Chocolate vs Cardiovascular Risk Factors

Perhaps I'm beating a dead horse.  But I prefer to think of this series of posts (Tuesday & Wednesday) re chocolate & heart disease as serendipity, where I actually found what I was looking for, unlike U2's 1987 hit from The Joshua Tree.  In fact, as I was researching these past two days, I also stumbled upon yet another systematic review & meta-analysis, this one published last November in Journal of Nutrition.

One thing I should point out, if it hasn't been yet made clear, is that there's chocolate, and there's chocolate.  More specifically, we're really interested in flavonoid-rich chocolate which we can purchase & consume as high-cacao (cocoa) content dark chocolate.  Typically, the higher the percentage of cacao or cocoa, the higher the flavonoid/flavanol content, which is what's been linked to the beneficial patient & disease oriented outcomes.  Of course, high cacao content chocolate is also more bitter (an acquired taste), rather than sweet like the milk chocolate most of us have grown up consuming.  So if you're looking for an excuse to eat a typical American candy bar, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Instead, 24 trials, half crossover & half placebo-controlled, involving just over 1,100 participants, most followed from 2 weeks to 8 weeks with one lasting 18 weeks, were analyzed, demonstrating that consumption of flavanoid-rich chocolate, compared to placebo, led to lower systolic blood pressure, lower LDL (bad) cholesterol, greater HDL (good) cholesterol, decrease in insulin resistance (as calculated by HOMA-IR), and improvement in flow mediated vasodilation.

Now before you take all these studies as gospel, remember that while these meta-analyses have been of placebo-controlled or cross-over trials, which are able to demonstrate cause & effect, the study durations have been too short and the study populations too varied to make definitive recommendations.  Still, if you like your dark chocolate, are able to limit yourself to one serving daily, and can skip something else of equivalent caloric content, then perhaps you might be able to improve some cardiovascular risk factors and thus your heart health.

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