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Here is more good news for all the chocolate nuts---and that probably means you. If you have a persistent cough, then just take chocolate, which may be better than a cough syrup, says a scientist from the University of Hull.

Alyn Morice, who is also a founding member of the International Society for the Study of Cough, said chocolate-based medication is better than linctus, and "the evidence is actually as solid as a bar of Fruit of Nut."

His study, called ROCOCO, tested 163 patients who were treated with either a linctus or a chocolate-based syrup called Unicough, an experiment whose results will be out in a year.

"We have just seen the results of the largest real-world study of an over-the-counter cough remedy ever undertaken in Europe," Morice wrote in the Daily Mail. "This proves that a new medicine which contains cocoa is better than a standard linctus. The head-to-head comparison found that patients taking the chocolate-based medicine had a significant improvement in symptoms within two days."

Morice has an interesting explanation. He said that it was due to its cocoa composition's "demulcent properties". Being thick and sticky, it can coat nerve endings and calm cough.

However, while this may be news to you, there are many previous studies that have arrived at the same conclusion. A study presented at the winter meeting of the British Thoracic Society in 2012 explained that chocolate can treat a cough better than codeine, said Medical Daily.

Morice debunked the myth that there are various types of coughs that need diverse treatments. That is an idea that was born in the 19th century and needs to die now.

"Variety is wonderful when we open a box of chocolates, but it's simply confusing when consumers are confronted with an array of different cough mixtures for supposedly different coughs," he wrote. "From a marketing point of view, it makes a lot of sense to talk about wet coughs and dry coughs, chesty ones or tickly ones - because it's a great way to encourage people to buy more products. But from a scientific standpoint, it is incredibly outdated."