NEW YORK, Dec 16 (Reuters Health) -- The much-touted marijuana-like properties of chocolate may not contribute to chocolate cravings after all, findings from an Italian study suggest.
Analyzing milk and cocoa, researchers found they do contain substances that mimic marijuana's effects, but not enough to have psychoactive effects. However, in their report in the journal Nature, the research team recommend studies to determine if low doses of these substances can affect behavior "before the relevance of these compounds to the purported mild rewarding and craving-inducing effects of cocoa can be dismissed."
In previous and widely-publicized studies, scientists reported that cocoa contains anandamide, a pleasure-inducing compound produced in the brain, and 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) and N-acylethanolamines (NAEs), substances that further mimic marijuana by enhancing anandamide's effects.
After analyzing milk and cocoa separately, Dr. Vincenzo Di Marzo of the Istituto per la Chimica di Molecale di Interesse Biologico in Naples and colleagues confirm that both cocoa and milk contain anandamide, NAEs, 2AG, and a similar substance called oleamide.
But neither milk nor cocoa appear to contain enough of these substances to produce marijuana-like effects, they write. Stomach acids break down most of the compounds before they reach the blood stream, according to the researchers.
But in a reply also published this week in Nature, the researchers who previously reported finding NAEs and related substance in cocoa, criticize the Italian study. Among other things, Di Marzo and colleagues failed to test the concentrations of all the NAEs found in cocoa, Dr. Massimiliano Beltramo and Dr. Daniele Piomelli of the University of California at Irvine, argue.
Ultimately, both groups of researchers leave open the possibility that chocolate may contain addictive compounds.
"This substance remains, in R. J. Huxtable's apt words, 'more than a food but less than a drug,'" write Beltramo and Piomelli.
SOURCE: Nature 1998;396:636-637.
