Umm, I'm okay with this.

In fact, I think I can easily comply with this one.

How dark chocolate may guard against brain injury from stroke

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that a compound in dark chocolate may protect the brain after a stroke by increasing cellular signals already known to shield nerve cells from damage.

Ninety minutes after feeding mice a single modest dose of epicatechin, a compound found naturally in dark chocolate, the scientists induced an ischemic stroke by essentially cutting off blood supply to the animals' brains. They found that the animals that had preventively ingested the epicatechin suffered significantly less brain damage than the ones that had not been given the compound.

Eat chocolate early. And often.

While most treatments against stroke in humans have to be given within a two- to three-hour time window to be effective, epicatechin appeared to limit further neuronal damage when given to mice 3.5 hours after a stroke. Given six hours after a stroke, however, the compound offered no protection to brain cells.

So what this article is saying is that I should probably be eating chocolate more often.

I'm good with that.

In other food-related news, the fam celebrated Mother's Day today by taking me to Shogun in Denton, Texas for sushi. Well, I got sushi. Everybody else did the Japanese hibachi thing, so I still got to enjoy the show and the nice warm flame-up (always my favorite part of it, since I'm always cold). I had an order of yellowtail sashimi, some seaweed salad, and a really yummy softshell crab roll with avocado. I was very, very happy. And I got to share a bite of sashimi with Isaac, who gives a hearty thumbs-up (this is an amazing thing, because he may be one of the world's pickiest eaters).