Do you dream about chocolate? A lot of studies have tested the health benefits of chocolate, but now researchers are taking it one step further. They're going to feed intense concentrations of chocolate to thousands of volunteers in order to see if the "chocolate pill" improves their heart health.
"People eat chocolate because they enjoy it," said JoAnn Manson, preventative medicine chief at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, in an interview with CTVNews. Too much chocolate isn't necessarily good for a person with the added sugar and fat. This latest study, though, seeks to test chocolate in its purer form in order to see whether or not it could improve health.
Cocoa flavanols are what the researchers are truly interested in examining. In previous studies, these flavanols have been shown to improve blood pressure, cholesterol, the body's use of insulin and other heart-related factors.
"You're not going to get these protective flavanols in most of the candy on the market," said Manson in an interview with the AP. "Cocoa flavanols are often destroyed by the processing."
The researchers will recruit participants from existing studies and give them pills that are rich in cocoa flavanols and have had all of the excess sugar and fat stripped out of them. In fact, the pills are so high in cocoa flavanols that it would be impossible to get enough of them from normal candy bars. The volunteers will receive two capsules a day for four years; one half of the participants will receive dummy pills while the other half will receive the real pills. Neither the participants nor the researchers will know which is which.
The new study will help show scientists whether chocolate can help those suffering from heart-related issues. If successful, the supplement could be a vital way to help improve heart health.
