Dark chocolate proven beneficial for heart health

While we’ve been told for years that dark chocolate is good for us, scientists have only just been able to determine why this is the case. Researchers from The Netherlands have found that dark chocolate helps restore flexibility to arteries while also preventing white blood cells from sticking to the walls of blood vessels.

Interestingly, the researchers found that increasing the flavanol content of dark chocolate did not alter its positive effects.

Both arterial stiffness and white blood cell adhesion are known to play a significant role in atherosclerosis.

“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, PhD, a researcher 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.”

Esser and his colleagues observed 44 overweight middle-aged men over two periods of four weeks as they consumed 70 grams of chocolate per day. Participants received either dark chocolate with a high flavanol content or regular dark chocolate. Both types had a similar cocoa mass content.

Before and after both intervention periods, researchers performed a range of measurements to check vascular health. The researchers also evaluated the sensory properties of the two types of chocolate and asked the participants to score their motivation to eat each type of chocolate during the intervention.

“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, MD, Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal, in which Esser’s study was published.

“Until the ‘dark chocolate drug’ is developed, however, we’ll just have to make do with what nature has given us!”

The study was published in the March 2014 issue of The FASEB Journal. The abstract is available here.