People who ate chocolate a few times a week or more weighed less than those who rarely indulged, according to a US study involving a thousand people. Researchers said the findings, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, don't prove that adding a candy bar to your daily diet will help you shed pounds. Nor did the total amount of chocolate consumed have an impact.
But the researchers, led by Beatrice Golomb, from the University of California San Diego, said it was possible that antioxidants in chocolate could be behind health benefits including lower blood pressure and cholesterol, as well as decreased body weight.
"People have just assumed that because it comes with calories and it's typically eaten as a sweet, therefore it would inherently have been one way, bad," said Golomb.
She and her colleagues used data from a study on cholesterol-lowering drugs that surveyed 1,000 healthy adults on typical eating habits, including how often they ate chocolate.
The participants, who ranged from 20 to 85 years old, ate chocolate an average of twice per week and had an average body mass index, or BMI, of 28, which is considered overweight but not obese. The researchers found that people who ate chocolate with greater frequency tended to eat more calories overall, including more saturated fat, than those who went light on the candy. But even so, chocolate lovers tended to have a lower body weight.
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