Anxiety behaviour displayed in C57BL/6J mice consuming coffee and cocoa, but not observed in mice consuming Japanese green tea in a high fat diet induced obesity model

S A Cichello^1,4*, D Begg² and R Weisinger³

¹School of Life Sciences, La Trobe University, Victoria Australia

²School of Public Health, Kunming Medical University, Yunnan, P.R. China

³School of Psychology, La Trobe University, Victoria, 3086 Australia

⁴School of Public Health, Kunming Medical University, Chenggong, 650500 Yunnan Province, P.R. China

It is now acknowledged that certain foods may affect mood and behavior. Recently, the food industry has seen a rise in foods containing beverages such as green tea cake, ice-cream, coffee biscuits as per the traditional chocolate as a food and cocoa beverage. Green tea has been suggested to exert numerous health properties, including anxiolytic properties (Vignes et. al. 2006), as does cocoa (i.e. migrane) (Savi et. al. 2002). Numerous studies have studied the consumption of these beverages (i.e. cocoa, coffee and green tea) for their anti-oxidant effect but few studies have included them in a feed format. In this study, mice were allotted into a 16 week treatment of a high-fat, high carbohydrate diet of varying treatments including 1) control diet (21% fat, 36.1% sucrose), 2) 2% cocoa (21% fat, 36.1% sucrose), 3) 2% coffee (21% fat, 36.1% sucrose) and 4) 2% green tea (21% fat, 36.1% sucrose). Subjects were offered the diets in a non-beverage feed format and fresh diet was offered daily. At week 16, the cocoa group mice displayed quicker entry time to dark areas, a greater (p<0.05) amount of time spent in the dark box area and higher (p<0.05) number of peeking events when compared with the control group. In addition, the coffee group mice displayed a higher (p<0.05) re-entries from the light to the dark box area (i.e. anxiety like behavior/ agitation), whereas the green tea group did not display the same level of anxiety like behavior seen in the cocoa and coffee groups. This result may suggest an anxiolytic offset effect against caffeine in green tea versus coffee or another phytochemical component or body compositional changes when consuming a high fat, high sucrose diet.

anxiety, agitation, behaviour, cocoa, coffee, green tea, light/ dark box

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