chocolate and workouts

Happy Friday! Today was rainy and sleepy for me, thanks to allergies keeping me awake last night. A solution to Friday afternoon sleepiness is to read some fun science ~ when the article is a valid study related to health, then it’s not completely off track of my field of work, and the fun topic helps keep me awake :)

Being a big fan of chocolate, I was intrigued by this headline in the New York Times: “How Chocolate Can Help Your Workout.” It immediately triggered memories from a few years back of a Sunday afternoon when I was feeling tired but trying to convince myself to go for a run. I grabbed a couple Hershey kisses in hopes of a slight sugar rush to re-energize me enough to get out the door. In fact, I felt great for the entire run! Clearly chocolate was good workout fuel in my experience – and now science is proving it!

Well, kind of. It’s an interesting study from the Journal of Physiology that details experiments with rats who were given epicatechin, a purified form of the main nutritional component of cacao. Four groups were compared:

• rats who were given water and did not do any exercise
• rats who were given water and did a routine of light treadmill walking
• rats who were given epicatechin and not do any exercise
• rats who were given epicatechin and did a routine of light treadmill walking.

Then they ran all rats to exhaustion on the treadmill. The rats in the groups with epicatechin showed significantly enhanced abilities to run before fatiguing, with the rat+exercise group coming out best. The study also did some muscle biopsy and speculates on the possible reasons for this improvement (they pinpoint greater numbers of mitochondria in the muscles – if you remember biology class, these are the “powerhouses of the cell”, as in the cell components that process energy). Interesting!

Of course the author details a number of caveats in the NYT article: first, that mice are not people and therefore we can’t draw solid conclusions about human fitness from these results. Second they point out that processing cacao decreases the amount of epicatechin, so eating a Hershey bar is not the same thing. Third, the rats received a small dose, which would be comparable to a very small amount of dark chocolate for humans – and most humans don’t want to stop with one dark chocolate chip. And overeating chocolate leads to excess sugar and fat consumption, which should be avoided.

With those things in mind, it’s still nice to see some possible benefits to the occasional chocolate treat. To be sure, someone really needs to conduct a study with humans, using reasonable chocolate quantities. I'd definitely sign up for that study. Or maybe I can just sign up for DC's version of the Hot Chocolate run that I did last year... only this time, including some chocolate consumption with my training :)