Chocolate

Published by luxmed on September 23, 2012

While a bar of chocolate might be considered as a guilty pleasure by many of us,
perhaps we don’t need to feel quite so bad about our weakness for this sweet treat.
Research published recently in the journal Neurology indicated that men who
consume a moderate amount of chocolate each week have a lower risk of
experiencing a stroke.
The Study and its Finding
Over 137,000 Swedish men were recruited for the study conducted by researchers
at the Institute of Stockholm. Participants completed a self-reported questionnaire
of their dietary intake and were followed over a ten year period, during which time
1,995 of them had a stroke. Looking back at their dietary intake at the start of the
study, those who had consumed the most chocolate had a 17% lower risk of stroke
than their counterparts who did not eat any chocolate. This equates to 12 fewer
strokes per 10,000 participating men over ten years. In context, the amount of
chocolate eaten by the highest consumers was 63g each week and as a guide a
standard sized bar of Dairy Milk weighs 49g. What was interesting is that while
the benefits of eating dark chocolate have previously been shown in various studies,
in Sweden 90% of chocolate eaten is milk chocolate. That said the cocoa solid content
– which is high in dark chocolate – of milk chocolate in Sweden and other European
countries, is higher than the milk chocolate commonly found in North America.
Following the finding of the beneficial link between chocolate and stroke risk in this
study, the same team analysed five sets of data from European and North American studies,
which showed that the same benefits were conveyed – /.../