Chocolate in Advertising and in the Brain

Welcome back to C4: Cera's Chocolate Culture at Central! Today, I will cover some more ways that chocolate impacts our culture from Central College's very own Liberal Arts Seminar class about chocolate. Except this time, we will focus a little more on the individual. Specifically, the impacts on an individual person's brain.

Let's start with how chocolate is presented in advertisements to make you want to buy it. Almost every American should be able to identify a Snickers commercial on the television with its signature catchphrase, "You're not you when you're hungry." I remember watching a Snickers commercial when I was younger about Mr. Bean stumbling around on a secret mission and alerting the enemy while some masked martial artists were silently and effortlessly jumping across buildings at night. Just as the enemy was about to attack, one of Mr. Bean's companions throws him a Snickers bar. After he eats it, Mr. Bean turns into another martial artist who quickly takes down the enemy.

While I am not a Communications Studies or Marketing major, I've learned a thing or two about advertising and design. Not for posters or commercials, but for websites as part of my Computer Science major. I also work part-time in Central College's Communications Office as a Student Web Designer to make Central look appealing to prospective students and families. Fun fact: Central's official website is hosted through WordPress, which is why I am using WordPress to host my own blog website since I already have experience with it. (Author's Note: This blog was originally hosted on WordPress but is now through my own Vercel application.)

Back to the chocolate advertising, I learned in class that there were patterns among the different companies such as marketing toward romance, some humor with chocolate puns, and passionate word choice. When I went to look for a chocolate ad that stood out to me, I saw a Hershey's ad with the "she" highlighted in it for International Women's Day. I was also interested in a provided course material article about Godiva's ad campaign to market toward younger consumers by sparking wonder with dedication and love. It is amazing how creative these ads can be when they bring in other topics or themes that go beyond chocolate.

However, advertisements are not the only way that chocolate impacts the brain. As I was doing research on this topic, I was surprised by how many studies there were on chocolate's effects on the human brain. I specifically focused on two articles from class: "How Visual Images of Chocolate Affect the Craving and Guilt of Female Dieters" and "Chocolate Craving & Menstruation."

Before I dive into those, I want to mention how impressed I was to see that there were studies on women instead of the default male. This is off-topic, but I read a book called "Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men," which covers a lot of ways where the male body is assumed to apply to women too and things like personal protective equipment and cars were designed based on that assumption. The results could be dangerous or even deadly for women because of it. The book also mentioned many medical studies which had little to no women participants, or they focused exclusively on medical issues for males. We should assume that women's brains and men's brains are not completely identical, so the studies in these articles should be more accurate for women.

Returning to the first article, which was about female dieters and chocolate images, the study concluded that the group of dieters had higher levels of craving than the group of non-dieters, likely because restricted foods for dieters are even more desirable and this could lead to dieters feeling negative emotions such as anxiety and guilt. This is a huge revelation, since it can undermine the effectiveness of diets if the participants gain negative emotions from it.

The second article covered chocolate craving and menstruation, and that study concluded that American women were more likely than Spanish women to crave chocolate around their menstruation cycles. However, both American men and women were also found to eat chocolate in the evening, whereas Spanish men and women typically ate chocolate after eating or while studying. This suggests that the cause is more likely to originate from culture rather than from a physiological basis for women as a whole.

Understanding how chocolate affects our brains is crucial to understanding how chocolate impacts our culture. And some of these effects are subtle, like the advertising and dieting. They could also be the other way around, in which our culture impacts our attitude toward chocolate, like with menstruation. But now that we are aware of this, we have the ability to proactively change that impact to lessen the negative effects at the very least.