Reducing the fat content of chocolate formulations is a major challenge for the confectionery industry. We report the suspension of aqueous microgel agar particles of up to 80% v/v within sunflower oil, cocoa butter, and ultimately chocolate. The optimised emulsification process involves a shear-cooling step. We demonstrate the versatility of our method when applied to white, milk, and dark cho...

The effect of chocolate on a group of volunteer migrainous subjects, who had observed that headache regularly occurred after the ingestion of small amounts of cocoa products, was investigated. Two separate studies were carried out in a double-blind placebo controlled manner. Only 13 headaches occurred to chocolate alone in 80 subject sessions, and only two subjects responded consistently to cho...

Epidemiological studies have shown inconsistent findings on the association between chocolate consumption and risk of heart failure (HF). We, therefore, performed a meta-analysis of prospective studies to determine the role of chocolate intake in the prevention of HF. We searched databases of PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus through December 2016 and scrutinized the reference lists of relevan...

In the present study, we assessed the effect of the olfactory sense on chocolate craving in college females. Building on previous research by Kemps and Tiggemann (2013), we hypothesized that a fresh scent would decrease one's craving level for chocolate food. While the precursor study only addressed the decrease of chocolate craving, we also hypothesized that a sweet scent would increase one's ...

Many women experience ambivalent reactions to chocolate: craving it but also wary of its impact on weight and health. Chocolate advertisements often use thin ideal models and previous research indicates that this exacerbates ambivalence. This experiment compared attitudes to, and consumption of, chocolate following exposure to images containing thin or overweight models together with written me...

BACKGROUND Chocolate is rich in flavonoids that have been shown to be of benefit in disparate conditions including cardiovascular disease and cancer. The effect of polyphenol rich chocolate in subjects with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has not been studied previously. METHODS We conducted a double blinded, randomised, clinical pilot crossover study comparing high cocoa liquor/polyphenol ric...

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors driving developers to consider software factories and to scrutinize challenges to employing this methodology. The greatest attraction of the software factory approach is its logically sound conceptual framework covering the whole development process, from beginning to end. The greatest challenge to the successful utilization of this approach is it...

Objective: Patients with metabolic syndrome are prone to cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Regarding the importance of nutritional factors in management of metabolic syndrome, this study was designed to evaluate the effects of dark chocolate consumption on serum lipid profile in patients with metabolic syndrome. Materials and Methods: In this randomized clinical trial, 114 patients with met...

Cue-induced craving is not easily reduced by an extinction or exposure procedure and may constitute an important route toward relapse in addictive behavior after treatment. In the present study, we investigated the effectiveness of counterconditioning as an alternative procedure to reduce cue-induced craving, in a nonclinical population. We found that a cue, initially paired with chocolate cons...