14 DAY TRIAL // In a recent investigation, researchers determined that people who score high on screening tests for depression tend to consume on average a lot more chocolate than those who score lower in these tests. The thing is that many people may not even be consciously aware of this fact, and may think that they are eating the sweet simply because it tastes good. The team behind the study also learned that this connection only holds true for chocolate, and not for other foods or sweets, LiveScience reports.
The experts even tested for possible correlations between being depressed and eating various components of chocolate, such as caffeine, fat, and carbohydrates. The correlation also did not hold if participants were given foods that increased their overall energy intake. In other words, it would appear that depressed people prefer chocolate specifically, apparently independent of its constituents. “Our study confirms long-held suspicions that eating chocolate is something that people do when they are feeling down,” says in a statement University of California in San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine professor and researcher, Beatrice Golomb.
She draws attention to the fact that the new investigation does not establish the sense of the connection, as in whether chocolate alleviates depression, or if it triggers it. The investigation only shows that the link is there, without providing any type of explanation for it. The test participants were not followed up in other studies long after the research ended, and so the investigators have no way of knowing whether, in the end, eating more chocolate ameliorated or boosted symptoms of depression. It could be that chocolate either acts as a natural antidepressant, or that it plays a significant part in driving the development of the condition itself.
The work was conducted on a number of 930 participants, of which 30 percent were women. None of the participants reported taking antidepressant medication at the beginning of the research. Details of the methodology used were published yesterday, in the April 26 issue of the American Medical Association's journal Archives of Internal Medicine. The research team says that a number of speculations are valid at this point in explaining the results, but adds that more investigations are required, before the direction of the link can be accurately established.