NO WONDER YOU CAN'T RESIST

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

The sound can't be captured on tape. No scientific instrument, regardless how sensitive, can detect it. But for millions of chocolate lovers, the nagging call of a Godiva bar or a Hershey's Kiss is as loud and impossible to ignore as an air-raid siren. It can't simply be that the stuff tastes good. So do popcorn and pizza, but the words popaholic and pizzaholic haven't forced their way into the lexicon the way chocoholic has. Chocolate doesn't just tingle the tongue: it makes people feel good in some fundamental, undefinable way.

No surprise, then, at a report in the current Nature. Chemicals found in chocolate, it seems, go after the same brain receptor system targeted by marijuana. In theory, you could even get high on chocolate--though not easily. Unlike THC, the active ingredient in pot, chocolate's chemicals turn on only a few circumscribed regions of the brain. A 130-lb. person would have to eat about 25 lb. of the stuff in one sitting to get a noticeable buzz.

But chocolate craving is evidently a real, physiological phenomenon. It's too early to tell precisely how the process works. Perhaps, write the researchers, who work at San Diego's Neurosciences Institute, the chemicals "intensify the sensory properties of chocolate." Or they may elevate the mood directly, which might explain why people medicate themselves with chocolate at times of psychological stress--a speculation that could possibly lead someday to new treatments for depression. For now, compulsive chocolate eaters can take some comfort in the fact that the craving isn't entirely theirs to control.

--By Michael D. Lemonick. Reported by Christine Sadlowski/New York

With reporting by CHRISTINE SADLOWSKI/NEW YORK