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A Short History of Chocolate in the United States

chocolate health

The use of chocolate as medicine has a long and interesting history in Europe and South America. This history is very well documented. Little is known about the medicinal use of chocolate in Northern America until recent.

Eighteenth century Anglo-Americans brought from Europe long-held medical beliefs to the newly formed Colonial Territories. Medicine practiced in 17th and 18th century Europe was based upon the humoral hot–cold/wet– dry system of bodily balance where illness was perceived as an imbalance to the system. Classifying foodstuffs into hot/cold and wet/dry was practiced in both Mesoamerica and Europe during this era: persons who became sick were prescribed foods of specific heat and dryness categories that supposedly returned them to “balance.”

Chocolate or cacao was presumed to be of benefit for the sick because it could be served as drink or substance, hot or cold. In this article many authentic sources were found that with a significant body of literature that documents chocolate used medicinally, specifically for a well defined range of diseases. Cholera, tuberculosis (consumption), asthma, small pox, yellow fever, to name a few.

Chocolate or cocoa doesn’t have a curing effect for these diseases, the only advantage of chocolate being high in calories and improving weight.

There is a rich history of chocolate usage to combat some of North America’s most horrific epidemics. It was recognized
that chocolate consumption could aid in weight gain. Further, as a beverage, chocolate’s high fat ratio created a product with a viscosity that almost seemed like a solid food. Being a liquid, however, supported the idea that the invalid should not consume solid foods because digestion
taxed the body. As a result, chocolate consumption fit the prevailing medical treatment paradigm and was widely utilized.

After the third decade of the 19th century chocolate lost it’s role as “medicine”. This might be due to technological advances in manufacturing chocolate. This dramatically altered chocolate production patterns it also began to be produced as a confection in solid form.
In the 1950s chocolate was associated with three marketing concepts: fun, pleasure, and snacking. Since recent laboratory research findings suggest a positive associate between dark chocolate consumption and improved heart health. Chocolate as part of an overall healthy eating pattern does promote good health – then as now.

You can read the whole article: The Medicinal Use of Chocolate in Early North America, here. Have fun.

ResearchBlogging.org
Deanna L. Pucciarelli, Louis E. Grivetti (2008). The Medicinal Use of Chocolate in Early North America Molecular Nutrition & Food Research, 52 (10), 1215-1227 DOI: 10.1002/mnfr.200700264

 

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Science, gender and the emergence of depression in American psychiatry 1950-1980

This article by Laura D. Hirshbein is a clear description how depression became a specific disease category with concrete criteria. I thought depression was one of the most clearly described categories in human history. Depression was not a classification in the DSM I (1952). Depression as we know it today became only a diagnostic category in DSM III in 1980. There were certainly descriptions of melancholia in physicians writing throughout human history but the author states that depression as we know it is a twentieth-century phenomenon.
As a psychiatrist working on a depression unit I can most of the time clearly recognize depression. But many patient also present with depressive complaints which are clear depressions in terms of DSM IV criteria but differ from those patients in which a diagnosis of depression can’t be missed at least to my opinion.
The author has strong arguments for this 20th century phenomenon.Depression became topic of research in the 1950’s. In those days the inpatients mainly consisted of young women.The large number of women in clinical trials for depression in those days appeared to be a reflection of the hospital population of that time. Before the 50′ in pre world war 2 period the inpatients of a psychiatric hospital were mainly older men.
In the develoment of DSM III, groups of researchers developed specific diagnostic criteria for depression. They looked at populations of patients in hospitals.Symptoms were counted and analyzed to see which best characterized depression.Patients with drugs or alcohol abuses were excluded as in medication trials. Researchers tested those criteria in hospitalized depressed women. The question whether women were depressed more than men was never raised. The connection between women and depression has been a closed circle. This article gives some food for thought.