Daily chocolate may keep the heart doctor awayAdvice to all Male Readers -- Please buy your sweety Chocolates for Easter this weekend!!
CNN Health reports:
Eating as little as a quarter of an ounce of chocolate each day -- an amount equal to about one small Easter egg -- may lower your risk of experiencing a heart attack or stroke, a new study has found. For best results, the chocolate should be dark, experts say. "Dark chocolate exhibits the greatest effects, milk chocolate fewer, and white chocolate no effects," says the lead author of the study, Brian Buijsse, a nutritional epidemiologist at the German Institute of Human Nutrition, in Nuthetal, Germany. In the study, Buijsse and his colleagues followed nearly 20,000 people for an average of eight years. The researchers surveyed the study participants about their chocolate consumption (as well as the rest of their diet), and also tracked the heart attacks and strokes that occurred in the group. Compared with people who rarely ate chocolate (about one bar per month), the people who ate the most chocolate (slightly more than one bar per week) had a 27 percent and 48 percent reduced risk of heart attack and stroke, respectively, the researchers found.
Health.com: How to make chocolate a healthy indulgence
Health.com: How to make chocolate a healthy indulgence
The heart benefits observed in the study may be due in part to lower blood pressure, the study notes. Previous studies have suggested that eating chocolate can lower blood pressure, and the researchers observed a similar -- though less pronounced -- association in this study.
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