People who are depressed eat more chocolate than people who are
not, US researchers said, in a study that puts numbers behind the
link between mood and chocolate.
They said people who were depressed ate an average of 8.4 servings
of chocolate per month, compared with 5.4 servings among those who
were not.
And people who had major depression based on results of a screening
test ate even more - 11.8 servings per month.
A serving was considered to be one small bar or 28 grams of
chocolate.
"Depressed mood was significantly related to higher chocolate
consumption," Dr Natalie Rose of the University of California,
Davis, and University of California, San Diego, and colleagues
wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Many people consider chocolate a mood-booster but few studies have
actually confirmed the connection between the confection and
mood.
And most studies have looked only at women.
Rose and colleagues studied the relationship between chocolate and
mood among 931 women and men who were not using
antidepressants.
People in the study reported how much chocolate they consumed
and most also completed a food frequency questionnaire about their
overall diet.
Their moods were assessed using a commonly used depression
scale.
What they found was a marked association between chocolate consumption and depression.
And unlike other studies that looked only at women, the link was
true of both men and women.
What the study could not say was why people who are depressed eat
more chocolate.
It could be that depression stimulates chocolate cravings, and
people eat chocolate as a sort of self treatment, confirming some
studies on rats that suggest chocolate can improve mood, the
authors said.
Or, it could be that depression may stimulate chocolate cravings
for some other reason without providing any mood benefit.
People in the study did not have any such "treatment benefit"
from chocolate, the team said.
And they said it may be that eating a lot of chocolate actually
causes people to feel depressed, another possible explanation for
the association they saw in the study.
It may be something physiological about chocolate, such as
providing additional antioxidants.
Or the mood-boosting effect of chocolate could be fleeting, like
the temporary euphoria from drinking alcohol, leaving people
feeling even lower after the brief euphoria has passed.
"Distinguishing among these possibilities will require different
study designs," the team said.
They said future studies will be needed to determine whether
chocolate is a cause of depression, or a temporary salve.
