A Little of What you Fancy does you Good.
Does a Chocolate Fix Help with Perimenopause?
Ever since lockdown began there’s been one non-negotiable for me. Chocolate.
Even when I couldn’t get bread —or flour, even when I was scrabbling all over the internet to get the only kind of food my cat will eat, I found a way to get dark chocolate.
Chocolate was always my pre-menstrual fix, and now it’s my peri-menopausal fix. After all, it has plant compounds very similar to oestrogen (phyto-oestrogens) and serotonin, my favourite feel-good chemical — and I’ve been feeling pretty good, considering. Although if I’m honest, as an experiment it’s pretty flawed — I can’t make a comparison as there have been no days on which I did not get my chocolate fix!
And is the science really as good as all that? I decided it was time to do some detective work.
Our prime suspect is phyto-oestrogen and I started with my go-to starting point for checking out evidence Cochrane, who collate and analyse data from lots of studies. They’re not convinced. Some studies show that phyto-oestrogens might have an effect, but they’re small and overall it’s not conclusive. To be fair the same seems to be true of much of the menopause research they’ve reviewed — the simple fact is there’s not enough of it. But there’s also no evidence of harm. So we can put that one down as a maybe!
Incidentally there’s also a lack of evidence as to any harmful effects of phyto-oestrogens on men, so you may need a different excuse to keep them from your chocolate stash.
But lets look at serotonin. I know quite a few women who go for a chocolate fix just before their period starts. Perhaps that’s a clue — or is it just that we need a sugar fix? Roughly speaking progesterone makes us calmer and oestrogen makes us happier. It’s our progesterone level which drops just before your period which is a big part of the edginess many of us experience. Progesterone as well as oestrogen drops in menopause — and they both affect your serotonin levels. So a serotonin boost certainly wouldn’t hurt.
But it’s not serotonin that’s in chocolate — it’s tryptophan, an amino acid, which is converted into serotonin in the cells. It’s found in plenty in turkey — but apparently it’s tangled up with many other amino acids, which take priority in the body, so apparently it doesn’t make it to the brain. But not so with chocolate. The sugar triggers insulin which sends the top priority amino acids into the body cells and tryptophan very likely finds it’s way to the brain, where it can be converted into serotonin. So I’m going to give tryptophan and serotonin a ‘very likely’.
Then there’s phenylethylamine (PEA) which is a rather ugly name for our ‘love stuff’. In the brain, it’s involved in our feelings of love, attraction and infatuation, mainly because it influences the release of serotonin and dopamine which is our next culprit. Unfortunately it gets broken down in the small intestine and you’d very likely have to make yourself sick to consume enough to effect the brain. Which would be less of an aphrodisiac.
Dopamine is the chemical involved in reward, pleasure and compulsion, which to be fair sounds pretty familiar. Tyrosine in chocolate is used by the body to make dopamine. But does it actually get as far as the brain? There is evidence to suggest that it helps us in times of stress, sleep deprivation and memory loss, and I was going to give it a big menopausal little helper tick until I discovered that fats can stop it getting to the brain, and you know chocolate… So let’s downgrade it to probably.
But perhaps chocolate’s involved in pleasure because it is pleasurable. And perhaps it’s involved in reward because we make it so. Perhaps as much as it’s cocktail of interesting chemicals it gives you a moment to stop and think and enjoy something purely for itself. Purely for yourself. Perhaps just knowing that there’s a stack of beautiful dark chocolate waiting for you in my fridge gives you something to look forward to.
But you know what else increases our levels of serotonin and dopamine as well as progesterone and oxytocin (our lovely baby-bonding chemical)? Spending time with friends. So I think now that lockdown’s coming to an end, I might do a little more of that and a little less of the chocolate. I may even get them to come on long walks with me, burn off that chocolate, increase my endorphin levels and boost the blood flow to my oestrogen starved brain.
