Scientists Find the Reason Why Dark Chocolate Boosts Heart Health
You probably heard that dark chocolate is good for your heart. It’s true. But it was not until recently that scientists figured out why. The new findings, published in The FASEB Journal, suggest that dark chocolate helps restore flexibility to the arteries while also preventing white blood cells from sticking to the walls of blood vessels.
A research team from Wageningen University in Netherlands analysed 44 middle-aged overweight men over two periods of four weeks as they consumed 70 grams of chocolate per day. Study participants received either specially produced dark chocolate with high flavanol content or chocolate that was regularly produced. Both chocolates had a similar cocoa mass content.
Before and after both intervention periods, researchers performed a variety of tests to measure the participants’ vascular health. During the study, participants were advised to refrain from certain energy dense food products to prevent weight gain. Scientists also evaluated the sensory properties of the high flavanol chocolate and the regular chocolate and collected the motivation scores of the participants to eat these chocolates during the intervention.
They found that dark chocolate helps restore flexibility to arteries while also preventing white blood cells from sticking to the walls of blood vessels. What’s more, increasing the flavanol content of dark chocolate did not change this effect.
"We provide a more complete picture of the impact of chocolate consumption in vascular health and show that increasing flavanol content has no added beneficial effect on vascular health," said Diederik Esser, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Top Institute Food and Nutrition and Wageningen University, Division of Human Nutrition in Wageningen, The Netherlands. "However, this increased flavanol content clearly affected taste and thereby the motivation to eat these chocolates. So the dark side of chocolate is a healthy one."
"The effect that dark chocolate has on our bodies is encouraging not only because it allows us to indulge with less guilt, but also because it could lead the way to therapies that do the same thing as dark chocolate but with better and more consistent results," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "Until the ’dark chocolate drug’ is developed, however, we’ll just have to make do with what nature has given us!"
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