Skip to main content

Wine and Chocolate: a not-so-silly Valentine

Silly me, I thought I could write up a simple blog post about the health effects of wine and chocolate, just in time for Valentine’s Day. So I go online to search the recent medical literature on the health effects on cocoa, and find that there are now more than 2000 articles on the subject. Needless to say, my comments here are based on a selected list. (You should know by now that wine and chocolate contain many of the same antioxidant molecules that have proven to be so beneficial, and that it has to be in the form of dark chocolate. There are a lot of studies now on how cocoa polyphenols lower blood pressure and help keep arteries clean, and the latest ones provide confirmation of the earlier reports.)


One article out just last month caught my eye. It turns out that simply smelling dark chocolate can provide a sense of satisfaction. The researchers proved this by comparing blood levels of insulin and the satiety hormone ghrelin in volunteers who either ate or just smelled dark chocolate, and both had a similar response. It reminds me of how enticing the “bouquet” of a great wine can be; sometimes I just want to enjoy that for a while before drinking it. Of course we already knew that wine and chocolate make for a sensory experience but it’s good to know that science is on the job here.

We also know that chocolate helps put one in the mood, so to speak, but now we have confirmation from a different study that cocoa not only makes us smarter but improves mood in scientifically verifiable ways. Using standardized assessments and cognitive performance testing, researchers documented significant improvements following ingestion of dark chocolate, along with measures of mood. Similar results have been found for red wine polyphenols, so it makes sense.

This last item is a bit more obscure, but I had to include it because I love the terminology used to describe the category of things like chocolate: “hedonic foods.” I’m not sure having a glass of wine or a piece of chocolate fully qualifies as hedonism, but they definitely give pleasure so we’ll accept the term. Researchers from the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago observed that animals experiencing pain react often by eating rather than avoidance, a phenomenon called “ingestion analgesia.” Through a series of experiments on rats they were able to show that the behavior is controlled at the level of the brain stem, meaning that it is a primitive reflex not subject to motivation, and powerful enough to overcome strong incentives to not eat. Major implications for obesity and eating disorders here.

All I know is that wine and chocolate are health foods of the first order, regardless of whatever part of my brain is telling me so, and I am not about to try and get by with a sniff  instead of a sip.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Which came first: Beer or wine? (or something else?)

Actually neither beer nor wine was the first fermented beverage, and wine arguably has a closer connection to health, but recent evidence indicates that humans developed the ability to metabolize alcohol long before we were even human. The uniquely human ability to handle alcohol comes from the digestive enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, or ADH4. A new science called paleogenetics identifies the emergence of the modern version of the ADH4 gene in our ape ancestors some 10 million years ago. Interestingly, this corresponds to the time when our arboreal forebears transitioned to a nomadic lifestyle on the ground. We went from swinging from tree limbs to walking upright, and the rest is history. Understanding the circumstances that led to perpetuation of the ADH4 mutation may contain clues to what made us human in the first place. How the ability to metabolize alcohol made us human Paleogenetecist Matthew Carrigan has an idea about how this happened . Arboreal species rely on fruit tha

Why I am not surprised that the NIH cancelled the alcohol-health study

Not long after enrolling the first patients in the much hyped prospective study on alcohol and health, the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they were pulling the plug. I am actually more surprised that they ever got it off the ground in the first place. As I wrote a year ago when the study was still in its planning stages, there were too many competing interests, criticisms of the study design, and concerns about funding to expect that whatever results came out would be universally accepted. Nevertheless, I am disappointed. The study, called Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health Trial (MACH) was intended to provide hard evidence about the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption by prospectively assigning subjects with heart disease to one drink per day or not drinking, which they were to follow for up to 10 years. Most existing data on the question is retrospective, or simply tracks a subject population according to their drinking preferences, w