Chow Line: Jury still out on chocolate's benefits

I roll my eyes every time some­one says that “choco­late is good for you.” What are the facts?

It’s sen­si­ble to be skep­ti­cal about claims like this. While there is some evi­dence that cocoa solids in choco­late offer some health ben­e­fits, you are right: Choco­late also con­tains a sig­nif­i­cant amount of fat and sugar (and there­fore, calo­ries) which could have health effects that aren’t so desirable.

In August 2011, an arti­cle in the “News in Health” monthly newslet­ter from the National Insti­tutes of Health (http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/) pro­vided a detailed overview of the lat­est stud­ies on health claims about choco­late. Its con­clu­sion is hon­est but hardly sat­is­fy­ing: The research remains far from clear.

It is true that cocoa solids con­tain a sig­nif­i­cant amount of flavonoids, which have pow­er­ful antiox­i­dant prop­er­ties. In fact, there have been ongo­ing stud­ies of these effects on the Kuna Indi­ans, who live on islands off the coast of Panama and whose pri­mary bev­er­age is made from dried, ground cocoa beans with just a small amount of added sweet­ener. The Kuna get as much as 900 mil­ligrams of flavonols (a type of flavonoid) daily from this drink — and they tend to have much lower rates of car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, can­cer and diabetes.

But this amount of flavonols is almost unheard of in the Amer­i­can diet. A typ­i­cal bar of dark choco­late (1.6 ounces) might con­tain about 250 mil­ligrams of flavonols — and also offers 9 grams of sat­u­rated fat, 21 grams of sugar and 240 calories.

Still, there is some evi­dence that dark choco­late might pro­vide ben­e­fits. A 2004 study in the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Nutri­tion gave a small group of peo­ple a daily dose of a dark-chocolate bar rich in flavonoids for two weeks and com­pared effects with those who got choco­late with the flavonoids removed. Those who received the choco­late rich in flavonoids had sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter blood ves­sel func­tion. Although no dif­fer­ence in blood pres­sure was observed, other stud­ies indi­cate that dark choco­late could help decrease hypertension.

Still, research find­ings are up in the air — enough so that experts aren’t telling peo­ple to have a bit of choco­late every day. But, if you do enjoy choco­late now and again, fol­low these rec­om­men­da­tions from NIH to get the most bang for your buck:

•Choose as dark a choco­late as you can find. Darker choco­late means more cocoa solids and more flavonoids.

•Avoid white choco­late, which has no cocoa solids, and milk choco­late, which has just a little.

•Enjoy hot choco­late? Make your own from unsweet­ened cocoa, water and non­fat milk, with just a lit­tle sugar or sweetener.

Chow Line is a ser­vice of Ohio State Uni­ver­sity Exten­sion and the Ohio Agri­cul­tural Research and Devel­op­ment Cen­ter. Send ques­tions to Chow Line, c/o Martha Fil­ipic, 2021 Cof­fey Road, Colum­bus, OH, 43210–1044, or filipic.3@cfaes.osu.edu.

Posted by Staff Reports on Feb 13 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.