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Dark Chocolate May Have Benefit
A small study suggests that eating dark
chocolate can lower your blood pressure — a delicious instance
in which something that tastes good might, for a change, be good
for you, too.
The short study would need to be
confirmed in larger, longer-term ones before doctors could recommend
treatment with chocolate, researchers say.
Yet if the results can be confirmed,
"you can sin with perhaps a little less bad feeling," said Dr.
Franz Messerli, a hypertension expert at Ochsner Clinic Foundation
in New Orleans.
The German study appears in Wednesday's
Journal of the American Medical Association.
Thirteen adults with untreated
mild hypertension got to eat 3-ounce chocolate bars every day
for two weeks. Half of the patients got white chocolate, half
got dark chocolate.
Dark chocolate contains plant substances
called polyphenols — ingredients scientists think are responsible
for the heart-healthy attributes of red wine. Polyphenols also
have been shown to lower blood pressure in animals.
Blood pressure remained pretty
much unchanged in the group that ate white chocolate, which does
not contain polyphenols. But after two weeks, systolic blood pressure
— the top number — had dropped an average of five points
in the dark-chocolate group. The lower, or diastolic, reading
fell an average of almost two points.
The participants had an average
blood pressure reading of about 153 over 84.
While their blood pressure did
not fall enough to be considered in the desirable range —
below 120 over 80 — the results show dark chocolate "might
serve as a promising approach to reduce systolic blood pressure,"
said lead author Dr. Dirk Taubert of the University of Cologne.
Taubert said participants ate the
chocolate bars instead of the sweets they usually consumed, and
thus did not gain weight during the study.
The study received no industry
funding — the researchers bought the chocolate themselves
from the supermarket.
On the Net:
JAMA: http://jama.ama-assn.org
Reference
Source 102
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