We are on our travels with Chocolate and Clozapine along the way!

This week’s blog comes from Zurich in Switzerland. I cannot remember the last time I visited Switzerland. At one stage in my life, my family and I often visited here. My mother’s parents and some of her brothers and sisters lived there, in the fascinating city of Basel. When I first visited the city, I was too young to really understand much about the place. I was just a young lad. I do, however, have lifetime memories that include real candles on the Christmas tree, chocolate porridge, snow and cold, and wonderful art installations by the artist Rowland Emett. His kinetic sculptures have since become world renowned.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Basel was and still is known as the cultural capital of Switzerland, and has more museums and galleries then anywhere else in the country. The first zoo in Switzerland opened there and it is the main centre for the pharmaceutical industry, with both Roche and Novartis located there. In 1938, Albert Hofmann produced the first psychedelic drug LSD at the Sandoz laboratories. Some 20 years later Clozapine was synthesised by the Swiss pharmaceutical company, Wander AG, a company eventually taken over by Sandoz. Clozapine marked an important point in the development of treatments for people experiencing serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. It was the first so called ‘atypical antipsychotic’ medication available for folk for whom other more traditional approaches had not worked. These days, whilst more generic forms of the drug are used, Clozapine remains on the World Health Organisation’s List of Essential Medicines.

But I digress! I’m not in Basel, but in Zurich. Yesterday J and I left our little house in the care of Tom and his sister Amelia, who look after our house and animals when we are away. We boarded a train from Blackpool North Station, bound for London, then onto Paris by  Eurostar, and eventually to Zurich. We are here for a couple of nights, before moving on to Budapest via an overnight train. We are travelling across Europe to Istanbul entirely by train stopping off in France, Switzerland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, before flying back to Manchester.

An enjoyable part of everyone’s visit to Switzerland often includes sampling the delicious chocolate they make. We have and it is undeniably sublime. Like that famous Danish lager, Swiss chocolate is probably the best chocolate in the world. My children will tell you that top of my list of favourite Swiss chocolate has to be Toblerone. These days, there are many variations of the triangle shaped bar, and I love them all (even the white chocolate version). On the other hand, J would never eat white chocolate, but loves rich dark chocolate.

Probably the most famous Swiss chocolate is that made by Lindt. When I was a child, this chocolate was always viewed as a luxurious treat, only to be enjoyed on very special occasions, and then, only in small amounts. I have long maintained that a little bit of chocolate now and then is good for you. Apparently, the darker the bar, the better it is for your health. Last week, I read a story that suggested we (humans) have been consuming chocolate for hundreds of years. Much of this time, it wasn’t chocolate, as we recognise it today, but a rather bitter liquid called cacao, made from the cacao bean.

This drink, because of what it contains, is probably good for your health. The Kuna Indians, who live on the San Blas Islands of Panama drink it on a regular basis. They add a little sugar, which turns the cacao into cocoa, and they drink at least four cups of this a day.  They generally have low blood pressure, which unlike us in the West, doesn’t rise as they get older. They enjoy low rates of cardiac problems, strokes, diabetes, and cancer and tend to have many more healthy later life years than us folk living in the West. It’s when we add a lot of sugar and milk (and shiny packaging) that we run into problems.

It was our very own Joseph Fry, who in 1847, created the first chocolate bar that resembles something we would be familiar with today. He mixed cocoa powder, sugar with melted cocoa butter to create the world’s first bar of chocolate. His crude bar of chocolate will have contained high levels of flavonoids, which is the element that helps reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke, something confirmed in many random controlled trials. The darker the chocolate the higher the levels of flavanols, thus the greater health benefit there might be.

What interested me though in this article was another element – theobromine, something that is also only found in coffee. It is a psychoactive substance. Clearly not as powerful as LSD, but a substance that can produce a significant ‘high’ if taken in reasonable quantities. Clearly chocolate is never going to be considered a health food, and J and I have no interest in taking any substance that might give us an artificial high. In fact, simply being away together on our train trip makes us feel happy and better able to enjoy the world around us. That said, the Swiss chocolate we had today was simply divine!