UCSD School of Medicine‘Chocolate is cheaper than therapy and you don’t need an appointment’ is a pretty popular quote. This thought goes in sync with a new study from UCSD School of Medicine. Well, study authors have seemingly discovered that women and men consume more chocolate as depressive symptoms augment, proposing a link between mood and chocolate.

The experts mentioned their study confirmed long-held suspicions that eating chocolate is something that people do when they are feeling down. Since it was a cross sectional study, meaning a slice in time, it did not tell whether the chocolate decreased or intensified the depression.

Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at UCSD School of Medicine and her colleagues investigated the association of chocolate intake to mood in an adult study sample of roughly 1,000 subjects. These subjects were apparently not on antidepressant medications and also did not encompass any recognized cardiovascular disease or diabetes. Volunteers were seemingly asked queries regarding how many helpings of chocolate they consumed in a week, and were screened by means of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) to gauge mood.

The experts discovered that both men and women who appeared to have elevated depression scores ate nearly 12 servings of chocolate per month. Also those seen with lesser depression scores consumed roughly eight servings of chocolate per month. Moreover, it was noted that people with no depression seemingly had five servings every month. No discrimination was supposedly made between dark and milk chocolate. Furthermore, a medium serving of chocolate was said to be one ounce, which is somewhat less than an average chocolate candy bar.

Golomb mentioned, “The findings did not appear to be explained by a general increase in caffeine, fat, carbohydrate or energy intake, suggesting that our findings are specific to chocolate.”

Moreover, there was apparently no dissimilarity in the intake of other antioxidant-rich foods, like fish, coffee, fruits and vegetables between those with depression and those without. Golomb mentioned that forthcoming studies could be needed to find out the basis of this relationship plus the function of chocolate in depression, as cause or cure.

The study was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.