Some sweet news: Dark chocolate may have real health benefits

In Alice Sebold’s book, “The Lovely Bones,” she describes an afterlife in which we each have our own personal heaven. I like this idea, and I must tell you, my heaven would be filled with the very best bittersweet dark chocolate. There’d be all my loved ones, to be sure, and lots of raucous dogs, but there’d be an endless supply of chocolate, and I’d never gain an ounce eating it.

I’ve always known, in my heart of hearts, that chocolate had to be good for you. How not? We know already that chocolate contains serotonin, that mood-elevating brain chemical, and also that it contains flavonoids, nature’s own antioxidants. The darker the chocolate, the more flavonoids. But does being rich in flavonoids translate into health benefits?

Researchers, reporting in “Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association,” say it does. Their study was a small but intriguing one, with 20 participants, 10 men and 10 women. They all had high blood pressure. They had systolic blood pressures (the top number) between 140 and 159 and diastolic blood pressures (the lower number) between 90 and 99. None of the study participants was taking blood pressure medicines, none had diabetes or other diseases, and none smoked.

For the week before the study started, they avoided chocolate and other flavonoid-rich foods like fruits, vegetables, tea and red wine. For the next 15 days, half ate a 3.5-ounce flavonoid-rich dark chocolate bar a day. The other half ate the same amount of white chocolate.

The researchers figured white chocolate was the perfect control food, since it contained all the same ingredients (and calories) as the dark chocolate, minus the flavonoids.

After another week of avoiding the flavonoid-rich foods, the participants “crossed over” and ate the other chocolate. The researchers pointed out that their chocolate had a high level of flavonoids, making it bittersweet, and dark, just the way I like it.

And here’s the good news for all us: After 15 days of chocolate bars, those in the “treated” group had systolic blood pressures 12 points lower and systolic blood pressures 9 points lower than the white chocolate group. No change in blood pressure in the pretend chocolate group.

These drops in blood pressure are equivalent to those we see with other healthy dietary changes – like lowering salt content, adding fruits, vegetables and whole grains and shedding those few extra pounds.

There was more good news. Markers of insulin resistance, thought to be a precursor to Type II diabetes, improved. And LDL cholesterol (the bad cholesterol) levels dropped by 10 percent in the dark chocolate group. No such changes in the white chocolate group.

There’s a problem here for those of us who want to go out and corner the market on Dove dark chocolate bars. Because, unlike in my heaven, chocolate carries a high calorie cost, and what we don’t want to do is gain another cardiovascular risk factor by gaining weight.

So if these findings can be duplicated in larger studies, some clever scientists are going to try to find out which flavonoids in chocolate are doing the good work. And then someone will make a pill out of it and sell it to us for big bucks.

But in my heaven, and maybe even right here and now, we can still get the good benefits from chocolate without piling on the pounds. And still get the joy of that sumptuous dark chocolate.

We can find a spare 400 calories that we can cut out of our diet. Or we can find some really good processed dark cocoa, which still has the flavonoids but lacks all that cocoa butter and sugar, and cook up something good with it.

OK, it may be pushing it to call chocolate a health food. But if we indulge in a dark chocolate bar once in a while, we can do it with an almost clear conscience, knowing that we’re getting a good dose of healthy antioxidants.