Chocolate Desserts
I love chocolate. Though I generally have more affinity for salty foods than sweet, chocolate is a huge - and probably the only – exception to this culinary rule. I talk about chocolate, think about chocolate, eat chocolate (of course), and even fantasize about chocolate creations before I sleep. While stuck in the mental mud known as writer’s block in writing this article, I even found myself wishing that writer’s block was an actual physical block of chocolate which I could just eat away. Simply put, I find chocolate to be one of the best things on Earth – which is why I couldn’t help searching for links to chocolate in PubMed.
To my dismay, I found that inputting “chocolate desserts” as a term mostly yielded articles on health hazards. One article in particular made my heart drop: “Consumption of sweet foods and breast cancer risk in Italy.” Published in February 2006 the study establishes a direct link between breast cancer risk and consuming sweet foods with a high glycemic index (GI). A food’s GI is a numerical value given to carbohydrates based on the increase of blood glucose levels after the food is consumed; foods with high GIs break down quicker during digestion than foods with low GIs. Foods with low GIs release glucose slowly and gradually over a period of time into the bloodstream.
Despite their alarming conclusions, the Italian study acknowledged that the link between cancer risk and high-GI food may not be as direct as implied. The researchers admitted that other studies found no link between cancer risk and intake of sweet foods. In addition, increased meal frequency was not ruled out as a potential factor, nor did the Italians refute the idea that the perceived link could also be related to a decreased diet of healthier foods, rather than intake of sweets. For example, a person eating a diet heavy in healthy foods, but also generous on the chocolate, could potentially escape an increased risk of the cancer. Furthermore, the study used only women already receiving treatment in a hospital, and thus only uses women with pre-existing health problems (including some already diagnosed with breast cancer). Whatever factors that had led these women to the hospital in the first place may have also caused them to be more susceptible to cancer risk than the average person. For example, a person who suffers from constant second-hand smoke may have problems with his/her lungs and would go to the hospital for help. However, second-hand smoke itself is also considered a risk factor for breast cancer. Thus, the study does not reflect the reality of healthy women and the consequences of their sweet tooth, and I couldn’t help being skeptical about their link between breast cancer and sweet foods. I began to feel a bit better about my own chocolate habits.
From there, the scientific news about chocolate could only improve…though it didn’t get much more appetizing. As I searched onward, I discovered that eating chocolate desserts can serve a role in detecting water pollution. Chocolate itself has caffeine and about 0.5-10% of consumed caffeine passes out in human waste. Research conducted by AP Ferreira in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil concluded that monitoring caffeine levels in water is an effective way to solve the surprisingly complex (and unpleasant) problem of detecting fecal matter in a water supply.
The quality of a water supply has traditionally been determined by the amount of fecal coliform bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, in the water. Although considered reliable for temperate waters, the presence of E. coli is not reliable for water quality assessment in tropical and subtropical environments like Brazil, where the temperature and overall environment is different. In such tropical and subtropical areas, not all fecal coliform bacteria are of fecal origin, so the presence of such bacteria is not necessarily an indication of fecal contamination. For instance, E. coli can reproduce in contaminated soil, which can lead to inaccurate readings of contamination of the water, or Enterococcus, another bacterial indicator, can propagate in reservoirs once they are introduced into environments. On the other hand, caffeine can be used as a chemical indicator of fecal contamination in water without any of these problems. For one, caffeine is has the advantage over bacteria of not being a live organism, and thus unable to replicate. Caffeine is also an ideal indicator because of its heavy consumption via medication or drinks (or desserts!), its stability in the water, its direct association to human activity, and its lack of biogenic sources. The study concludes that water samples shown to contain pathogens, personal care products, and other pollutants also have a presence of caffeine.
Therefore, eating products containing caffeine is every citizen’s civic duty, as the resulting excretions can help officials determine water quality; some of the consumed caffeine exits the body and ends up in sewage water. A caffeinated product (such as a fudge chocolate brownie) is eaten by, say, Stan. Stan’s body metabolizes most of the caffeine, but about 0.5-10% escape from being metabolized and end up as part of sewage waste. The next time there is a contamination by the sewage water, Stan’s unmetabolized caffeine from that brownie is sure to be found. Who knew eating chocolate could actually help the environment?
References
PubMeditation
PubMed is the search engine of choice for most scientists and doctors, and is the reason why science libraries are usually empty these days. With archives of abstracts that go back decades and links to full journal article PDF files, PubMed is the gateway to science history, the tool for inflating your reference list, or making the painful discovery that your experiment has already been done. For this recurring column, we exploit its power for fun and mischief.