Edward Willett

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Are you as surprised as British researchers…

...to discover that "Chocolate gives people more of a buzz than passionate kisses"?"There is no doubt that chocolate beats kissing hands down when it comes to providing a long-lasting body and brain buzz -- a buzz that, in many cases, lasted four times as long as the most passionate kiss."Mmmm...chocolate...

Posted by Edward Willett at 2:50, April 17th, 2007 under Blog | Comment now »

Hot chocolate

Come this Sunday, some 50,000 people will be sitting in the stands at Taylor Field for the Grey Cup, their minds focused on one thing--how much they’d love a cup of hot cocoa. They needn’t worry about indulging, in light of new research that shows that cocoa has an even higher concentration of antioxidants than red wine and tea. A team of researchers at Cornell University, led by Chang Yong Lee, a professor of food chemistry, tested a cup of hot water containing two tablespoons of pure cocoa powder, roughly equivalent to the amount of cocoa in a normal-size packet of instant hot chocolate; a cup of water containing a standard size bag of green tea; ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 11:36, November 11th, 2003 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns | Comment now »

Why we crave chocolate

It's the season for sweets, and one of the favorites, this Christmas and every Christmas (not to mention Valentine's Day, Easter, and assorted other special occasions) is chocolate. Why do we crave this unique food? It's not just the taste. As new research has shown, a lot of the pleasure we get out of eating chocolate is purely in our heads. First, we should abolish some of the most pernicious myths about chocolate. Eating chocolate does not cause acne, nor does it aggravate existing acne. Studies at both the Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the U.S. Naval Academy showed that eating chocolate or not eating chocolate had no impact on ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 16:18, December 14th, 1998 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns | Comment now »

Chocolate

North Americans eat 4.5 kilograms of it apiece per year. The Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and others eat even more. And given unlimited resources and no worries about looking like a blimp, I'd be happy to eat even more than that. "It" is chocolate, and most people agree with taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, who labelled the cacao plant "Theobroma cacao"--"Theobroma" is Latin for "food of the gods." That's certainly what the Aztecs considered it to be. When Hernan Cortes arrived at the court of the Aztec Emperor Montezuma II in 1519, he discovered Montezuma drank 50 golden goblets a day of a cold, bitter drink called chocolatl (or xocoatl), made from the ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 16:15, February 14th, 1993 under Blog, Columns, Science Columns | Comment now »