14 DAY TRIAL // A new study linked moderate consumption of dark chocolate to lower risks of heart failure in middle-aged and elderly Swedish women.
Murray Mittleman, MD, DrPH, lead researcher of the study and director of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit at Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, looked at the link between the amount of high-quality chocolate that 31,823 middle-aged and elderly Swedish women ate and their risk for heart failure.
The 48-to-83-years-old women answered to food-frequency questionnaires, as part of the Swedish Mammography Cohort program.
Once the answers were combined with data from the national Swedish hospitalization and death registries between 1998 and 2006, scientists used several statistical models and drew their conclusions on the relationship between chocolate consumption and heart failure.
The survey concluded that women who ate an average of one to two servings of high-quality chocolate a week, had a 32 percent lower risk of developing heart failure.
Also, women who ate chocolate one to three times a month had a 26% lower risk of suffering from heart problems, and those who ate chocolate at least once a day showed no protective effect against heart failure.
Mittleman explained that the last situation could be due to the additional calories gained from eating chocolate instead of other healthier foods.
“You can't ignore that chocolate is a relatively calorie-dense food and large amounts of habitual consumption is going to raise your risks for weight gain,” he said, “but if you're going to have a treat, dark chocolate is probably a good choice, as long as it's in moderation.”
Most short-term studies showed that the high concentration of “flavonoids” within chocolate can lower blood pressure, still this is the first study that emphasized the long-term effects on heart failure.
The study's implications for Americans are affected by the quality of the chocolate, as in Sweden, even milk chocolate has a higher cocoa concentration than the dark chocolate usually sold in the US, and higher the cocoa content is associated with greater heart benefits.
Linda Van Horn, PhD, RD, immediate past chair of the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee and professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago said that this study does not encourage eating large amounts of chocolate, on the contrary.
“This is not an “eat all you want” take-home message, rather it's that eating a little dark chocolate can be healthful, as long as other adverse behaviors do not occur, such as weight gain or excessive intake of non-nutrient dense 'empty' calories.”
In the US, heart failure affects 1% of Americans over age 65, so “anything that helps to decrease heart failure is an important issue worth examining,” said Mittleman. The results of the study are published in Circulation: Heart Failure, a journal of the American Heart Association.