If that chocolate craving sometimes feels as if it is coming from deep in your gut, maybe it is.
A study links the type of bacteria living in people’s digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave chocolate daily show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than those immune to chocolate’s allure.
That may be the case for other foods too. The idea could eventually lead to treating some types of obesity by changing the composition of the trillions of bacteria in the intestines and stomach, said Sunil Kochhar, co-author of the study, which appears today in the Journal of Proteome Research.
Still to be determined is whether the bacteria cause the craving or whether one’s diet changed the bacteria, which then reinforced food choices.
