CHOCOLATE LOVERS ARE MADE, NOT BORN, RESEARCHERS SAY

Dark, rich and lusciously sweet, chocolate is the most irresistible of
confections, so addictive that it has been suspected of intoxicating with
marijuana-like opiates and chemicals that can mimic the brain chemistry of
a person in love. Chocolate seems to have a special power over women, who
consistently rate it as their No. 1 food craving and whose desire for it
often intensifies around the time of menstruation.

As a result, scientists have hypothesized that a woman's need to order a
triple chocolate cake or to make a midnight run for fudge brownie ice cream
may not be mere indulgence, but instead her body's attempt to satisfy a
natural need for the powerful chemistry of chocolate.

But now, that comforting hypothesis may have to give way to plain old guilt
once again. In a study of college students in the United States and Spain,
an international team of researchers found that the peculiarly female lust
for chocolate appears not to be physiological but cultural.

In a study to be published later this year in the journal Appetite,
researchers found that among people who craved sweets, American women
craved chocolate much more often than American men, as expected. But
Spanish women who craved sweets did not show the same intense devotion to
chocolate. In fact, among those craving sweets, Spanish women were no more
enthusiastic about chocolate than Spanish men.

The finding has shaken the foundations of the theory that the female body
naturally seeks and desires chocolate and may force chocoholic women to
look elsewhere for reassurance about their habits.

"The chocolate craving isn't physiological," said Dr. Debra Zellner,
psychologist at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pa. "There has to
be something other than a physiological need and it's probably cultural. We
taught ourselves this addiction."

Dr. Marcia Pelchat, a sensory psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses
Center in Philadelphia, called the work an important first step in
cross-cultural studies of cravings. "I believe there is a strong cultural
basis for craving for chocolate," she said.

The new paper is one of a growing number on chocolate in the relatively new
field of appetite studies in which researchers use tools like
scratch-and-sniff tests and questionnaires.

Zellner did the research with Dr. Scott Parker at American University and
Dr. Ana Garriga-Trillo at Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia in
Spain, both psychologists, and two student assistants, Elizabeth Rohm and
Soraya Centeno at Shippensburg. They asked 240 Spanish and 178 American
college students to fill out a questionnaire rating different foods and
naming the foods they craved the most.

Among Americans, 60 percent of men craved salty or meat-containing foods
and 60 percent of women craved sweet. The same pattern was found in Spanish
men and women, suggesting that this still unexplained phenomenon might be
based on some essential physiological difference between men and women.

When researchers looked into chocolate cravings in particular, they found
that among sweet cravers, nearly 50 percent of the American women craved
chocolate while fewer than 20 percent of American men did. But among
Spanish sweet cravers, around 25 percent of both sexes craved chocolate.

Zellner said physiological differences between Spanish and American women
were unlikely to explain differences in chocolate cravings. Cultural
differences are a much more likely explanation, she said.

"After filling out the questionnaire, a number of Spanish students asked,
'What's so important about chocolate?"' she noted. "Chocolate is not a big
deal over there."

The new study flies in the face of what has become a cottage industry of
research aimed at discovering what chemical chocolate harbors that makes it
irresistible, not only to women, but to everyone. Chemically complex,
chocolate contains not only caffeine but also mood-altering chemicals known
as cannabinoids (the same family of potent molecules found in marijuana)
and other molecules that cause cannabinoids to accumulate in the brain.

"The problem is you'd have to eat a humongous amount -- we're talking 27
pounds of chocolate at a sitting -- to have any pharmacologic effect," said
Pelchat, suggesting that a drug-induced high is not what makes people crave
chocolate.

Others have suggested that chocolate eaters are essentially treating
themselves for depression, or, in the case of many women, for premenstrual
depression. Researchers say carbohydrates in chocolate raise levels of the
brain chemical serotonin, improving mood. But a lot of foods contain
carbohydrates. Still others say the key is phenylethylamine, a chemical
said to mimic the brain chemistry of a person in love. But, Pelchat notes,
"It's been argued that a salami sandwich could do the same thing."

Zellner said chocolate's appeal might boil down to a more mundane
phenomenon, well known to psychologists, that people like to eat what is
familiar. In the United States, in contrast to Spain, she said, chocolate
is ubiquitous. Perhaps as important, "every culture has its very special or
wonderful foods," Zellner said.

The implication, said Zellner, is that at least in theory American women
could abandon chocolate and teach themselves to adore lightly sweetened
rice cakes.

In the end, perhaps no study will convince a chocolate-crazed country that
there is not something powerfully druglike in its favorite sweet.

Five years ago, Dr. Paul Rozin and colleagues at the University of
Pennsylvania published a study in which they gave chocolate lovers packets
of items to eat when they experienced a craving. Sometimes the packets
contained regular chocolate, sometimes white chocolate (which does not
contain the pharmacologically active elements in chocolate) and sometimes a
tasteless gelatin capsule filled with cocoa.

If those powerful chemicals are what chocolate lovers crave, then the
tasteless capsules should satisfy the cravings, but they do not. Even white
chocolate did a better job of satisfying cravings than the capsules. Yet in
spite of this convincing study, researchers have continued to chemically
dissect chocolate in search of its magic.

In a way, none of this comes as a surprise to the average chocolate addict.
She could have told you that a gelatin capsule was not going to do the
trick. She could have told you she does not crave chocolate for its
mind-altering chemicals. For the dyed-in-the-cocoa chocoholic, the
not-very-secret secret is simply that chocolate tastes very, very good.