Chocolate – from the Accidental Optimist’s Guide to Life

“Food preparation in the form of a paste or solid block made from roasted and ground cacao seeds, usually sweetened.” Oxford Dictionary.

Well if you put it like that, it doesn’t sound terribly exciting. So why are there 28,900,000 entries if you Google chocolate? That’s eleven million more entries than for the meaning of life! Is chocolate the answer to life the universe and everything? 

“He’s just adorable.” The waitress said. Well, yes, Art, our nine-month old baby, had the capacity to be most adorable. “Would he like a chocolate?” 

“That’s kind but no,” I answered, a first-time middle-class doctor mum with all sorts of nutritional ideals for our precious child.

“No thank you,” echoed Danny, Art’s doting Dad. “He’s never had choc…oh.”

Art had already snatched the chocolate from the waitress and was ripping off the shiny wrapper. Why? Why did he know it was something he really, really wanted when he had never had it? Was it the smell? Was it the shiny wrapper? Was it that we had said ‘no’?

Our Springer Spaniel is no better. Bo can sniff out chocolate, double wrapped inside a box inside a carrier bag sitting amongst ten full carrier bags of the weekly shop. Why? Chocolate is poisonous for dogs (and horses and parrots apparently). A three stone dog will be poisoned by a half-pound bar of chocolate. A pound of chocolate will give it fits, internal bleeds and heart attacks. But does that put Bo off? No way. Chocolate is poisonous for humans too (if you ate twenty pounds at one sitting – no mean feat, even for me). But look at its benefits!

Chocolate contains over 300 chemicals, including the flavinoids, which lower blood pressure and protect against heart attacks and cancer. Chocolate triggers all the same responses as falling in love, with its secret ingredients such as the psychoactive theobromide, phenyl ethylamine (a cousin of the amphetamines), and small quantities of anadamide (a cannabis-like compound). Chocolate’s so good, it’s banned in racehorses.

But it’s bad for your teeth and will give you spots! Wrong, wrong. Cacao butter is thought to actually protect you from dental plaque and several trials have shown that chocolate doesn’t make acne any worse. It will of course make you fat* as it’s full of sugar and saturated fats, which we humans are genetically programmed to love. Breast milk, for instance, is full of sugar, so we had a sweet tooth before we even had teeth, and in Stone-age days you might go for a week without food, so you crammed in as many high energy fats and sugars as you possibly could to stave off the forthcoming famine.

Obviously we fat people are just perfect evolutionary survivors from the Stone-age, when the ability to pig out was a lifesaver. Unfortunately, all stuffing yourself does in our times of plenty, is give you diabetes, painful hips and knees and a broken heart (both literally and figuratively).

(I have a theory about fat people and thin people. Under stress, thin people lose their appetite, whereas stressed fat people comfort eat. And of course, chocolate is the perfect comfort food, with its melting point being just below human body temperature, so that it melts in the mouth. Ah! Chocolate!)

Chocolate covers the whole of Maslow’s pyramid:

-         Basic needs. Eat it or use it to buy other bare necessities (many Central American tribes used cacao liquid or beans as currency) and of course there’s twenty reasons why it’s better than sex (good when soft, not scared of commitment etc.)

-         Safety needs. You’ll never feel safer than drinking a nice warm mug of hot chocolate

-         Love and belonging. Casanova and the Aztec Emperor Montezuma, used it as an aphrodisiac and the Aztecs associated cacao with the God of fertility.Today anyone bearing gifts of chocolate will increase their chances of being loved

-         Esteem. It makes you feel good

-         Cognitive needs. It’s full of brain enhancing chemicals

-         Aesthetic needs. It looks and tastes beautiful

-         Self-actualisation? Hmmm? I’m sure I’ll think of something.

So it seems miraculous to me that mankind managed to live without it for thousands of years. The first recorded chocolate beverage was made from the chocolate tree (Theobroma Cacao) and drunk by the Aztecs in the fifteenth century, although the Maya Indians were probably using it long before that. Actual chocolate bars didn’t make an appearance until the nineteenth century, which means, I regret to say, that chocolate cannot be a panacea for our needs. Perhaps, just perhaps, chocolate is masking unfulfilled needs?

Give up chocolate and get a life? No, no, I can’t believe I just said that.