Is Chocolate Really Healthy for You?
March 12, 2006

Excerpted from Newsweek Health
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11678153/site/newsweek/page/4/

"Recently, chocolate appeared to be heading for that coveted health-food status, and the public was more than ready to gobble it up. It began when a 2001 study (funded by the American Cocoa Research Institute) found that cocoa powder and dark chocolate boosted good cholesterol by 4 percent. What most people didn't realize is that there were only 23 participants in this study, hardly enough to produce any serious conclusion.

Nonetheless, it made headlines and was followed by additional chocolate studies that seemed to find even more benefits. But most of that research focused on a group of compounds in chocolate called flavanols—which unfortunately tend to get processed out of the chocolate you buy at the grocery store. And chocolate still has lots of fat, sugar and calories.

Just last week a study from the Netherlands published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that participants who ate the most food containing chocolate (candy bars, spreads, pudding) had slightly lower blood pressure and were half as likely to have died from heart disease at the end of the 15-year follow-up. However, it's not clear that the results were strictly from chocolate. The biggest challenge in dietary research is that nobody eats only one thing. In this case, the chocolate lovers also ate less meat and more nuts."