Chocolate Makes Your Heart Young Again

Here’s more good news for chocolate lovers. Tons of studies have shown that dark chocolate is good for your heart. This study wanted to see if chocolate is specifically good for older people and the negative changes that come with an aging heart. . . .

As we age, our arteries become stiffer, and we are at increased risk for high blood pressure. This double-blind study included twenty-two people who were younger than thirty-five and twenty people who were between fifty and eighty years old. Half of the older group had either mildly elevated cholesterol or blood pressure. Everyone was given either a placebo drink or a drink that contained 450mg of cocoa flavonols twice a day for two weeks.

After two weeks, flow-mediated dilation (FMD) was significantly higher in the cocoa flavonol group than in the placebo group for younger and older people. FMD measures blood vessel dilation in response to increased blood flow. It is an important indicator of atherosclerosis. Every 1% increase in FMD translates into a 13% reduction in your risk of having a cardiovascular event.

Measures of the stiffness of the arteries and aorta improved significantly in both the younger and the older cocoa flavonol groups. Arterial stiffness and diastolic pressure improved in the older people who were drinking the cocoa flavonol drink, but there was no improvement in the placebo group. The cocoa flavonols improved diastolic blood pressure and peripheral resistance in both younger and older people, while, again, the placebo had no effect.

So, for older people, dark chocolate significantly improved blood vessel dilation, arterial stiffness, peripheral resistance and blood pressure.

This study shows that dark chocolate is good for the cardiovascular system for both young and old. But, intriguingly, according to the study’s authors, it shows that dark chocolate “reverses age-related burden of cardiovascular risk in healthy elderly” people. In other words, dark chocolate reverses the effects of aging on the cardiovascular system.

It may even be possible that dark chocolate is even better than this study found. In order to make the placebo drink more like the cocoa flavonol rich chocolate drink, the researchers added theobromine into the placebo drink. But theobromine is a component of chocolate that is largely responsible for its ability to raise the heart healthy HDL cholesterol. So, the placebo may have been more than a placebo, and the chocolate may have been even better than a truer placebo.

Age (Dordr) 2015;37:56

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