Chocolate Medicine

For Heart Disease and Stroke

Heart attack survivors who eat chocolate two or more times per week cut their risk of dying from heart disease about threefold compared to those who never touch the stuff. Smaller quantities confer less protection, but are still better than none, according to the study, which appears in the September 2009 issue of the Journal of Internal Medicine. Earlier research had established a strong link between cocoa-based confections and lowered blood pressure or improvement in blood flow. It had also shown that chocolate cuts the rate of heart-related mortality in healthy older men, along with post-menopausal women. And now research published in May of 2010 in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism is saying that something in dark chocolate seems to guard against the damage of a stroke.

One of the most important actions of magnesium is its vasodilating effects which improves the blood supply to ischaemic areas and reduces infarct size.

The Journal of Internal Medicine study is the first to demonstrate that consuming chocolate can help ward off death if one has suffered a heart attack. “It seems that antioxidants in cocoa are a likely candidate” is the best Dr. Imre Janszky of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm could come up with for explaining the life-saving properties of chocolate. Dr. Martin Lajous, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health admitted that the protective mechanism by which chocolate might prevent stroke isn’t yet clear. Researchers in the stroke study pegged a flavanol in chocolate called epicatechin as the active agent. It is amazing that none of these researchers fingered magnesium as the main agent in chocolate that has these powerful medical effects.

Magnesium deficiency appears to have caused eight million sudden coronary deaths in America during the period 1940-1994.1
~ Paul Mason

More