Good News!
If you're like me, the taste of most cough medicines makes taking them seem almost as unpleasant as the cough that you're trying to cure. Recently though, as I tried to fight off a lingering cough, I learned some wonderful news-there's a new kind of cough medicine in town, and it tastes like chocolate! In a recent study (published in November of 2004), scientists at the Imperial Heart and Lung Institute in London concluded that theobromine, one of the active ingredients in chocolate, is a better cough suppressant than codeine.
The Study: Chocolate vs. Codeine
The study took place over three weeks. Each week, the people in the study were given a different type of pill-one week these contained theobromine, one week they contained codeine, and the third week they contained a placebo. After the subjects took the pills, capsaicin, a compound found in chile peppers, was used to make the subjects cough. When the subjects had taken the pills with the theobromine, it took a third more capsaicin to make them cough than when they took the placebo. The researchers attributed this to the affects that theobromine has on the vagus nerve, which is responsible for the instinct that causes people to cough. The benefit of using theobromine over codeine is that theobromine seems to have no negative side effects, while codeine, a narcotic, does. This bodes well for the chocolate's future as a cough suppressant.
Using Chocolate to Cure Coughs
The amount of theobromine used in the study was equal to that in about two cups of cocoa. It is important to remember, however, that cocoa, unlike traditional cough medications, is high in calories. One would not want to combat a cough only to gain an unhealthy amount of weight! It is important to note that studies of other antioxidants have shown that these compounds do not provide the same health benefits in isolation as they when they are ingested via foods in which they occur naturally. For example, the lycopene in tomatoes has been identified as a powerful anti-cancer agent-perhaps due to a synergistic effect with other compounds in the tomato. However, several studies have shown that lycopene that has been isolated in pill form was not effective in combating cancer. If the same holds true for theobromine, eating a small piece of dark chocolate or drinking a cup of cocoa could prove to be as effective for fighting coughs as taking a larger dose of theobromine in pill form. One can only hope!