Dark chocolate
Purported health benefits aren’t what they’re cracked up to be, experts say
I’m pretty sure I won’t have any friends left once they’ve read this — especially with all of the Halloween candy still lying around. That’s because no matter how you break that candy bar, and no matter how many headlines you’ve seen about the health benefits of chocolate, the scientific evidence remains pretty slim.
Sure, you probably know that “white chocolate” (which doesn’t contain any chocolate at all) and milk chocolate (which is loaded with sugar and fat) are not healthy choices. But while dark chocolate is a better choice, it’s not a healthy one. I’m sorry, trick-or-treaters.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a chocoholic myself, so I’m not happy about this either. I believed — thanks to many published studies — that chocolate may lower the risk of certain cancers, lower blood pressure and reduce the risks of diabetes, stroke and heart disease.
I even read that dark chocolate lowers the risk of depression and that it’s counted — along with nuts, avocados and blueberries — as a “superfood.”
Mucking up things, though, were other studies that suggest chocolate may increase our risk for other cancers, and we’d be fools not to know that eating too much can lead to obesity (and the troublesome health conditions that follow).
So, is chocolate healthy? The top Google result for that question was a report (Can Chocolate
be Good for my Health?) on the Mayo Clinic website. To help me fact-check it, I called Marion Nestle, the much-respected professor of food and nutrition studies at New York University, who has extensively studied the chocolate industry (most recently in her book Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat).
I read Nestle (who has no relation to the candy maker) the article’s lead paragraph, which states, in part, “chocolate’s reputation is on the rise, as a growing number of studies suggest that it can be a heart-healthy choice.”
She stopped me right there to note that it’s not chocolate but the flavanols in chocolate that might have potential benefits. Flavanols are abundant in cocoa beans, which yield cocoa powder, which is then used to make chocolate, she said.
To be fair, despite its enticing headline, the Mayo article does focus on the benefits of flavanols, not chocolate, notably their “antioxidant effects that reduce cell damage implicated in heart disease ... (and) also help lower blood pressure and improve vascular function.” But will readers understand that the amount of flavanols in a chocolate bar is not nearly enough to affect their health? No, Nestle said with obvious exasperation: “You’d have to eat an awful lot of chocolate to make a difference.”
That’s because flavanol-rich cocoa has a bitter taste, so candy manufacturers add lots of fats and sugars to create commercial
— delicious-tasting — chocolate. Not so great.
Alice Lichtenstein, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University, also said “the data don’t support using (chocolate) as a health food.” Why do so many think it is? “It sounds great so I think people like repeating it,” she said.
Lichtenstein is critical of many of the studies, which she reminded me tend to come out right before Valentine’s Day — our National Day of Chocolate. They “lack plausibility” and are mostly “observational,” she said, which means they can show that two variables are related to each other but can’t prove cause and effect.
As an example, Lichtenstein pointed to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that showed “a very strong correlation between per capita chocolate intake and the number of Nobel Prizes awarded in any country. Does that mean the more chocolate you eat, the more likely you are to win a Nobel Prize?”
I certainly hoped so, but Lichtenstein quashed my dream: “Obviously not.” Correlation is not causation, she said, a fallacy many people fail to understand. Eating more chocolate will not make you smarter or boost your chances of winning a Nobel Prize. Sorry.
Further dashing my hopes, Nestle said chocolate makers have long funded studies seeking to determine the health benefits of chocolate. A 2018 Vox report on more than 100 Mars-funded studies found overwhelmingly glowing conclusions about cocoa and chocolate — promoting everything from chocolate’s heart health benefits to cocoa’s ability to fight disease.
“I’m not impressed by the research that shows this (when) it is industry funded,” Nestle said. “It’s very hard to take seriously.”
To wrap up my “investigation,” I spoke to Katherine Zeratsky, a registered dietitian and licensed nutritionist at the Mayo Clinic and the author of Can Chocolate be Good for my Health?”
Is it, I asked? “I think it possibly can be,” she said. “It’s like so many other foods, it probably depends on how it’s consumed, how much is consumed. ”
So what’s a chocoholic to do? First, stop thinking of chocolate as “healthy.” Nestle said she eats dark chocolate with nuts, but she’s clear it’s a treat.
OK, now you can unfriend me.