Montezuma rated it pretty highly too - back in the sixteenth century he said:
"The divine drink, which builds up resistance and fights fatigue. A cup of this precious drink [cocoa] permits man to walk for a whole day without food"
Me and Montezuma aren't alone in our love of good chocolate, so some splendid scientists at the University of Hull decided to see if it (ie the beautiful stuff that's gots lots of cocoa in it - and therefore lots of polyphenols) helps the symptom of fatigue in people with ME.
And guess what, it does - really significantly. Hurrah! And even though their test subjects ate 15g of 85% chocolate three times a day for eight weeks, they didn't gain weight - they just felt loads better. And as soon as they stopped and ate pretend chocolate (prepared specially by Nestle), the fatigue returned.
So even though the ME that buggered up my life for fifteen years or so is well in abeyance, I reckon I should keep on eating top quality chocolate every day - and maybe even several times a day is it seems to me that I may not be consuming a high enough dose at the moment. I'm not complaining.
Here's the full paper (in Nutrition Journal): http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/55 It's called 'High cocoa polyphenol rich chocolate may reduce the burden of the symptoms in chronic fatigue syndrome' and it's by
Thozhukat Sathyapalan, Stephen Beckett, Alan S Rigby, Duane D Mellor and Stephen L Atkin. Hope they get a lifetime supply of gorgeous chocolate as a reward!
Oh, and I got better from ME after following the Gupta Amydala Retraining Technique - six months of meditation, NLP and visualisations. ME is a neurological disease - it's not all in the mind - but you can switch off the triggers with these techniques http://www.cfsrecovery.com/
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