For the millions of people who count it among their major food groups, recent research suggesting chocolate is good for our health sounds like a beautiful dream. But is that all it is or is there some reality to the chocolate/health connection?
According to research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, chocolate can lower your cholesterol. What's more, dark chocolate has been found to be high in antioxidants. It can also reduce your risk of diabetes.
It all sounds too good to be true -- and perhaps it is, warn experts. "If you want to reduce your heart disease risk, there are much better places to start than at the bottom of a box of chocolates," Victoria Taylor of the British Heart Foundation told The Vancouver Sun. "Evidence does suggest chocolate might have some heart health benefits, but we need to find out why that might be."
To find some conclusive answers about whether chocolate really is a superfood, a team of researchers from University of Cambridge analyzed data from seven chocolate studies involving more than 100,000 people. Their final verdict: More studies are needed.
Here's the thing about chocolate: It's high in calories, fat and sugar, all of which have been strongly linked to the very health problems chocolate supposedly fights off. As you probably know by now, you should be eating dark, unprocessed chocolate in moderate amounts to gain any health benefits. So you're doing yourself more harm than good by inhaling three Dairy Milks and a slice of chocolate birthday cake in the afternoon.
If you can practice moderation when it comes to chocolate, another recent study published on Reuters found women who ate two small pieces of dark chocolate a day (90 calories total) lost an average of around 11 pounds in four months -- as long as they followed a calorie-controlled diet.
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