It would appear that eating chocolate could lessen your risk of heart disease and stroke.
Published in the journal Heart, researchers wanted to look at chocolate consumption and the risk of future cardiovascular events. So they pooled together data from 9 studies with nearly 160,000 participants looking specifically at incidence of heart disease and strokes.
They found that those who ate the most chocolate had a significantly lower risk of coronary heart disease, stroke and cardiovascular mortality.
The researchers are being cautious with their findings. They say that this suggests that chocolate consumption could be good for the heart. This is due to the fact that residual confounding could not be excluded. In other words, there could be other factors at play that were not recorded in the data sets and so cannot be adjusted for. That being said, they could at least leave us with this piece of good news:
“There does not appear to be any evidence to say that chocolate should be avoided in those who are concerned about cardiovascular risk.”