More on the benefits of chocolate

[Guest guest]

Al Pater: can you post the study??

Long-term benefit found in chocolate

A new study shows that eating chocolate can protect a woman's heart.

Murray Mittleman of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues studied 31,823 middle-aged and elderly Swedish women, comparing how much chocolate they ate with their risk for heart failure over a nine-year period.

Women who consumed one or two servings each week of high-quality chocolate, which contains a higher density of cocoa, had a 32 percent lower risk of developing heart failure than women who did not regularly eat any chocolate, the researchers reported in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure. Those who had one to three servings per month had a 26 percent lower risk. But women who treated themselves to at least one serving each day did not appear to benefit. The researchers speculate that the additional calories that result from eating that much chocolate might outweigh the benefits.

Previous research has indicated that compounds in chocolate known as flavanoids lower blood pressure. The new study is the first to show over the long term that chocolate appears to protect against heart failure.

The researchers noted that in Sweden even milk chocolate has a higher cocoa concentration (30 percent) than dark chocolate sold in the United States (as little as 15 percent). So American chocolate may have fewer heart benefits and more calories and fat for equivalent servings.

-- Rob Stein