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Oct. 12, 2007 -- Attention, chocolate lovers: You may not be able to help yourselves. Swiss and British scientists have linked the widespread love of chocolate to a chemical "signature" that may be programmed into our metabolisms.
That chemical signature is detectable by common laboratory tests, says Sunil Kochhar, PhD, the lead author of the new study and a researcher at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. "This is a test that is minimally invasive," he says. "It looks at urine and plasma, which everyone can happily give."
The research finding does more than absolve chocolate lovers of guilt. "We are trying to understand how our metabolism reacts to a certain kind of food," he tells WebMD. "Our results do open a new avenue to assess diet and its metabolic consequences."
In the new approach, chemical signatures are linked with dietary preferences -- in this case, love of chocolate. Eventually, people may be categorized by metabolic type or metabotype. That metabotype, in turn, may be used to create a diet that is healthier yet customized to a person's needs, preferences, and reactions to foods.
The chocolate lovers in the study, for instance, had healthier levels of LDL cholesterol (so-called "bad" cholesterol) than did those who could pass up the treat.
The results of the study are published in the Journal of Proteome Research.
In the study, Kochhar and his team evaluated 22 volunteers, half of whom said they were "chocolate desiring" and half who were "chocolate indifferent."? "It took us a year to find the chocolate-indifferent people," Kochhar tells WebMD.
The study evaluated men only, Kochhar says, to avoid variations linked to the menstrual period, but he plans to study women in future research.
The volunteers each ate chocolate or placebo daily over a five-day time span. They ate 50 grams, about 1.7 ounces, or a little more than a standard-size candy bar in the U.S. They ate Nestle Callier, a chocolate readily available in Swiss supermarkets. They ate a variety of chocolates, including milk or dark chocolate or milk chocolate with almonds, Kochhar says. Nestle funded the research.
The researchers evaluated their urinary and blood plasma samples. The metabolic profiles of the chocolate lovers were different from those who were "chocolate indifferent," they found. The chocolate lovers had lower LDL cholesterol levels and higher levels of a protein called albumin, an important and beneficial protein.
They even had that profile when they didn't eat the chocolate, the researchers found.
Kochhar's team also found the activity of good bacteria in the gut was different in chocolate lovers than in the others. He speculates that food preferences, including that for chocolate, might be imprinted in such a way that our body gets used to a specific diet.