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Can Chocolate Pill Prevent Heart Disease? People eat chocolate because they love it, not because of its claimed benefits. For the past, there have been debates pertaining to health benefits of dark chocolate like prevent heart disease and stroke. Cocoa is believed to act as a vasodilator that triggers relaxation of muscle cells within blood vessel walls. Relaxed blood vessels naturally widen, resulting in greater blood flow and decreased blood pressure. All of these benefits appear to come from flavanols, which are the main type of flavonoid found in cocoa and chocolate. A variety of foods like fruits and vegetables contain flavonoids, which helps protect plants from environment toxins and help repair damage, too. Consuming foods rich in flavonoids seems to help the body’s cells resist damages caused by free radicals formed by normal bodily processes like breathing and from environment contaminants like cigarette smoke. Free radicals could damage the body if the body does not have adequate amount of antioxidants to fight the oxidation that occurs. For instance, rise in oxidation can trigger an increase in LDL (low-density cholesterol) or the so-called bad cholesterol that can in turn put a person at risk of heart disease and stroke. Scientists from both the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston reported that heart attack survivors who eat chocolate 2 or more times a week cut their risk of dying from heart disease by about 3 times than those who have never tasted chocolate. In the paper published in the September 2009’s issue of the ‘Journal of Internal Medicine’, they also pointed out that smaller quantities of chocolate consumption would have lesser protection but are still better than none.
To find out more, a pill has been made to contain the nutrients in dark chocolate and it is used in a large study that intends to examine if there are health benefits from chocolate's ingredients minus the sugar and fat. This will probably be the first large study that looks at cocoa flavanols that have been found by previous smaller studies to improve blood pressure, cholesterol, use of insulin, and other heart related factors. 18,000 adult men and women nationwide will be enrolled. They will take 2 flavorless capsules a day containing 750 milligrams of cocoa flavanols or dummy pills for those in the control group. Neither the researchers nor the study participants will know who is taking what during the study. The flavanol capsules are coated so that they have no taste. The participants’ heart health will be monitored over a period of 4 years. No chocolate bars are to be consumed because even chocolate bar with 72 percent cocoa contains 240 calories per serving that also include 10 grams of sugar and 18 grams of fat. To ingest the same amount of cocoa flavanols, the study participants would require to eat almost 5 bars of dark chocolate a day. Meanwhile, it is rather hard to get flavanols in most of the candy on the market as processing often destroys cocoa flavanols. By taking the flavanols pills, they will theoretically have all of the good stuff without the extra calories from fat and sugar. Should the study results be consistent with previous studies, which showed the health benefit of eating cocoa flavanols, it will definitely be good news for chocolate lovers. Researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle will conduct the study, and the study will be sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and Mars Inc., maker of M&M's and Snickers bars, Mars Inc. has patented a method to extract flavanols from cocoa in high concentration and put them into capsules. In fact, most of the findings regarding possible benefits of cocoa have emerged from Mars-supported studies. The company has funded cocoa flavanol research since the 1990s, and it already sells a line of products based on earlier research, called CocoaVia, including 250mg cocoa extract capsules.
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