A Surprising Link Between Cocoa and Blood Pressure

I love eating, and honestly, I love some food that tastes good but is unhealthy. As we all know, the struggle between trying to eat healthy and craving unhealthy food is real.

That is why I love to see studies like this one hit the news. The bottom line? Cocoa is possibly healthy for your heart.

A big study followed nearly 9,000 adults in their early 70s for about 3.5 years to see if taking a daily cocoa extract supplement could help prevent high blood pressure. None of them had heart disease or cancer going in, and all started with reasonably healthy blood pressure.

The most interesting finding was that cocoa extract didn’t help everyone equally. For people who started with truly normal blood pressure (the lower end of healthy), it reduced their chance of developing high blood pressure by 24%. But for people whose blood pressure was already creeping up (still technically “okay” but on the higher side) it didn’t seem to make a difference. And the benefit didn’t kick in until about two years of daily use.

This lines up with what we already know about cocoa. The flavanols in cocoa (the beneficial compounds) help blood vessels relax, reduce inflammation, and support healthy circulation. Dozens of shorter studies have shown that cocoa products can modestly lower blood pressure, especially at higher doses and in people who already have high blood pressure.

What makes this study unique is the long game. Most previous research only looked at blood pressure changes over a few weeks or months. This one tracked whether people actually developed high blood pressure over the years, which is a much more meaningful question.

That said, there are some reasons to be cautious. The finding about normal vs. elevated blood pressure subgroups wasn’t something researchers specifically set out to test (it emerged from digging into the data, which means it could be a fluke). There could also be lifestyle differences between the groups that weren’t fully accounted for. And yes, Mars (the candy company) funded the study and provided the supplements, so that’s worth keeping in mind.

One theory for why it only helped the lower blood pressure group: cocoa might work by slowing down the natural rise in blood pressure that happens as we age, rather than actively bringing it down. If your blood pressure is already elevated, there’s less runway before you cross into high blood pressure territory, making the effect harder to detect.

The takeaway? It’s a promising first look, and it makes sense given everything else we know about cocoa flavanols. But it’s just one study, and we’ll need more research, ideally with higher doses, before drawing firm conclusions. In the meantime, there are worse excuses to enjoy some dark chocolate.

Foto de Jessica Loaiza en Unsplash