New book reveals the highs of dark chocolate

The forthcoming book by cognitive scientists Simon Wootton and Terry Horne - ‘Teach Yourself Training Your Brain’ – reveals that dark chocolate can give you a buzz and boost your brain speed, without the fatiguing side-effects of caffeine. The book also reveals that dark chocolate contains a cannabinoid brain chemical which is known as the “bliss chemical”, because it is produced in the brain when you feel good.

Eating dark chocolate substantially increases your mental speed and energy, because it contains the brain stimulant theobromine. Dark chocolate is virtually free of caffeine at the levels found in coffee, strong tea and Red Bull. Caffeine can give you a temporary boost, but it can have fatiguing short term side-effects and more dangerous long term side-effects.

Dark chocolate contains about 21% of theobromine. Theobromine works as a brain stimulant by relaxing muscles and so dilating blood veins, arteries and blood vessels. The effect of theobromine is gentler and more sustained than of caffeine. It lasts four times longer and is kinder to your heart. Theobromine has actually been prescribed for heart patients to help lower blood pressure.

Caffeine, on the other hand, is life-threatening to many heart patients because it raises your blood pressure and so potentially damages your brain as well as your heart

In the book, biochemist Simon Wootton will identify the ‘bliss chemical’ as anandamide. The anandamide released in your brain when you feel good is a cannabinoid chemical, so it does act on your brain the same way as the THC in cannabis, but, because anandamide only affects certain brain cells, not the whole of your brain like cannabis does, then you can feel good without losing the rest of your mind. You do not feel ‘out of it’, like you would on cannabis (or marijuana).

As a natural brain chemical, anandamide is not known to have harmful side effects, unless you consider too much happiness to be harmful! After all, our grannies used to warn us that “laughing before tea would mean tears before bedtime”. In this case, grannies, it appears, have got it wrong. All the evidence that laughter and happiness are correlated with good health and so is the dark chocolate which contains the anandamide – the brain’s own bliss chemical.

These days, eating dark chocolate does not have to be a bitter experience. The dark side of the chocolate maker’s art is now producing dark chocolates that are velvety in texture and creamy in taste. Creamy dark chocolates by Domori and Michel Cluizel used to be found only in specialist shops in London, but the prize-winning Mora Mora by the world’s first Equitrade firm, Malagasy is now becoming easier to find, through supermarkets like Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury and health food shops supplied by SUMA.

‘Teach Yourself Training Your Brain’ is published on 30th November 2007 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk.