Improving Blood Flow with Cocoa

As any diabetes sufferer knows, one has to be careful about eating foods containing lots of sugar. It’s not that diabetics can’t eat foods that have sugar, but they have to be approached with caution and in measured amounts.

That said, what if I told you that downing a cup of cocoa will do a world of good for a diabetic’s blood flow? And what if I told you cocoa’s so good for blood flow, including a cup of the stuff with every meal wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Crazy idea?

Not according to a recent study, which found consuming cocoa high in flavonol content improves blood vessel function in diabetics. The study’s published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Researchers from Australia’s International Diabetes Institute performed two separate but similar studies before reaching this conclusion. One of the studies involved approximately 40 people who were given varying doses of cocoa, three times a day, 30 days in total. All of the participants were diabetic and were receiving some kind of treatment prior to the study’s beginning.

The essential point of the study was to see if there was any noticeable difference in diabetes sufferers’ conditions depending on the flavonol content in the cocoa. Flavonols are basically flavonoids, which are chemical compounds found in a host of plants; they’re renowned for their richness in antioxidant activity. The cacao plant happens to be one of the plants containing lots of flavonols.

Some of the participants got a cocoa with 25 mg of flavonol; others got a cocoa with a whopping 321 mg of flavonols. Other than this, there was no difference between the cocoas (i.e. the caloric content and other nutrients in each were the same). And what’dya know, but the participants who consumed the cocoa with the most flavonol content reaped the most benefit, as their cardiovascular conditions were much better than those that had the cocoa with 25 mg of flavonols. The researchers determined the quality of the participants’ “cardiovascular conditions” through something called flow mediated dilation. This analysis measures just how much blood is flowing through the blood vessels, and serves as a helpful indicator in assessing one’s risk for heart disease. Based on the researchers’ analysis, the high-flavonol group had a flow mediated dilation 30 percent higher than the low-flavonol group.

The other study they conducted revealed similar findings, as those that consumed the highest amounts of flavonols had the best FMD indicator.

As the researchers themselves say, this study doesn’t reveal all the benefits of cocoa, outside of the flavonol content, but it does hammer home the point that in moderate amounts, chocolate is beneficial to one’s health in general and one’s heart health in particular.

Now, as I say in my book The Blood Pressure Miracle, I’m not suggesting that buying a .50 cent Hershey’s milk chocolate bar and eating a square of it a day will improve blood flow. The chocolate I’m talking about is dark chocolate – which is rich in the very cocoa that these researchers used. By supplementing your diet with small doses of dark chocolate, blood flow and blood pressure levels are improved. More and more chocolate bars list the percentage of cocoa (or cacao) contained within the bar in bold face on the packaging. The higher the cocoa content, the better.