The new drug in European ballads ... is one that you maybe even have taken today

                         
Chocolate addicts can now smell cocoa powder raves of the old continent


The rave already extends the morning. Someone takes a little package, find a corner on a desk and stretches a certain mysterious powder career. A powder that is brown and has a bizarrely familiar smell. It's not a ballad of smell, but children and Mom's home.

The powder comes from a plant of tropical America, it is perfectly legal and you may have now taken just orally: the plant is Theobroma cacao and the powder is simply chocolate.

The idea appeared in rave Lucid in Berlin, where anything other than cocoa, herbal teas and vegetarian dishes are banned - including alcohol. There cocoa comes in drinks. Another rave, the Morning Gloryville also offers in the form of pills. And the Belgian cholatier Dominique Persoone even created a device to smell chocolate in 2007 to a party with (irony) Rolling Stones. It has sold 50,000 of them.

Cocoa advocates say cheap is subtle but noticeable. A sense of peace, joy and concentration. But it must be raw chocolate, not cocoa powder - chocolate contains cocoa butter and sugar, which decreases the active ingredients to less than 10% pure.

It works? All the science in the world can not give someone a sense, know how to experience one thing or another. Only experiencing. But there are reasons to suspect that the "new" drug is not so different from Grandma Toddynho.

The magic of chocolate is not yet well understood. Besides theobromine, his most famous psychoactive, chocolate also has tryptophan, which is related to the production of the well-being of the hormones, serotonin - but egg white has ten times more. Another candidate is phenylethylamine - a compound that is released by the brain during orgasm - but this is a serious problem to be destroyed in the stomach before reaching the brain (no test was done through the nose). Theobromine itself is not all: as far as we know, is a lighter version of caffeine, which is chemically almost identical. It shows potential for the treatment of asthma and circulatory problems, not dull.

The pleasure of eating chocolate probably has more to do with being delicious: eat something good releases endorphins in the blood, causing a sense of calm and pleasure.

At least, no one will die of overdose: a deadly dose of pure chocolate (yes, it exists) is about 30 kg for a 70 kg person. Just do not invite the dog to the party: for them, theobromine can be lethal in much smaller doses.