Oh, I love when I read studies like this one. According to a Swedish study (they spent 9 years and surveyed over 30,000 women) that I read about on the Women’s Health website, chocolate has cardiovascular benefits. Those who ate one or two servings of dark chocolate each week cut their risk for heart failure by as much as a third.
So what gives? According to this very informative article on Leslie Beck, RD‘s website, dark chocolate, like purple grapes, berries and black and green tea, is packed with flavonoids, a phytochemical with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-clotting properties. Research suggests that flavonoids man help protect the heart by lowering blood pressure and reducing cholesterol levels.
In fact, according to Women’s Health, a chocolate bar has five times the flavonoids of an apple after all. Five times.
Of course this does not mean you should go out and down an entire bag of oreos. According to the article on Leslie Beck RD’s website, The health benefits of chocolate are limited to dark chocolate, which contains the most flavonoids. Dark chocolate has approximately four times as many flavonoids as milk chocolate, while white chocolate has none. To maximize dark chocolate’s heart health benefits, choose a dark chocolate bar with at least 70 percent cocoa content. The greater the percentage of cocoa solids in chocolate, the more flavonoids it contains.
But still, chocolate is chocolate right? This is good news for sure!
