Chocolate fights coughs better than codeine, or so a doctor claims. And much better, you would not get the nasty side effects and dizziness of codeine if you pop a chocolate square as a cure for coughing, or so they say.Â
Take this with a grain of cocoa. According to new research, dark chocolate fights coughs better than drugs. But how does it do it? By creating a sticky coating that ends up protecting the nerve endings in your throat. Those nerve endings are the ones that cause you to cough. This claim comes from professor Alyn Morice, a specialist in coughs and respiratory medicine, but this is what they wrote in the Daily Mail, so maybe it’s not entirely trustworthy.
Professor Morice says that it’s the viscosity of the melted chocolate that also allows some of the compounds found in chocolate to literally calm your nerves. It’s not the same if you use hot chocolate, because there’s less viscosity.
Chocolate fights coughs, but how do you do it?
The idea here is to eat some chocolate squares and then let them melt in your mouth so that the melted chocolate does its coating job on your irritated nerve endings. It’s as easy as that, apparently, and I can say with certainty that I’m definitely going to try this the next time I have a cold (which I sincerely hope is at least months away).
On the other hand, I have some certain trust issues with this concept. First, I have written before about how dark chocolate is supposedly this superfood, but all of the positive news about it might just be the chocolate lobby doing its job. So I definitely have trust issues when it comes to news about chocolate.
Not to mention that if we want to use the cough-fighting properties of chocolate, we might have a limited time to do it, since it seems like it might be going extinct.
If your appetite for reading about chocolate has been awakened, then find out the pros and cons of chocolate.
