chocolate

Chocolate, cinnamon or oysters have a reputation for lighting the wick of sexual desire, but do they have real aphrodisiac effects, or is this a popular belief?

A revealing study published in the journal Neurology suggests that drinking two cups of hot chocolate daily for a month improves cognitive test scores and increases blood flow to the brain.

When you're feeling nervous, restless or stressed, eating dark chocolate helps you relax, according to a study from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. The researchers, led by Matthew Pase, attribute this calming property to the polyphenols in cocoa.

Scientists from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) have found that dark chocolate is more satiating than milk chocolate, and that it helps reduce voracity towards sweet, salty and fatty foods, especially if we take it first thing in the day.

A cup of hot chocolate tastes better in a cream or orange container than in a white or red glass, according to a new study by scientists at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Oxford.

Does chocolate taste better to you when you are on a diet? You are not the only one. According to a Northwestern University study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, the guilt we feel when putting a piece of chocolate in our mouths while on a diet makes it more pleasant and tasty.

Who has not ever reached for a chocolate bar in a "downturn" moment? Science supports this custom. Daniele Pionelli, from the San Diego Institute of Neurosciences (USA), discovered a few years ago that chocolate contains anandamide, a substance related to the sensation of well-being that bears a great resemblance to one of the ingredients in marijuana.

Beatrice Golomb and her colleagues from the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of San Diego (USA) have shown that people who consume more chocolate have a lower body mass index than those who are not fond of cocoa, even if they hardly exercise.