Can Dark Chocolate Reduce High Blood Pressure?

[Geee]

PJMedia:

When I was young I assumed that anything medicinal must be nasty to the taste. This assumption was partly the fruit of experience – medicines that were given to me were nasty to the taste – and partly attributable to the puritanicalZeitgeist in which I grew up, according to which anything that I enjoyed was morally suspect. It seemed to follow in my young mind that displeasure was therefore virtuous. Health, of course, was the natural reward of virtue, and disease of vice; hence nasty things were good for you. The logic is not strict, but it is understandable.

The unpleasantness of medicine, either to the taste or in side-effects, is one of the reasons, no doubt, for the poor compliance of patients with what doctors prescribe. Therefore, as the kitsch song puts it, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. But what if the spoonful of sugar should become the medicine itself? That would be a therapeutic revolution indeed.

Some Australian researchers decided to model what would happen if their patients at risk of cardiovascular disease ate dark chocolate regularly. It is important to remember that this study, reported recently in the British Medical Journal, was conducted purely in the realm of the imagination; reality might turn out to be very different.

The Australian doctors noticed that trials that have actually been performed have shown that the consumption of dark chocolate reduces patients’ high blood pressure and their concentration of low-density lipoproteins, both of which are risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The problem with these trials is that none of them lasted very long: 18 weeks at most. Whether the beneficial effects would have endured if the trials had continued for a longer period is not known. But, the Australian doctors asked, what if the beneficial effects did last as long as patients continued to take dark chocolate?

[Valin]

@Geee