First they told us we craved chocolate because it simulated the feeling of being in love. Now the science of nutrimetabonomics says it's something else entirely... (The science of what?)

According to an article in the The Journal of Proteome Research, metabonomics "is a discipline that uses metabolic profiles of bodily fluids such as blood plasma and urine to understand drug toxicity, pharmacological responsiveness, and other biological events." Nutrimetabonomics takes this one step further, examining the effects of diet on the metabolism, and the influences that metabolism has on diet. One particular example being the link between the types of bacteria present in people's digestive systems and their cravings for chocolate.

Much of this research has been performed by Sunil Kochhar and his colleagues at the Nestlé Research Center in Switzerland (yes, you read that right—the Nestlé Research Center). Their conclusions: the presence or absence of certain kinds of bacteria in your digestive system will make you either "chocolate-desiring" or "chocolate-indifferent." Whether that is cause or effect is an open question: did the bacteria get into chocolate-cravers' systems because they ate lots of chocolate at a young age, or were those bacteria always in their systems?

Kochhar and his associates tested the blood and urine of a set of 22 men placed on a carefully defined diet, giving them chocolate at discrete points during the study. Half the men identified as chocolate-loving, the other half not. They chose men to avoid "the confounding effects of hormonal fluctuations" that would affect women over the course of the study. They said the hardest part was finding 11 men who didn't like chocolate. (It took over a year to do so.)

Read the article for more information. (Thanks to Heow for the pointer to the news item.)