Study strengths and limitations
muscle pain, Pain
A significant strength of this study is that it was designed as a randomized double-blinded study, with both male and female participants within a small age-range. All the participants in the study fully completed the questionnaires and experiments, with no missing data.Pain induction by hypertonic saline has been widely used in several studies due to its ability to mimic clinical acute muscle pain [Despite its findings, this study is not without limitations. We did not control for any ingestion of sweet foods before the visit, which could have affected the results [One important confounding factor is that once the participant has been given the chocolate and taste it, they likely know what type of chocolate they were eating. Their preference could interfere with results. On the other hand, in this study preference and taste-experience were included in the results, which might have helped to address the limitations mentioned above.As mentioned before, another limitation was the amount of chocolate that was given to the participants (3.6 g), which is much lower than other studies exploring the effect of flavanol or tryptophan content [