Do you find yourself repeatedly reaching for a Snickers or a Toblerone bar when you’re feeling down? You’re apparently not alone.
A new study reports that people who scored positive for possible depression on a standard mood-screening test tended to consume more chocolate (an average of 8.4 one-ounce servings of chocolate per month) than those who did not register as depressed on the test (an average of 5.4 servings).
Furthermore, the more depressed the participants were, the more chocolate they ate. Those who scored the highest on the screening test ate an average of 11.8 one-ounce servings of chocolate per month.
The study, published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, included 931 (mostly white, mostly college-educated, and mostly overweight) men and women from San Diego, Calif., and the results were the same for both genders. (A previous study had found a chocolate-depression relationship, but all its participants were women.) None of the participants had been diagnosed as being depressed before the study, and, thus, none were taking anti-depressants (which, of course, would have skewed the results).
Why chocolate?
Although the study found an association between eating chocolate and depression, it did not find that chocolate improves mood. It wasn’t looking for that.
Of course, chocolate may have some yet-unidentified effect on the brain that lifts mood and, thus, may serve as a kind of “self-treatment,” but, despite what chocolate manufacturers would like you to believe, that effect has yet to be proven in humans. (One study found that chocolate lifts mood, but only for a fleeting three minutes.)
The possibility that chocolate is contributing to the depression can’t be ruled out either, the study’s authors point out.
Complicating this matter is the fact that many chocolate products contain artificial trans fat, which inhibits the body’s production of mood-elevating omega-3 fatty acid. It could be, therefore, that the cocoa in commercial chocolate enhances mood, but the trans fat in the product dampens it. The result: A neutralizing or reversing of the product’s potential benefits.
Of course, we may feel better after eating chocolate simply because we believe we’ll feel better (that ever-present and always-complicating-matters placebo effect). As Marcia Levin Pelchat, a psychologist who studies food craving at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia told the L.A. Times:
“In the United States, people consider chocolate really tasty. It has a high cultural value. It’s an appropriate gift for Valentine’s Day. But in China, you might give stuffed snails to someone you really like.”
Stuffed snails instead of a box of Godiva chocolates for Valentine’s Day? Now, that would definitely have an effect on one’s mood.
