Chocolate a Sweet Remedy for Many Ills?

March 29th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

THURSDAY, March 29 (HealthDay News) — International researchers
have uncovered even more healthy properties of flavanols — the
antioxidants found in cocoa beans.

Eighteen chocolate-centered studies — including investigations of how
cocoa might affect blood pressure, heart disease, painful nerve disorders
and cancer risk — were to be presented Wednesday at the American Chemical
Society’s annual meeting in San Diego.

Some caveats: Most of the studies have not yet been accepted for
publication in a peer-reviewed journal, so those findings are preliminary.
Many studies were also small in scope, with relatively few participants.
And some were animal studies, and results might not translate to
humans.

While larger, observational studies have shown possible health benefits
from dark chocolate or cocoa, this new research begins to explore how
those benefits occur, explained Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of
cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“The thing to keep in mind: All of these are very small studies,”
Fonarow said. “But they are important steps in investigating the
mechanisms by which chocolate or cocoa may have beneficial cardiovascular
effects.”

Several of the studies suggested that cocoa might protect against
inflammation.

“One of the presumed mechanisms by which cocoa or dark chocolate could
be beneficial, or flavonoids in general, is through the mechanism of
decreasing vascular inflammation,” part of the process leading to strokes
and heart attack, Fonarow noted.

For instance, in a study involving obese mice, researchers found that
adding cocoa to their high-fat diet slowed down their weight gain.

The mice “have elevated body fat, fasting blood glucose and serum
insulin levels. And they have markers for systemic inflammation,” said
study author Joshua Lambert, an assistant professor of food science at
Pennsylvania State University.

After supplementing the animals’ diets with cocoa, “we saw that these
markers of systemic inflammation went back down to the same level as they
would be in mice that were on a low-fat diet,” Lambert said. “So it seems
like we’re able to take this inflammatory response and reduce it back to
the level you see in lean mice.”

In another study from Italy, 40 people, half of whom were smokers, were
randomly assigned to receive either dark chocolate or milk chocolate. Dark
chocolate only was found to reduce “oxidative stress” involved in
dangerous clot formation — and only in smokers.

“The results, suggesting that dark chocolate can reduce oxidative
stress and subsequent disease in smokers are intriguing and certainly
worthy of further study,” said Dr. Thomas Glynn, director of cancer
science and trends and international cancer control for the American
Cancer Society.

“The authors establish the biological plausibility of antioxidant
effects of dark chocolate in a small [group] of smokers and demonstrate
the potential harm-reducing effects for smokers of eating dark chocolate,”
Glynn said.

But, he added, “great caution is necessary, however, in interpreting
the results of studies regarding the possible health benefits of dark
chocolate — none of the evidence to date is definitive and is based on
small studies with limited time duration. No one, despite the enjoyment of
dark chocolate, should consider using it as a substitute for healthy
eating, getting exercise and above all, stopping smoking.”

Also being presented at the meeting is a meta-analysis of human
research on cocoa flavonoids and cardiac risk factors. The analysis, which
combined data from 24 studies on 1,106 people, appeared in the Journal
of Nutrition last September.

“Cocoa lowered blood pressure, lowered LDL [‘bad’] cholesterol, raised
HDL cholesterol — the good cholesterol — and improved insulin
resistance,” said senior study author Eric Ding, a nutritionist,
epidemiologist and faculty member at Harvard Medical School. He said cocoa
also might have a role in dilating vessels to improve blood flow.

Ding warned not to look for health benefits from your favorite milk
chocolate candy bar. “It’s not a chocolate study — it’s cocoa flavonoid,”
he said.

In his study, Lambert said, “we used unsweetened regular cocoa powder.
How that relates to chocolate — there’s a couple of degrees of
separation. Because when you make chocolate you add fat, in the form of
cocoa butter and sugar.”

Lambert added, “Nobody’s going to eat a tablespoon of unsweetened
cocoa.”

But how will people take their “medicine?”

“It’s one of those issues, should you get it in a conventional or
fortified product or a supplement?” Ding said. “The dose [of
cocoa-flavonoid compound] on average is 400 to 500 milligrams —
equivalent to 32 bars of milk chocolate or eight to nine bars of dark
chocolate.”

In other new research:

A study of 30 adults, published in the Journal of Proteome
Research, found that eating a small amount of dark chocolate daily
reduced stress hormones. This study came out of the Swiss-based Nestle
Research Center, run by the chocolate-making company.
An Italian study concluded that flavanol-rich chocolate lowers blood
pressure by 6 milligrams of mercury (mmHg) in systolic blood pressure (the
top number) and 3 mmHg in diastolic pressure. “That magnitude of blood
pressure reduction would be clinically relevant if sustained, and clearly
done in placebo-controlled double-blind studies,” Fonarow said.
A small pilot study from England had people with type 2 diabetes eat
high- and low-flavanol chocolate an hour before a meal. Those who ate the
high-flavanol chocolate improved in some measures of heart disease
risk.
In studies on rats, researchers in Missouri found evidence that cocoa
ingredients soothe excitability of the trigeminal nerve, involved in
migraines and temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ).
One rat study from Spain suggested that cocoa might reduce colon
cancer risk by destroying precancerous cells, and another hinted that it
offered protection from liver damage, by inhibiting enzymes involved in
inflammation.