Chocolate News
How chocolate could be the answer to a good night’s sleep
HARPERS BAZAAR If you’re struggling to sleep well, upping your chocolate levels could be the answer. The links between what we eat and how we sleep, and how there are certain foods which can aid – or disturb – slumber. Hormones influence the sleep process. Our levels of serotonin, which is essential for the production of the sleep hormone melatonin, can be boosted by certain foods, including chocolate. It increases serotonin; serotonin helps you fall asleep at night. What’s really important to note is we have hormones that wake us up in the morning. Cortisol wakes you up in the morning, and then cortisol dips across the day and passes the baton to the melatonin, and the melatonin helps you sleep. Insulin, which regulates your energy and blood sugar throughout the day, will affect your cortisol and your melatonin. So what you eat, when you eat and also how you eat as well, can affect your hormones.Chocolate is getting weirder by the day
At the Chicago-based Vosges Haut-Chocolat, founder Katrina Markoff is experimenting with “sound infusion.” As the brand’s “cosmic” truffles cool, they’re treated to piped-in sounds of varying frequencies. Sold in a 21-piece box for $72, they’re made for people who believe in the wellness proprieties of vibrations. “There are healing frequencies that people listen to with meditation and sound healing and gong baths, so we decided to try that,” she says. “We really focus on creating experience.”
Researchers print rainbow colorants on shimmering chocolate
ETH researchers are making chocolates shimmer in rainbow colors without the addition of colorants. They have found a way to imprint a special structure on the surface of the chocolate to create a targeted color effect. (CLICK, HERE, TO SEE!)
If You Love Chocolate, Visit Turin On Your Next Trip To Italy
If you want to consume some of the best edibles—pastas, cheeses, breads—and wines in the world, of course, you head to Italy. If you want some of the world’s best chocolates, you should go there, too, specifically to the quietly elegant city of Turin, a bucket-list stop for anyone remotely interested in fine-quality versions of the sweet.
That chocolate bar will cost you 42 minutes of running
A new kind of food label hopes to fight obesity by stating how much exercise is required to burn it off. There have been numerous attempts to simplify nutrition labels – some more successful than others – but a new suggestion has potential to make a difference. “Physical activity calorie equivalent” (PACE) labeling adds the type and amount of exercise required to “burn off” a particular food. For example, eating 229 calories in a small bar of milk chocolate would require about 42 minutes of walking or 22 minutes of running to burn these off.