Chocolate And Your Health

If you love chocolate, you’re no doubt delighted by emerging research on its health benefits. Chocolate is a source of polyphenols, the same kinds of antioxidants found in red wine and green tea. The fat it contains is mostly stearic acid, which doesn’t raise cholesterol levels. It also contains compounds called flavonoids, which are good for the heart – they reduce the stickiness of platelets, inhibiting blood clotting and reducing the danger of heart attack. Here’s some of what we’ve learned about chocolate’s specific health benefits.

Chocolate’s Health Benefits:

Blood pressure: Drinking hot chocolate is associated with reduced blood pressure, improved blood vessel health and lowering LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and elevating HDL (“good”) cholesterol, according to Harvard Medical School researchers who analyzed findings from 21 studies that involved more than 2,500 participants.

Heart disease: Drinking cocoa may be responsible for the very low incidence of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer among the Kuna Islanders of Panama. The cocoa they drink is made from gently processed home-grown cacao beans. Otherwise their native diet is low in protein, very low in fat, rich in fruit and, surprisingly, high in salt. Epicatechin, a flavanol (a natural flavonoid compound) in cocoa, has been identified as the active ingredient responsible for Kuna good health.

Memory: Some evidence from Columbia University suggests that cocoa flavanols seem to lessen a particular type of age-related memory loss. The researchers explained that as we age, we’re a bit less likely to remember such things as the names of new acquaintances or where you parked your car. These memories are believed to be stored in the dentate gyrus, an area of the brain’s hippocampus. (This type of memory loss is different from that associated with Alzheimer’s disease.)

The study showed that drinking cocoa containing 900 milligrams of flavanols daily for three months resulted in significant improvements in memory. To get that amount you would have to consume at least 10.58 ounces of chocolate daily, which would add up to nearly 1,000 calories.

Atrial Fibrillation: Eating up to six ounces of chocolate per week could help reduce your risk of developing atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm affecting up to 6.1 million Americans. This condition poses risks of stroke, heart failure, cognitive decline, dementia, and death.

The news comes from data on 55,502 men and women ages 50 to 64 participating in a Danish health study. Based on food frequency data submitted by the participants, the researchers determined that those who ate one to three one-ounce servings of chocolate per month had a 10 percent lower rate of atrial fibrillation compared to those who ate less than one-ounce of chocolate a month. Those who ate chocolate once a week had a 17 percent lower rate while those who ate two to six servings per week had a 20 percent lower rate. Eating more than that amount of chocolate weekly didn’t appear to reduce the risk further.

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