Have your cake and eat it, too. That's my conclusion after reading a
new study published last week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluding that
chocolate (cocoa) can lower systolic & diastolic blood pressure by 2-4mm Hg via epicatechin, a flavanol.
Now, you have to understand that I'm a lumper, not a splitter. I look at the big picture rather than the details, the theme rather than the individual pieces. So while the article was really a meta-analysis of data from 15 randomized controlled trials regarding diastolic blood pressure and 16 randomized controlled trials regarding systolic blood pressure vs epicatechin, a monomer flavanol found in cocoa (chocolate), it turns out that pure epicatechin can increase nitric oxide which leads to vasodilation while decreasing vasocontricting compounds.
The important point that was repeated several times throughout the article was that
25mg/d of epicatechin lead to a 4mm Hg decrease in systolic blood pressure and a 2mm Hg decrease in diastolic blood pressure. But the practical point was buried within the discussion: those
25mg of epicatechin can be obtained in 25-30g of cocoa rich (50%) chocolate. This is nowhere near the
70-80% cocoa solids that has been espoused in other studies. So while this study isn't recommending Americanized milk chocolate, it's quite possible that a palatable 50% cocoa will be adequate at least for blood pressure lowering purposes.
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