Finally… a good reason to come to the dark side… dark chocolate that is. All the chocolate health benefits.
Eat the right kind of chocolate, in moderation of course, and you just might find you’re doing your heart a huge favor, and prevent heart attacks and failure according to intriguing new research.
While earlier short term studies have found chocolate to be beneficial to blood pressure, this is the first to show long term outcomes that are related specifically to heart failure which can be the result of untreated high blood pressure over time.
About 1% of Americans over the age of 65 experience heart failure. Contrary to the name, heart failure does not mean your heart has stopped or won’t work anymore. It simply means your heart isn’t able to pump blood the way it used to… the way it should. As the U.S. population ages, rates of heart failure are expected to rise as well.
The most recent research looked at the effect of eating chocolate on heart disease. A team led by Murray Mittleman, MD, DrPH of Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center examined information from a nine-year study of 31,823 women participating in a research project known as the Swedish Mammography Cohort. The subjects, all between the ages of 48 and 83, reported their chocolate eating tendencies and the team combined the results with data from Swedish hospitalization and death registries between the years 1998 and 2006.
Women who ate one to two servings of high quality chocolate (30% cocoa solids) per week had a 32% lower risk of developing heart failure. Women who had one to three servings per month had a 28% reduced risk. Interestingly, those who at least one serving daily didn’t appear to benefit from a protective effect, the reason may be due to the added calories that come from eating the chocolate in place of more nutritious foods.
You must remember that the difference in the quality of the chocolate is likely quite important. In the U.S., chocolate that has 15% cocoa solids can be sold as dark chocolate. In Sweden, even milk chocolate has more cocoa (30% cocoa solids) than dark chocolate sold in the U.S.
It’s the higher cocoa content that’s been associated with all the health benefits, and in fact the milk seems to keep the good-for-you nutrients from being absorbed by the body.
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Cutting Risk Of Heart Failure… Continued…
What’s more, the serving size the Swedish subjects enjoyed ranged from 19 grams among those over 62 years old, to 30 grams for those 61 years old and younger. In the U.S., the standard portion size is 20 grams.
Because chocolate is a rather calorie dense food, eating lots over the long term is certainly going to increase the chances you’ll gain weight. We chocolate lovers know this all too well. Which is why the experts caution this is not an “eat all you want” message. If you must indulge, dark chocolate, in small, limited amounts, appears to be a rather nice tasting, good for you option when trying to prevent heart attack or failure from occuring.
Chocolate health benefits outweight any negatives as long as other bad behaviors (weight gain or increased intake of lots of empty calories) don’t take over.
