Can Dark Chocolate Reduce High Blood Pressure?
When I was young I assumed that anything medicinal must be nasty to the taste. This assumption was partly the fruit of experience – medicines that were given to me were nasty to the taste – and partly attributable to the puritanical Zeitgeist in which I grew up, according to which anything that I enjoyed was morally suspect. It seemed to follow in my young mind that displeasure was therefore virtuous. Health, of course, was the natural reward of virtue, and disease of vice; hence nasty things were good for you. The logic is not strict, but it is understandable.
The unpleasantness of medicine, either to the taste or in side-effects, is one of the reasons, no doubt, for the poor compliance of patients with what doctors prescribe. Therefore, as the kitsch song puts it, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. But what if the spoonful of sugar should become the medicine itself? That would be a therapeutic revolution indeed.
Some Australian researchers decided to model what would happen if their patients at risk of cardiovascular disease ate dark chocolate regularly. It is important to remember that this study, reported recently in the British Medical Journal, was conducted purely in the realm of the imagination; reality might turn out to be very different.
The Australian doctors noticed that trials that have actually been performed have shown that the consumption of dark chocolate reduces patients’ high blood pressure and their concentration of low-density lipoproteins, both of which are risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The problem with these trials is that none of them lasted very long: 18 weeks at most. Whether the beneficial effects would have endured if the trials had continued for a longer period is not known. But, the Australian doctors asked, what if the beneficial effects did last as long as patients continued to take dark chocolate?
My theory, good doctor, is ‘What tastes good must be good for you.’ Chocolate tastes good, ergo…
I like that reasoning.
Dark chocolate has quite observable short-term beta-blocker effects, but these are not generally the path to reduced BP. The other claimed BP benefits, I dunno. And if you use (pieces from) the Lindt 85% bar, it’s well over $100/year, and after a while you may just get a bit tired of the taste, and the calories.
Check this out and compare to other sources. I love the stuff so this is just a bonus. Hot chocolate from pure cocoa, no milk.
http://www.hersheys.com/nutrition-professionals/?HG_ID=HCHN1002
I would like to believe that the dose was too modest. In this rare instance I am going to adopt the Obama formula – the investment needs to be increased in order for the benefits to finally be significant. I.e., $50 of good dark chocolate is a (tiny) good start but not nearly enough!
Coming on the heels of yesterday’s mordant reports about the perils of sitting still (more than three hours a day at a desk may shorten your life by ‘up to’ two years, gasp!), Dalrymple is welcome indeed.
The road ahead: get comfortable. To neutralize the perils of sitting, demolish a pile of Lindt Dark and Cadbury’s Black Bourneville, wash it down with a quart of strong French-roast robusta coffee that’s had a double-run through the Gran Gaggia, then chug a couple of bottles of industrial Cabernet before bedtime. Add up all those ’20 percent reductions in risk’ and live forever. The secrets of eternal life, thanks to modern research, really do sound kind of OK.
Chocolate, dark or not, may or may not have curative effects. But the German chocolate I would like to eat would kill me with my diabetis. However, if one wants to conquer Russia, then good sugary, specially Swiss or German, chocolate is the WMD weapon. Russian produced chocolate is terrible. Every time I visit Russia I must bring 4 or 5 kilos of German chocolate along. Such a delicacy softens up the populace or, more accurately, a Russian colleague (of female persuasion). Maybe I have found the secret weapon for the Pentagon!
Count me in!
But, if you don’t like the taste of chocolate, is it then “medicine” in the old-fashioned puritanical sense?
When do the scotch whisky tests commence? Count me in!
Chocolate is bad because it has too much sugar and too many calories and gives you pimples. Chocolate is good because we love the taste and it has medicinal value, including lowering your blood pressure. Has anyone else noticed that dieticians are about like fortune tellers? Sheesh.
As a regular platelet donor, I always get 2 dove dark chocolates before giving. Apparantly the chocolate inhibits the platelets from aggregating. Not a bad trade off – they get my platelets and I get chocolate. Win-Win.
I’m sorry but this is some of a trick. I suspect the Swiss, they’re always making chocolate…….
90% cocoa dark chocolate (Lindt) is an acquired taste. My daughter says it tastes like dirt. I’m not sure how she knows that. The chocolate has lots of calories, mostly from fat, but very little sugar. I love the stuff.
Woody Allen was right! (ie Sleeper)
A couple of glasses of red wine, a handful of almonds, three squares of dark chocolate…I may die tomorrow but I will die happy.
I eat lots of chocolate. I plan to live forever; so far, so good…
Cortez et al were the first Europeans to taste Chocolate (mixed with Vanilla-another New World Product) They sent some to the Pope asking if it were sinful.The Pope replied that anything that good could not be sinful. Thus beside’s Dahrymple’s dipensation,we have Papal!
I heard this story very differently: There were nuns in Mexico who invented modern chocolate by adding sugar. They became very fat and were ex-communicated.
Ah! But what if somehow the people whose hearts were stronger merely CRAVED dark chocolate more than the control group, because of a genetic anomaly, attached to the same gene?
I may know that statistical anaysis is the reason we have improved medicine so much over the last 40 years, yet, have we merely made healthy people sicker so that we can make sick people healthier?
If my kidney fails (and it did), replacing it with a new one makes all kinds of sense. You simply fix what’s broke. Keeping your weight and blood pressure in order, noone questions. But at what price, and to what standard? I’m sure that if your blood pressure would be 80/40, your cardiologist would be ecstatic! But so would your undertaker!
Contemplate this, while Obama creates a medical system of affirmative action dolts. I go to a Rheumatologist who is world renowned. He always says, “It’s not like dropping the medicine into a petri dish! The body fights back.”
How true. And in this American medical system which, somehow, is “broken”, I can see this man, one of the best in the world, by just making an appointment.
Choose your doctor carefully, indeed. How would you know if he finished last in his class in Guiana, or first in his class at Mt. Sinai? There are stupid mechanics, and stupid doctors. How can you tell the difference? When they start torturing you, to no avail, trust me; you’ll know! Then you’d kill for that good doctor.
Then, listen to him, because you ain’t that smart.