The chocoholic's high explained
Forget the tree, the carols, the family gatherings and the jolly old man in the red suit. Let's talk about what really makes people happy this time of year -- chocolate. According to a recent study, chocolate can make people happy -- really happy -- any time of the year.
The chocoholic's high
When chocoholics see or eat the cocoa confection, their brains react the same way drug addicts do when they take cocaine, the study (published in the August 2007 issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience) revealed.
Researchers Edmund Rolls and Ciara McCabe from the University of Oxford, showed 16 healthy female volunteers -- half cravers, half not -- mouth-watering photos of chocolate and then fed them fine chocolate while scanning their brain activity through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
They found that brain activity increased in the regions associated with pleasure sensations, habit-forming behaviour and addiction, even more so in the cravers than the non-cravers.
Investigate your relationship with food
"Rolls showed that individuals differ in their reaction to something based on how much they like it," explains Dr. Marilyn Jones-Gotman, a professor in the department of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal. "It's not a property of chocolate, or of cocaine for that matter, but rather a property of the individual's relationship to that food," she explains.
It's important to note that the body mass indexes (BMI) of the cravers and non-cravers in the Oxford study didn't differ, and that food cravers aren't necessarily overweight, the researchers state. But they did find that brain response to a craved food may be linked to how much -- and how often -- a person consumes that food.
"It isn't a bad thing that the brain is reacting to chocolate. It's a bad thing when it's an addiction to tobacco and gambling and cocaine," explains Jones-Gotman.
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