Another Reason to Love Chocolate (As If We Needed One)

Here is some nutrition advice worth sinking your teeth into: Eating dark chocolate appears to lower blood pressure in people with hypertension. Researchers at the University of L’Aquila in Italy gave 20 volunteers (each with untreated high blood pressure) a three-and-a-half-ounce bar of dark chocolate each day. After two weeks, the participants had experience what was considered to be a “clinically meaningful decline” in their blood pressure. 

However, “this study is not about eating more chocolate,” study author Dr. Jeffrey Blumberg cautioned. “It suggests that cocoa flavonoids appear to have benefits on vascular function and glucose sensitivity.”

So don’t start loading up on chocolate just yet because it is a long way from being considered a health food. Unfortunately, the chocolate most of us consume has been robbed of its flavonoids, the component believed to confer the most health benefits. (It’s also what makes chocolate so bitter, which is why confectioner’s work so hard to get rid of the stuff.)

Blumberg, a nutrition professor at Tufts University, and his colleagues urge moderation and suggest consuming a diet rich in flavonoids from additional sources, such as green and black tea, apples, grape juice, and red wine.

Source: Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association, 2005; 46, 398-405