Everyone gets a craving for chocolate every so often and we have all heard that dark chocolate can be good for us. As of now the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and Mars Inc. are creating a study with 18,000 participants to see if certain cocoa flavanols, if put into a capsule, can benefit the heart.
There have been smaller studies on dark chocolate but none of them have been as big. The smaller studies have found what appears to be a link from dark chocolate to good heart health. They found that eating dark chocolate a few times a week can help improve blood flow, which will improve blood pressure, and helps blood clots from forming. All of these areas that dark chocolate helps leads the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and Mars Inc. to conduct the study in a pill on a larger scale.
Mars Inc. has developed a way to extract cocoa flavonols and put them into a capsule. The study will have three groups of people. One group will get a placebo, another will receive the cocoa pill extract and the last group will receive a multivitamin. The study will be watched for four years.
If you think you can gain these awesome benefits from just eating chocolate, then it’s hard to say but that will not help. This is because during the candy making process most of the protective flavanols are destroyed during the process. However, there have been studies as mentioned before of dark chocolate benefiting the heart and also the brain.
Preventative medicine chief, Dr. JoAnn Manson does suggest that we “do not jump on the ban wagon.” It is best to wait until the study is completed and accurate. She also states that sometimes more is not better but in past different studies sometimes can be damaging or bad for our bodies.