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Aug 24, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column
I am a chocoholic and so are my two daughters even though they are roughly 27 years apart. I am the kind of person who believes that seven days without chocolate makes one weak. Although I know that chocolate does not make the world go round, it does make the trip worthwhile.
I am like the lady who told the waitress, “I would like ‘Death By Chocolate’ for dessert but just enough to put me in a critical condition.”
I am not alone in my passion. A new survey has shown that nine out of ten people love chocolate. The tenth is a liar and should be charged with perjury or, like the old time days, charged with “purge-ry” or sent to “purge-atory”.
This colon detox thing that makes up nine out of ten infomercials is nothing new. My parents practiced it – on me. The health and education ministries were co-conspirators in what, at that time, was called a “cleanout”. If your parents were remiss in administering the purgatives at home, you still had to get your dose of salts and senna at school.
The District Nurse would come to the school, give you a full cup of the noxious substance and send you home before your cup runneth over. Any delay or dawdling on the road could be disastrous. Your stomach bubbled like the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth and if you didn’t head home on the double, you would end up in toil and trouble.
The reason I thought of purge-ry and chocolate is that the combination represented the first and only time I ever had a problem with chocolate. It was a product called “Brooklax” – a chocolate laxative that was sold over-the-counter. I was about seven at the time but even at that age my love of chocolate was legendary. Nestle wove its Black Magic on me at birth I believe, and Cadbury at my christening.
My favourite drink was something called CCMEL which came to the Caribbean from Holland. We also had TONO, MILO and Ovaltine. My father bought the Brooklax and put it within easy reach. I beheld it and it was good! For a short while. While my father might be considered “lax” for leaving the Brooklax tin where I could access it without difficulty, I was even “laxer”.
I was laxating like mad without let or hindrance. I laxed and relaxed. Such was the effect of the Brooklax that I laxed like the running brook that could brook no resistance.
I found out later that there was another product “Ex-Lax” that also had a chocolate version.
The mystery writer, Eric Ambler (The Mask of Demetrios), started off in advertising at a time when one had to be extremely circumspect in dealing with bodily functions. Ambler had been given the Ex-Lax account at a time when the slogan was “Ex-Lax For Incomplete Elimination.” In those days (and even now) some people believed that an inefficient excretory system caused poisoning of the body. Ex-Lax made sure you got rid of everything.
However, Ambler discovered that people were buying the stuff under a misapprehension. They thought “Incomplete Elimination” was a sexual dysfunction which could be cured with chocolate.
Those people were ahead of their time. As Sherlock Holmes said to his friend Dr. Watson, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” The truth is that chocolate reduces your risk of dying from heart diseases and if it can do that, it can do anything – a view I have long held despite nearly being eliminated by Brooklax.
According to an AFP report, heart attack survivors who eat chocolate two or more times per week cut their risk of dying from heart disease about threefold compared to those who never touch the stuff. A study in the September issue of the Journal of Internal Medicine coauthored by Imre Janszky of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and Kenneth Mukamal, a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston is the first to demonstrate that consuming chocolate can help to keep alive persons who have suffered from heart attacks.
“It was specific to chocolate — we found no benefit to sweets in general,” said Dr. Mukamal. My thoughts exactly – while I eschew sweets, I now have even more reason to love chocolate. Of even greater interest is that chocolate does not discriminate- something I have always known.
The researchers stressed that chocolate is a rich source of beneficial bioactive compounds and that the results were valid for men and women and across all the age groups in the study.
We’ve come a long way in the 4,000 years since the Ancient Mayans used cocoa beans as currency and only people of royal blood could drink chocolate or, as it was called, ‘xocolatl.’
Two doctors at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Donald F. Klein and Michael R. Liebowitz, suggested that the brain of a person in love contains large quantities of phenylethylamine, a chemical that produces an amphetamine-like high. Chocolate also contains a lot of phenylethylamine. Klein and Liebowitz postulated that people like chocolate so much because it makes them feel like they’re in love.
This has prompted the question, “What is two inches wide, six inches long and drives women wild?” A bar of chocolate. Additionally it explains why there is no organisation called “Chocolate Anonymous.” Nobody wants to quit.
To illustrate the irresistibility of chocolate, I want to tell you the story of Douglas. While walking in the woods Douglas saw a young fairy who had fallen into the river and bravely dived in to rescue her. In gratitude the fairy granted Douglas three wishes.
He wished for a huge pile of gold, and ‘poof’ there it was. Then he wished for a huge palace, again ‘poof’ and there it was. Finally he wished he could be irresistible to all women. There was a blinding flash, a mighty roar and ‘poof’ he turned into a box of chocolates.
If that was not mysterious enough, there is the math and the aftermath. How could a two-pound box of chocolate make us gain five pounds?
*Tony Deyal was last seen singing “Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen” and asking “If I eat equal amounts of light and dark chocolate is that a balanced diet?”
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