Eat chocolate to lose weight?

In perhaps the best news you will hear this week, a new study suggests that eating chocolate can have the following benefits:

• Reduced abdominal circumference (waist size)
• Reduced total cholesterol and LDL
• Reduced triglycerides
• Reduced fasting glucose
• Reduced systolic and diastolic blood pressure

What kind of chocolate was studied? The answer may surprise you: cocoa capsules, cocoa extracts, cocoa beverages, cocoa/dark chocolate bars, and cocoa snacks. In other words, mostly normal chocolate.

Don’t get too excited. The benefits were fairly moderate in scope. Eating a pound of chocolate a day is not likely to solve all your health issues. But on the other hand, this study backs up a contrarian opinion that chocolate has more health benefits than you might think.

Photo by Pablo Merchán Montes on Unsplash