GOOD FOR YOUR ♥? SWEET!

Chocolate lovers rejoice

Great news for chocoholics. Your love of the sweet treat doesn’t just warm your heart — it’s good for it.

A new study has found that consuming chocolate more than once a week reduces the risk of developing coronary disease.

Chocolate lovers have an 8 percent less of a chance of experiencing heart problems than those who eat the stuff less frequently, according to researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

“Our study suggests that chocolate helps keep the heart’s blood vessels healthy,” said the report’s author, Dr. Chayakrit Krittanawong.

The researchers combined six studies to test the link between chocolate consumption and coronary heart disease, a condition in which the arteries become blocked by a build-up of fatty substances.

They said the nutrients in chocolate — including flavonoids, methylxanthines, polyphenols and stearic acid — may reduce inflammation and increase good (HDL) cholesterol.

The study did not consider whether any particular kind of chocolate is better, or whether there is an ideal portion size.

But Krittanawong had a caveat.

“Moderate amounts of chocolate seem to protect the coronary arteries but it’s likely that large quantities do not,” he said. “The calories, sugar, milk and fat in commercially available products need to be considered, particularly in diabetics and obese people.”

The participants, who were from the United States, Sweden and Australia, had an average follow-up time of about nine years for the individual studies, which spanned the past five decades.

The analysis — which was published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology Research — found that 14,043 of the participants developed coronary heart disease.