Good News! Snacking On Chocolate And Wine Is Good For Your Heart

Chocolate and wine, researchers now say, are good for the heart!  First of all I'd like to thank whoever is doing these studies.  Chocolate and wine?  It's sounds like a party to me. 

Now this is good news for most people but for people like me, food addicts, this sort of thing just doesn't work!  But a new study suggests that snacking on chocolate could help fight weight gain too.

Researchers from the University Of California surveyed more than 1,000 healthy men and women about chocolate consumption.  There were some interesting results, those who ate chocolate during the week had a lower body mass index or BMI, a measure of body fat content. I wonder if that might be because it is not forbidden? You know what I mean?  I think foods you label as forbidden make you think about them more, you feel deprived so when you do indulge you overeat.  Researchers found, eating chocolate five times a week was associated with a decrease in BMI.  Good news for chocoholics, right!

“The study showed that despite chocolate’s high caloric load, its regular intake does not result in weight gain.”

Okay now to the dark chocolate part.  Previous studies suggested that dark chocolate can lower blood pressure, bad cholesterol and the risk of diabetes but this study did not distinguish between dark and milk chocolate.

How much chocolate can you eat a day?  Here's the tough part, it's best is to keep it to about an ounce per day. That amounts to only about 150 calories.

Chocolate has a lot of other health benefits too, when consumed in moderation.

That other study says chocolate and wine, paired together, are good for heart health.  Really, thank you to whoever came up with the idea that this would be something good to study and prove.  Now I'm off to the mall for Lady Godiva, I'll pick up a bottle of wine from John Russo's Wine Warehouse and Deli and I'm heading home to do my heart some good.