Chocolate Migraines and How to Eat Around Them

Now that we have covered booze, it's high time to move on to the next guilty pleasure - Chocolate.

Chocolate is considered one of the migraine triggers. How true is it? No one really knows. One study by British scientists tried to tackle the issue:

"Patients with migraine who believed that chocolate could provoke their attacks were challenged with either chocolate or a closely matching placebo. In a double-blind parallel group study, chocolate ingestion was followed by a typical migraine episode in 5 out of 12 patients, while none of the 8 patients challenged with placebo had an attack. The median time to the onset of the attack was 22 h."

So the science-types concluded that chocolate is actually able to trigger a migraine attack in patients who believe themselves sensitive to it. Not exactly a big help.

OK, you need that chocolate fix but are afraid of the consequences. What's one to do?

Here's a couple of pointers that should let us have our cake and eat it too:

• Moderation, as always, is the first and the last thing one should remember when indulging in something that is considered a trigger. Migraine triggers are cumulative - the more you eat, the more likely it to affect you.
• Dark chocolate should be preferable to milk chocolate. A recent study in Denmark has demonstrated (and they know their chocolate over there) that "dark chocolate is far more filling than milk chocolate, lessening our craving for sweet, salty and fatty foods." Good to know.
• If my gentle readers themselves really sensitive to chocolate, consider this - it could be not the chocolate itself you are reacting to but the sugar in it. Try experimenting - backing semi-sweet chocolate is sweet enough to eat and has low level of flavoring additives. If nibbling a small cube of it doesn't send you to a migraine land, there could be some hope yet.

Enjoy your holidays, my gentle readers, and whatever you do - don't overdo it.