More good reasons to eat CHOCOLATE!

I am a huge fan of chocolate. But it has to be dark chocolate. Don’t even give me that nasty white stuff. How something white and reeking of vanilla could be considered chocolate is beyond me!

Yes, I am a chocolate snob.

Even milk chocolate I don’t like. I won’t even eat it. I am so used to dark chocolate (85% is great) that milk chocolate tastes like vanilla to me.

Am I alone here?

I’ve shared before the benefits of indulging in chocolate, especially dark chocolate.

Natural News recently published an article reiterating the benefits of chocolate for heart disease.

Here’s some of what the article says…

[J]ust imagine the fluttering of hearts in Big Pharma offices if they found a no side effect, easy to produce drug that actually worked to lower the risk of developing heart disease in the first place by almost 40 percent. The demand and profits to be made would be enormous. While there is no such medication, it turns out that eating chocolate regularly appears to accomplish what pills can’t. [emphasis mine]

For a new study, which was just published in the online version of the British Medical Journal, Dr. Oscar Franco and colleagues from the University of Cambridge carried out a large scale investigation of existing research on chocolate. In all, they looked at research involving over 100,000 participants with and without existing heart disease. Then the scientists evaluated the effects of eating chocolate on cardiovascular events including heart attacks and stroke.

For each of seven studies that were analyzed, the research team compared the group with the highest chocolate consumption against the group with the lowest consumption (to minimize bias, they factored in differences in the way each study had been designed). Bottom line: the highest levels of chocolate consumption were associated with an astounding 37 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease and an almost 30 percent reduction in stroke compared with lowest levels of chocolate eating.

The interesting thing is that the studies didn’t take note of dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or white chocolate. It also included not just chocolate bars, but chocolate desserts and drinks.

Maybe next time they will differentiate between the types of chocolate. My money is on dark chocolate being more beneficial than the rest.

I personally love Beyond Organic chocolate and Lindt Truffles. How about you?