Omnivore Atlanta

The season to be a pig is coming up fast. Everywhere you turn, some kindhearted soul will be shoving a sugary, fatty snack at you. My mother’s principal holiday indulgence was chocolate.

She detested fruitcake and we mailed the same one back to one another for years. But, long after I left home, she was also mailing me an annual trove of Godiva chocolate. I’m talking 20 pounds of the stuff some years. While my mother was dying last year, I took her Godiva and she regained her appetite long enough to polish it off.

Of course, Godiva long ago lost its cachet when it became a subsidiary of the Campbell Soup Company. But I still crave it and all other chocolate. I used to blame my mother’s chocolate nurturance for this, but you know what? It’s not her fault. Hey, it’s not even my fault! It’s the fault of my metabolism and “gut microbes.”

So says a new study by British and Swiss scientists published in the Nov. 2 issue of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Proteome Research. An article at PhysOrg.com reports this:

Sunil Kochhar and colleagues studied 11 volunteers who classified themselves as “chocolate desiring” and 11 volunteers who were “chocolate indifferent.” In a controlled clinical study, each subject — all men — ate chocolate or placebo over a five day period while their blood and urine samples were analyzed. The chocolate lovers had a hallmark metabolic profile that involved low levels of LDL-cholesterol (so-called “bad” cholesterol) and marginally elevated levels of albumin, a beneficial protein, the scientists say.

The chocolate lovers expressed this profile even when they ate no chocolate, the researchers note. The activity of the gut microbes in the chocolate lovers was also distinctively different from the other subjects, they add.

“Our study shows that food preferences, including chocolate, might be programmed or imprinted into our metabolic system in such a way that the body becomes attuned to a particular diet,” says Kochhar, a scientist with Nestlé Research Center in Switzerland.

“We know that some people can eat a diet that is high in steak and carbs and generally remain healthy, while the same food in others is unhealthy,” he explains. “Knowing one’s metabolic profile could open-the-door to dietary or nutritional interventions that are customized to your type so that your metabolism can be nudged to a healthier status.”

Honestly, this isn’t very convincing on the surface. The study was only five days and this preliminary report doesn’t indicate how the scientists ruled out the possibility that the chocolate affected gut bacteria rather than the reverse. Still, it’s an interesting step toward a more general understanding of why some people seem unaffected by food that negatively affects others or causes cravings.

(Photo from http://paper5.client.logicworks.net/.)

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Tags: chocolate, metabolism.