Chocolate Unwrapped Health Article

First, in the interest of full disclosure, an admission: I love chocolate. And I’m lucky enough to carry on my love affair in a country synonymous with the greatest chocolate in the world. For a part of every year I make my home in Lausanne, Switzerland, which rises steeply from the shore of Lake Geneva to a tangle of medieval streets topped by a towering 13th-century cathedral—and where every neighborhood, it seems, has its own chocolatier.

Not a place that just sells chocolate, mind you, but a laboratoire where it’s made by hand, usually by artisans whose families have been making chocolate for generations. Everyone in Lausanne has a favorite. Mine are found at Durig, on a busy corner just below the train station, where Madame Durig presides over a counter full of bars of dark chocolate that, like fine wines, are labeled with the origin of their cocoa—Madagascar, Venezuela, St. Dominique, Cuba. Cocoa beans are almost as sensitive to local growing conditions as wine, which is why the Durigs include the provenance on the label. The finest beans, called criollos, come from Central America. The trees are difficult to grow, but the beans they produce give just the right acidity, balance and complexity to the finest chocolates. The most widely used are forastero beans, less flavorful and sometimes a little bitter, but easier to grow, and found from California to Africa along with trinitario beans, a cross between criollo and forastero.

When I visited the shop recently, Madame Durig offered me a sample of dark chocolate made from criollo beans grown in Cuba—"the finest cocoa in the world," she told me, as the deep, complex flavors melted over my tongue, fragrant and intense. Then she said something that surprised me. "That’s 70 percent cocoa. And the more cocoa, you know, the healthier it is for you."

"Really?"

"Oh yes," she said. "It’s supposed to be very good for your heart."

Now in my experience, the Swiss have never needed an excuse to enjoy chocolate—certainly not for their health. I’ve always figured that their hearty constitutions and long lives had more to do with their irresistible urge to clomp up and down the Alps than with eating chocolate truffles. And though I’ve seen the occasional newspaper reports touting the health benefits of chocolate, I’ve never taken them all that seriously. The notion of chocolate as a health food has always seemed as ridiculous—and peculiarly American—as diets that say you can eat all you want and still lose weight.

Or was it? Not long after Madame Durig told me that cocoa was good for your heart, I heard about a French diet expert named Michel Montignac who is making it big with a book called

Je mange donc je maigris!—"I eat, therefore I get slim!" Part of his message is that it’s just fine to eat a piece of dark chocolate every day. Two Australian health researchers have been touting the same notion in a book published in 2003 called A Chocolate a Day Keeps the Doctor Away. Back home in California, I checked out the local medical library and, lo and behold, I found dozens of serious research papers trumpeting the health benefits of chocolate.

Could my favorite indulgence, I began to wonder, really be just what the doctor ordered?

Taking Chocolate to the Laboratory

To find out, I began by putting in a call to Carl Keen, a professor of nutrition and internal medicine at the University of California, Davis. The university, located in California’s wine country, is well known for studies showing the heart benefits of a glass of cabernet or merlot. A few years back, Keen began to wonder if chocolate might also be just as good for your heart.

"There’s plenty of reason to think chocolate might have some of the beneficial effects of wine," Keen told me. "Both chocolate and wine can be very rich in compounds called flavonoids, which can function as antioxidants and also seem to keep blood from clotting. Cocoa is unusually rich in two kinds of flavonoids, flavonols and proanthocyanidins, which appear to be especially potent."

Antioxidants block the damaging effects of free radical oxygen molecules. That may be especially important for cardiovascular health. By reducing the rate of cholesterol oxidation, antioxidants lower the risk for injury to the lining of blood vessels. To gauge the effect of eating chocolate, Keen and his colleagues recruited a lucky group of 20 volunteers at the university, who were asked to snack on M&M’s Semi-Sweet Chocolate Mini Baking Bits that had been engineered to contain varying levels of flavonols. In return, the subjects agreed to have blood drawn several times after the snack. Two hours after the volunteers nibbled on the flavonol-rich chocolate, Keen and his team recorded a jump in the levels of antioxidants in their blood. The more flavonols the chocolate contained, the higher the blood levels of antioxidants. The researchers also noted a rise in antioxidant capacity—the ability of these substances in blood to neutralize potentially dangerous oxygen free radicals. Plus they saw a drop-off in the oxidation of cholesterol.

"All of those changes are just the things we think will lower the risk for cardiovascular disease," Keen told me. And there were more. The flavonols in chocolate, like those in wine, have a thinning effect on blood, which can help reduce the risk of blood clots that might otherwise obstruct arteries. "It’s important for blood to clot when you’ve cut yourself, of course," Keen explained. "But if it clots too easily, blockages can form in arteries. When that happens in an artery leading to the heart, the result is a heart attack." In a study in which volunteers drank a specially prepared cocoa beverage, Keen confirmed that flavonol-rich chocolate can reduce the tendency for platelets to form clots.

The good news doesn’t stop there. More recently, Keen and other scientists found evidence that the flavonols in chocolate may also affect the function of the immune system, specifically by reducing inflammation. That could be important in protecting against heart disease, too, since inflammation in the lining of artery walls is believed to be part of the damaging process that leads to cardiovascular disease.