We have been writing about hiccup remedies for 40 years because there always seems to be an interesting home remedy for hiccups. People claim an enormous variety of things work to stop hiccups. These range from scaring someone, which we doubt is effective, to having the victim swallow a spoonful of sugar. This remedy has been approved by doctors (New England Journal of Medicine, Dec. 23, 1971). What is your favorite hiccup cure?
Chasing Away Hiccups with Chocolate:
Q. The absolute best cure I’ve ever found for hiccups is CHOCOLATE. Don’t believe me? Try it.
Keep some 70 to 90 percent cocoa dark chocolate on hand. (Lindt is good.) Smooth a bite of the chocolate on the roof of your mouth and be amazed at how fast your hiccups disappear!
Don’t worry about chocolate making you fat. Unsweetened dark chocolate is beneficial. (Milk chocolate, though, is not good for dieters.) You’ll thank me for this cure.
Chocolate as a Hiccup Cure:
A. We first heard about using chocolate as a home remedy for hiccups from a listener who called our radio show. Her Danish grandmother had always dispensed a few chocolate chips to a child with hiccups.
We have since heard from others who agree that chocolate can help stop hiccups. Here’s one reader’s hiccup cure story:
“I discovered this remedy one day after repeated bouts of hiccups. I became aggravated and decided that if I was going to have them, I was going to have them with chocolate. They stopped immediately, much to my surprise. The chocolate remedy has been foolproof for years now.”
Presumably some of the cocoa flavanol compounds are able to stimulate the vagus nerve to counteract hiccups (Experimental Physiology, Jan., 2013). We can’t think of a tastier remedy to chase away the hiccups.
Other Hiccup Remedies:
There are, of course, many other hiccup remedies. One of the simplest is sipping water. It can be made more challenging by sipping from the opposite side of the glass, bending over and slowly straightening up while sipping or synchronizing the sip with the hiccup. You can read what we have written about those remedies here.
There are plenty of other hiccup remedies. We demonstrate a few of them in this video. You’ll find many others in our book, The People’s Pharmacy Quick & Handy Home Remedies.
Let us know what your favorite is. If you try chocolate for hiccups, we’ll be interested in hearing how well it works.
Revised 8/25/16
1/28/19 redirected to: https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/articles/do-you-need-help-for-hiccup-cure/
