Forget honey and lemon, CHOCOLATE will cure your sore throat

You know it's a good day for science when the world's leading cough expert claims chocolate is the best thing you can ingest to heal a sore throat... Remember how you have always been told that honey and lemon is the best thing to be sipping on if your throat is at you? Well, it may look like this is actually, in fact, not true. According to Professor Alyn Morice from Hull University, there is some strong evidence in place to prove that cocoa (AKA chocolate!) is much more effective in soothing a sore throat.

Morice, who is an international authority on cough and the mechanism of coughs, has studied the effects on different cough medications and other popular throat soothing "concoctions", and has discovered that medicine containing chocolate is stickier and more viscose than standard medicines, as it forms a coating that protects nerve endings in the throat which trigger the urge to cough.

Are you hearing us, guys? Chocolate can calm a cough. (*reaches for Bounty bar...)

This is what the professor had to say: "We have just seen the results of the largest real-world study of an over-the-counter cough remedy ever undertaken in Europe," Morice recently explained to the Daily Mail. "This proves that a new medicine which contains cocoa is better than a standard linctus. The head-to-head comparison found that patients taking the chocolate-based medicine had a significant improvement in symptoms within two days." And as if this isn't enough to make you feel better about all that chocolate you scoffed over Christmas (Hey; you were just soothing your throat!), it turns out that this isn't even the first study to show that chocolate can calm coughs. Previously, researchers at Imperial College in London found that theobromine, an alkaloid in cocoa, is better at suppressing the urge to cough than codeine — an established ingredient in cough medicines. Why does chocolate work so well? Well, researchers claim it's because cocoa has demulcent properties, which means it relieves inflammation or irritation. Essentially, it's stickier than typical cough syrup, and better forms a coating to protect the nerve endings in the throat that trigger the urge to cough. (This effect is also why honey and lemon work, albeit, according to Morice, not as well.) Unfortunately, while slowly sucking on a piece of chocolate may provide "some relief", Morice thinks that cocoa for the sake of throat healing is best ingested in a mix with other substances – as it is the way chocolate works in conjunction with others ingredients that makes it so effective. Ah, well. Mix schmix. What we will take from this is the following: Quitting chocolate is no longer going to happen – sure, it is practically a medicine!