Good news for chocoholics this Easter

MEDICAL MATTERS:No need for guilt over all those Easter eggs

IS THERE still a hint of the aroma of chocolate wafting around your house this morning? There may be the remains of an Easter egg on the table, covered in foil, but with cocoa fumes still in the air. Or, if the packaging from multiple egg boxes has been gathered together ready to go in the recycling bin, your nose will almost certainly pick up the inviting scent of chocolate.

Put aside whatever pangs of guilt this sensation may bring and instead let’s focus on the health benefits of this quintessentially Easter treat.

The latest report appeared last week in Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the journals of the American Medical Association, entitled Association between more frequent chocolate consumption and lower body mass index. Dr Beatrice A Golomb, and colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, studied 1,018 men and women without known cardiovascular disease or diabetes. They were asked how many times a week they consumed chocolate and also filled in a food questionnaire. The researchers then took into account calorie intake, the consumption of saturated fat, and mood scores of the participants, in an attempt to control for these factors. Activity levels were based on the number of times in a week the subjects engaged in vigorous activity for at least 20-minute periods.

The results showed the study participants consumed chocolate on average twice per week and exercised 3.6 times per week. Frequency of chocolate consumption was associated with greater intake of calories and saturated fats.

And while chocolate consumption frequency was not associated with greater activity, it was intriguingly associated with being thinner.

Like lots of “chocolate is good for you” research, this study has many potential holes and biases. Not least is the fact that chocolate products are often high in sugar and fat, leading to the not-

unreasonable assumption that they must help increase BMI.

However, there is a growing body of research which is beginning to hint that the character as well as the quantity of calories has an impact on blood pressure, cholesterol and other risk factors.

Previous research has shown the benefit of chocolate on health due to its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. These include reducing blood pressure and improving the effectiveness of insulin, which in turn helps to slow down the development of diabetes.

And on a larger scale, last year researchers from Cambridge University analysed the results of seven previous chocolate studies involving more than 100,000 participants. In a paper published simultaneously by the British Medical Journal, Dr Oscar Franco and his colleagues said “the highest levels of chocolate consumption were associated with a 37 per cent reduction in cardiovascular disease and a 29 per cent reduction in stroke compared with lowest levels”.

Then there was a long-term study, published in the European Heart Journal in 2010. The German researchers followed almost 20,000 people aged 35-65 for between eight and 10 years. Those who ate the most chocolate – about 7.5g a day – had lower blood pressure and had a significantly lower risk of having a heart attack or stroke than those who ate the least chocolate. Lead author Dr Brian Buijsse of the German Institute of Human Nutrition summarised the results succinctly: “People who ate the most chocolate were at a 39 per cent lower risk than those with the lowest chocolate intakes.

“To put it in terms of absolute risk, if people in the group eating the least amount of chocolate increased their chocolate intake by 6g a day, 85 fewer heart attacks and strokes per 10,000 people could be expected to occur over a period of about 10 years,” he said.

And to finally assuage any guilt you may have today, how about some anecdotal evidence concerning a woman who lived to 122?

Jeanne Louise Calment reportedly ate two and a half pounds of dark chocolate per week for most of her life. I’d like to think she died happy.

mhouston@irishtimes.com