CHOCOLATE CRAVINGS

Thought you might find this new research about chocolate cravings interesting...

Urge for chocolate could be gut feeling

By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — If that craving for chocolate sometimes feels like it is coming from deep in your gut, that's because maybe it is.

A small study links the type of bacteria living in people's digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate's allure.

That may be the case for other foods, too. The idea could eventually lead to treating some types of obesity by changing the composition of the trillions of bacteria occupying the intestines and stomach, said Sunil Kochhar, co-author of the study. It appears Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Proteome Research.
Kochhar is in charge of metabolism research at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. The food conglomerate Nestle SA paid for the study. But this isn't part of an effort to convert a few to the dark side (or even milk) side of cocoa, Kocchar said.

In fact, the study was delayed because it took a year for the researchers to find 11 men who don't eat chocolate.
Kochhar compared the blood and urine of those 11 men, who he jokingly called "weird" for their indifference to chocolate, to 11 similar men who ate chocolate daily. They were all healthy, not obese, and were fed the same food for five days.

The researchers examined the byproducts of metabolism in their blood and urine and found that a dozen substances were significantly different between the two groups. For example, the amino acid glycine was higher in chocolate lovers, while taurine (an active ingredient in energy drinks) was higher in people who didn't eat chocolate. Also chocolate lovers had lower levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL.

The levels of several of the specific substances that were different in the two groups are known to be linked to different types of bacteria, Kochhar said.

Still to be determined is if the bacteria cause the craving, or if early in life people's diets changed the bacteria, which then reinforced food choices.

How gut bacteria affect people is a hot field of scientific research.
Past studies have shown that intestinal bacteria change when people lose weight, said Dr. Sam Klein, an obesity expert and professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.

Since bacteria interact with what you eat, it is logical to think that there is a connection between those microbes and desires for certain foods, said Klein, who wasn't part of Kochhar's study.

Kochhar's research makes so much sense that people should have thought of it earlier, said J. Bruce German, professor of food chemistry at the University of California Davis. While five outside scientists thought the study was intriguing, Dr. Richard Bergman at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, had concerns about the accuracy of the initial division of the men into groups that wanted chocolate or were indifferent to it.

What matters to Kochhar is where the research could lead.

Kochhar said the relationship between food, people and what grows in their gut is important for the future: "If we understand the relationship, then we can find ways to nudge it in the right direction."

There you go Korj. Way to woo the ladies. Maybe you can get her some antibiotics for Sweetest Day... which, BTW, is just around the corner. HaHaHa

Lots of different things affect the microflora in your GI tract.

For example, dietary fibers and fructans like inulin are fermented into short chain fatty acids by intestinal bacteria. This causes the pH of your gut to change in ways that make it less hospitable to certain species of bacteria.

Eating lots of yogurt, drinking alcoholic beverages, and taking antibiotics will all alter the population of your gut "bugs" too.

Chocolate study signals way to personalised health diets

10/15/2007- A study has shed new light on people's food preferences and a specific chemical signature that can be programmed into the metabolic system, leading the way to healthy diets that cater to an individual's needs.

Proteome research is a relatively new area which involves characterising the structure of all the proteins produced by our genes, so as to understand the metabolic changes that take place when we digest food.

The scientists, from the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, say their findings from laboratory work on chocolate-eaters break new ground and could eventually help with the classification of individuals by metabolic type.

This, in turn, could be used to design healthier diets that are in tune to an individual's needs, they say.

"We know that some people can eat a diet that is high in steak and carbs and generally remain healthy, while the same food in others is unhealthy," said lead researcher Sunil Kocchar.

"Knowing one's metabolic profile could open the door to dietary or nutritional interventions that are customised to you type so that your metabolism can be nudged into a healthier status."

The controlled clinical study, which is published next month in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Proteome Research involved 22 men, half of whom classified themselves in questionnaires as 'chocolate-desiring', and half of whom 'chocolate-indifferent'.

The men ate either chocolate or a placebo over a five day period, during which their blood and urine samples were also analysed using spectroscopy-based metabotyping Methods and multivariate statistics to identify specific metabolic subclasses.

They found that the chocolate-lovers had a hallmark metabolic profile that involved low levels of LDL cholesterol and marginally elevated levels of the beneficial protein albumin. This profile was expressed even when they ate no chocolate.

Moreover, there were distinct differences in the activity of the gut microbes in the chocolate-lovers.

"Our study shows that food preferences, including chocolate, might be programmed or imprinted into our metabolic system in such a way that the body becomes attuned to a particular diet," said Kochhar.

No women were included in the study group because the researchers wanted to avoid metabolic variations linked to the menstrual cycle skewing the results.

But Kohhar and his team do plan to conduct further studies in the area to see if there is a gender-specific response to chocolate.

He predicts that spur blood or urine tests to determine metabolic type could one day be available. But since proteome research is a relatively new field, these could still be five years away, as more research is needed.

Chocolate makers, including Barry Callebaut and Mars, as well as Nestle, have been keenly researching the potential benefits of chocolate for human health, with a slate of promising results communicated in the last couple of years.

In addition to the light the new results shed on metabolic types, the researchers say it could also lead to the discovery of additional biomarkers that can identify new health benefits linked to chocolate and other foods.

Source: Journal of Proteome Research, November 2, 2007
Title: Human Metabolic Phenotypes Link Directly to Specific Dietary Preferences in Healthy Individuals
Authors: Serge Rezzi, Ziad Ramadan, Francüois-Pierre Martin, Laurent Fay, Peter van Bladeren, John Lindon, Jeremy Nicholson, and Sunil Kochhar

Sixpack- how can you hate chocolate lol. I envy you...