Quick run to your kitchen throw open the cupboards and the refrigerator and look to see how many pieces of chocolate you find. Go on I'll wait.
So what did you find? If your like me there is a lot of chocolate in your house or in my case there was until this last weekend when things when from good to poop in a rather short period of time.
I was listening to the TED Radio hour on NPR over the weekend like I normally do and something caught my attention.....the mention of chocolate. This was kinda weird since the topic of the day was about success. I perked up to hear Ron Gutman talk about smiling your way to success. "A smile, he reported, has the same brain stimulation as eating 2,000 bars of chocolate." This was not the first time I had heard some scientific research related in terms of chocolate, but since I don't know who is reading this I will refrain from posting it because it is not appropriate for all age groups.
I started looking for fun sort of motivational facts about chocolate and here is what I came up with:
1) "One chocolate chip can give a person enough energy to walk 150 feet."
(Bring on the chocolate chip cookies I say. )
2) "A Hershey's bar was dug up after 60 years from Admiral Richard Byrd’s
cache at the South Pole. Having been frozen all those years, it was
still edible."
3) "Chocolate melting in a person’s mouth can cause a more intense and longer-lasting “buzz” than kissing."
(On the same note I read once that there are 22 calories in a Hersey Kiss and you burn 25 calories in a passionate one minute kiss. Not a bad way to burn calories if you ask me.)
4) "Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a
beneficent restorer of exhausted power. It is the best friend of those
engaged in literary pursuits. – Baron Justus von Liebig (1803-1873),
German chemist"
(I'm not sure exactly how these go together.)
5) "Chocolate is a Vegetable: chocolate is derived from cocoa beans. Bean =
vegetable. Sugar is derived from either sugar cane or sugar beets. Both
are plants, which places them in the vegetable category. Thus, chocolate
is a vegetable. To go one step further, chocolate candy bars also
contain milk, which is dairy. So candy bars are a health food."
(It isn't but I like the logic here)
Why are we so enamored with chocolate is it the way it melts on the tongue, the fact that it gives us the same chemical happy feeling in our brains that other pleasurable things do, or is something coded in our DNA from way way back. Imaging being the Aztecs your trying to make something like beer and come up with chocolate were you bummed out by this or after some taste testing by your friends did you decide it was the best thing on earth?
Ruth Wakefield, who invented the chocolate chip cookie, sold her recipe to Nestle for a lifetime supply of chocolate. You go girl!
Whatever it is that has us so addicted may it never be factored out of chocolate. I tip my hat to you Aztecs for your mistake is one of my favorite things.
Want more chocolate?
http://www.facts-about-chocolate.com/chocolate-quotes/
Even local bears love chocolate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3GiXckb9z0
http://facts.randomhistory.com/chocolate-facts.html
http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/rm-quiz-chocolate
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