Can Cocoa reduce nighttime peeing?

In February 2025 a man told me that he had read a news article about dark chocolate reducing the risk for diabetes. (Here is one of many of those news articles.) Although he doesn't have diabetes, he was wondering what effect chocolate might have on his health, so he began eating 40 grams of 75% dark chocolate after dinner. To his surprise, he noticed that was peeing less often during the night.

I did not have any dark chocolate, but I had cocoa powder, so I began experimenting with having between 5 and 15 grams of cocoa powder a couple hours before I go to bed. I have been amazed to discover that it seems to let me sleep better, and most nights I do not have to get up to pee. However, I don't know if those benefits are because of the cocoa.

It's difficult to determine the effect of cocoa because there are so many factors that can affect how we sleep. For example, I was getting up to pee frequently simply because I was afraid of peeing in my bed.

Some years ago, I can't remember when, I woke up in the middle of the night and felt like I was going to pee, but I had not had that problem since I was a very young child, so I ignored the feeling. A short while later I began peeing in my bed. (Perhaps these incidents were the original reason for referring to our age group as being in "our golden years".)

I stopped ignoring that feeling after that incident. I have been peeing whenever I wake up and feel like I might need to pee, which results in me usually peeing two or three times a night.

Therefore, I suspect that many, or most, of the times that I got up to pee was because of that fear, not because I actually had to. That in turn makes me wonder if the reason I was peeing less after having cocoa was because I wasn't as fearful.

Although reduction of peeing could be psychosomatic, the cocoa seems to truly reduce my nighttime peeing. I thought it might be because it reduces the amount of pee my kidneys produce during the night, so I began to pee into a container in the morning, and I would get about twice as much as I produce during the day when have the urge to pee. So I don't think the cocoa is reducing the amount of pee. Instead, I suspect that it is reducing the desire to pee.

Perhaps there are some chemicals in cocoa that affect the nerves or muscles that create the desire to pee. If so, then it would be nice to create a pill that has those chemicals and none of the caffeine or other chemicals that interfere with sleeping.

Update 25 March 2025:
There are a lot of reports about cocoa containing cadmium and lead. In this news article, those metals are referred to as "neurotoxic metals", and that "consuming low levels of cadmium can damage the kidneys."

This brings up a frightening possibility: what if the cocoa reduces nighttime peeing because the cadmium and/or lead is damaging nerves, brain cells, or kidneys?

This issue is another example of why we benefit from eliminating secrecy and observing people. Specifically, in November 2024 I began experimenting with reducing my consumption of salt in the evening to see if that would reduce the amount of times I pee at night. There were a couple nights when I peed only once, and at least one night I did not pee at all.

I assumed that the nights I rarely peed was just because I didn't have much salt that day, or was not drinking less liquids, or eating less food, but after that man told me about chocolate reducing his nighttime peeing, it occurred to me that perhaps the reason that I did not pee very often during certain nights of November and December was because those might have been the evenings when I ate some of the "Chocolate buckwheat" that I described here. I was eating it after dinner, but sometime near the end of December I switched to eating it only after breakfast because I assumed that the caffeine in cocoa would increase the peeing at night since coffee and tea makes me pee more often.

If there had been surveillance cameras in my bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, computer software might have noticed that I was sleeping better and peeing less often on the evenings that I had cocoa after dinner. I would not have come to such a conclusion because coffee and tea make me pee more often, and I assumed the caffeine in cocoa would do so also.

We cannot expect individual citizens to provide us with useful medical knowledge. We need a government that will fund scientific research programs of health and medical issues. There might be hundreds of different factors that affect our sleeping and our peeing, such as:

•	The types and quantities of foods and liquids that we have eaten during the day, and the amount of time between our last meal and when we get into bed.
•	Whether the food and gas that is passing through our intestines is pushing on our bladder or urethra.
•	The type and amount of exercise that we have had during the day, and especially during the evening, and whether our body has to put resources into healing the muscles.
•	The amount of sleep that we had on previous nights.
•	Our emotional state, such as whether we are under stress or sad or happy.

We cannot improve something if we are afraid to experiment with changes to it. In order to improve our lives, we must find the courage to experiment with ourselves. Four major changes that I advocate are:

1)		We must change our economic system because we cannot expect to get useful health or medical knowledge, or any other scientific information, from scientists who are under pressure to make profit for their business.

2)		We must change our culture to prevent Jews, religious fanatics, political groups, the FBI, vegans, Freudian psychologists, feminists, and other groups from pressuring scientists into producing theories that promote certain beliefs. Scientists, and everybody else, must have the freedom to do research without being threatened, pressured, assassinated, or deceived. Everybody should also be able to discuss such issues as the genetic differences between men and women and the Holocaust without fear of being attacked, ridiculed, insulted, arrested, or fired from their jobs.

3)		We need to raise the standards for scientists. For example, a person should not qualify as a scientist if he cannot figure out whether the Apollo moon landings were real or fake, or if he believes that the World Trade Center towers and Building 7 crumbled into dust because of fire, or if he cannot figure out whether it was possible for the Nazis to gas and burn 6 million Jews during the final years of World War II, or if he refuses to acknowledge the evidence that humans are a species of ape.

4)		We must eliminate secrecy. We need to be free of governments and organizations that hide information about the JFK assassination, the Holocaust, the Apollo moon landing, Hitler, and other events.