new book, Eat Chocolate, Lose Weight. As gimmicky as it might sound, eating chocolate might be the best natural remedy for anxiety you're not using, and science has shown that it goes beyond the mere buzz you get from gobbling up a Hershey bar in your car on the way home from work.
More from Rodale News: 11 Mood-Boosting Foods
The Cortisol-Cocoa Connection
Stress prompts your body to produce cortisol; research has shown that obese women have higher levels of cortisol than women of normal weight, and cortisol also triggers the accumulation of abdominal, or visceral, fat, which builds up around your organs and can contribute to depression, along with heart disease and stroke. Yet a 2009 study found that people who ate 40 grams (about an ounce) of chocolate every day for two weeks saw decreases in cortisol in their systems compared to its levels at the start of the study. Another study a year later showed that, over the course of 30 days, people who ate cocoa daily had 10 percent lower levels of anxiety and considered themselves 10 percent calmer than they had been at the start of the study.
But the key to their success, Clower writes, is all in prevention, not reaction. Studies finding that the sweet stuff has a positive impact on mood and anxiety all looked at consumption over the course of 30 days, he adds, while studies looking at people who consume chocolate in response to stress find those people generally feel as depressed after their chocolate fix as they did before it. They experience what he calls a "mood massage" that lasts roughly three minutes
My sister does do that though, eats a square off a Hershey's Bar everyday and, hopefully, it helps relieve the stressful situation she lives in with an ill, crabby and unloving husband! Haven't heard if he is in Barnes Hospital as yet! Hurray for Chocolate and it is almost Valentine's Day and time for a big heart-shaped box, if I only had a beau! 
:blush: 
Ma
