November 12th, 2009 · No Comments

Green Right Now Reports

European researchers have found more evidence that the emotional benefits of dark chocolate are real and not just wishful thinking.

They are reporting in a study published in  the Journal of Proteome Research what we’ve all been hoping they (or someone) would — that eating dark chocolate regularly, albeit in small amounts, lowers stress levels. And potentially giving people with stress issues one more natural tool in their arsenal, should drugs be something they’d like to avoid.

More precisely,  the study found that volunteer subjects who ate dark chocolate every day for two weeks had fewer stress-reaction hormones and chemicals in their bodies. The researchers verified this by testing the urine of these young, healthy test volunteers.

Dark chocolate has been shown to have healthful effects on the cardiovascular system and to act as an antioxidant, but the mechanism for its reported mood-balancing properties has been less explored in the literature, according to the researchers.

Lead researcher Sunil Kochhar and colleagues wanted to find out how dark chocolate might be acting to reduce stress. What they found was that the chocolate altered the metabolism of the volunteers (from the Netherlands) in ways that would be expected to be mood-improving.

Their study, called Gut Microbiota, and Stress-Related Metabolism in Free-Living Subjects, looked at the biological output of volunteers who were rated as having higher than average anxiety after they were put on a two-week program of snacking on 40 grams of dark chocolate each day.

“Dark chocolate reduced the urinary excretion of the stress hormone cortisol … and partially normalized stress-related differences in energy metabolism (glycine, citrate, trans-aconitate, proline, ?-alanine) and gut microbial activities (hippurate and p-cresol sulfate),” they write.

But let’s not fret the technicalities.  Eat and be happy.