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11/23/2004 Entry: "Chocolate Helps Coughing"

A justification for those bags of little chocolate bars that live in our upper cabinet -- an ingredient in chocolate actually reduces coughing! "The study found that theobromine, found in cocoa, was nearly a third more effective in stopping persistent coughs than codeine, currently considered the best cough medicine." I didn't know that capsaicin could be used to cause coughing in healthy volunteers, and the article doesn't mention how capsaicin would be applied to cause this effect, but in a different study "Capsaicin nebulised on air in saline was inhaled via a low resistance valve using a mouthpiece and noseclip." Ouch!

Theobromine effects remind me of Kage Baker's Company novels, in which the immortal cyborgs have been engineered to get drunk off chocolate due to the theobromine. (Reuters article via Absolute Piffle.)