Study Reveals How Eating Dark Chocolate Protects the Heart

Eating dark chocolate protects the heart by restoring flexibility to the arteries and preventing white blood cells from sticking to the walls of blood vessels.

Researchers explain that arterial stiffness and white blood cell adhesion are known factors that play a significant role in atherosclerosis, the hardening or narrowing of the arteries.

The study also reveals that 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," 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, said in a news release. "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 latest study involved 44 middle-aged overweight men over two periods of four weeks as they ate 70 grams of chocolate per day. Participants were given either specially produced dark chocolate with high flavanol content or chocolate that was regularly produced. Both types of chocolate had similar cocoa mass content.

Researchers measured participants' vascular health before and after intervention periods. Participants were asked to avoid certain energy dense foods to prevent weight gain.

Researchers also analyzed the sensory properties of the high flavanol chocolate and the regular chocolate and participants' motivation to eat these chocolates during the study period.

"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, according to a statement. "Until the 'dark chocolate drug' is developed, however, we'll just have to make do with what nature has given us!"

The findings are published in The FASEB Journal.