The good chocolate

WORLD OF SCIENCE - BOB BROCKIE

The chocolate news continues to be good. A string of recent scientific and medical publications confirm that eating dark chocolate helps just about everything.

Experiments on Greek youths showed that chocolate made their arteries more elastic and improved the circulation of their blood. Other tests show that it slightly reduces blood pressure. It also helps prevent persistent coughing by soothing and moistening your throat. The cocoa ingredient theobromine is nearly one third more effective than usually prescribed codeine in reducing coughing.

Another study concluded that melting chocolate in one's mouth increases brain activity and heart rate more intensely than does passionate kissing (the leader of that study insists he did not include his wife in his experimental sample). More medical evidence suggests dark chocolate is anti-diarrhoeal, stimulates the brain, may slow brain decay with old age and that cocoa flavonoids may have anti-cancer effects, but more research is needed.

A survey in Bath, England, revealed that many more chocolate eaters were happier than chocolate refusniks. On the downside, eating milk chocolate or white chocolate, or drinking fat-containing milk with dark chocolate, appears largely to negate the health benefits. It's worse for dogs, cats, horses, parrots and rodents. The cough- stifling chocolate chemical theobromine can poison them. A big box of chocolates has been known to kill a small dog.

Mars Incorporated, the giant American company (Mars Bars, M&Ms), spends money each year on cocoa flavonoid research. Mars is talking with pharmaceutical companies to license drugs based on these molecules. According to Mars-funded researchers, cocoa-based prescription drugs could potentially help treat diabetes, dementia and other diseases. The same company is to spend US$10 million during the next five years decoding the dna of the cocoa tree.

Mars wants to identify the best chocolate flavour genes, so it can improve the taste of its products. It also wants to produce higher-yielding crops. Traditional methods of plant improvement take about six years to come up with promising new strains of cocoa trees. Researchers say they can do it in 18 months.

Most of the world's cocoa beans are produced by farmers working small family plots in West Africa. Child and even slave labour blight the industry in some regions, but the trees themselves are blighted by the black pod fungal disease. The fungus has driven many small growers off their land. Mars Inc wants to help the farmers by developing disease-resistant trees. It might also develop cocoa trees that will grow in colder climates.

When Mars Inc eventually decodes the cocoa dna, alarmists warn that we're in for big trouble. They claim that growing cocoa in cold climates will drive the traditional tropical growers out of business, that Mexicans will rush to patent chocolate's dna and demand royalties, and that we'll all die of frankenchocolate if pesticides don't get us first. Pass the chocolates.

- © Fairfax NZ News