The next set of evidence about the health benefits of chocolate has arrived. A study from the University of Cologne in Germany found that dark chocolate seems to have a lowering effect on your blood pressure! Before you go digging into that box of chocolates, keep reading.
According to the study, it doesn’t take a lot of chocolate to produce the beneficial effects for your heart. The volunteers in the German study ate about six grams of dark chocolate every day — that’s about one and a half Hershey’s Kisses. If ever there was a study I wish I could have been a participant in, it’s this one: one group ate dark chocolate every day and the other group ate white chocolate. That’s a win-win situation to me!
Study participants were mostly healthy adults with mild high blood pressure or pre-hypertension. The average blood pressure at the start of the study was 147 over 86. The dark chocolate eaters dropped three points of systolic blood pressure and two points of diastolic. The white chocolate eaters — white chocolate doesn’t contain any cocoa — didn’t see any change in their numbers.
This is the first study to point out that just a little bit of dark chocolate is enough to make a difference in blood pressure readings. The drop in blood pressure wasn’t huge, but it was enough to potentially cut the risk of heart disease in the long term. The key ingredient is the flavanols — plant-based compounds in cocoa that also work their magic in red wine. Tests suggest that the steady exposure to flavanols helped the body keep blood vessels dilated and blood pressure more regular.
The drawback of using chocolate (or red wine) for blood pressure control is the calories. It doesn’t do your body much good to gorge on chocolate to lower your blood pressure — the weight you pack on will be more harmful to your body overall. But a little bit every day, combined with losing weight and reducing salt has the potential to make a difference.