Valentine’s Day has taken over the candy aisles of my local drug store chain. Wandering through the aisles, I saw pink M&M’s and marshmallow hearts and heart-shaped Snickers in pink wrappers. There were also shelves of heart-shaped boxes of sugar candies that said “ I love you” and offerings with or without attached Teddy bears.

Since Valentine’s Day has been made into the mid-winter “declaration of love,” is sugar now the food of romance? It very well may be and not just because a box of chocolates attached to a Teddy bear costs a lot less than a dozen long-stemmed red roses. You can’t eat the roses; they just sit in a vase. But candy, especially chocolate, not only engages your sense of smell, touch and of course taste; it also may put your brain in to a romantic mood.    

Many of us spent our elementary school Valentine days crunching our way through cinnamon-flavored red hearts or putting together secret “I love you “ messages on heart-shaped sugar candies. If no boy, or girl, friend sent a card, we would eat the hearts ourselves. Seeing and eating these candies as adults around Valentine’s Day may bring back memories of crushes on 3^rd grade classmates and the possibility of romance without relying on a computer dating service.

Chocolate has, of course, the additional bonus of being a sensual treat. The feeling of an exquisite chocolate melting on the tongue is unique. (I still remember the amazing sensation of eating a freshly-made chocolate truffle in a candy shop in Zurich twenty years ago. As it melted on my tongue I felt as if time had stopped. That’s how intense the taste, and texture, was.) It has been claimed that chocolate contains some ingredients that may be aphrodisiacs, thereby putting the eater in the mood for romance.  One suspects if this were true, the ingredients would be purified and sold in the same stores that sell engagement rings. But it is not necessary to ingest some exotic ingredient in chocolate to experience the romance of Valentine’s Day.  Chocolate—and indeed all the other sugary confections—can put you in the mood for romance.

The sugar in two or three pink marshmallow hearts, a tiny box of Sweethearts (the hearts with the writing) or a chocolate heart will start a process that gets more serotonin in your brain.  This good-mood chemical makes you feel happy, calm, and relaxed. It turns off all the mental clutter (as in, “When do I have to turn in that report?”) while allowing you to focus entirely on whoever gave you the candy. And the nice thing about this process is that it happens so fast.

If you eat the Sweethearts or marshmallows on a relatively empty stomach, you will begin to feel very mellow in about 10 to 15 minutes. Chocolate takes somewhat longer because its fat content slows down digestion. The nice thing about all of this is that these effects are not limited to Valentine’s Day.

So if the only thing you have to curl up with is the Teddy bear from last year’s box of chocolates, you will feel some comfort from eating those sugary hearts. Serotonin helps both those who have found romance and those who are still looking.

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