If you’re a dark chocolate lover, your day is about to get a little sweeter.
That’s because two new studies presented at the Experimental Biology 2018 annual meeting this week in San Diego have shown that certain types of dark chocolate offer health benefits – specifically, positive effects for your stress levels, inflammation, mood, memory and immunity.
This applies to dark chocolate with a high cacao concentration – minimally 70 percent cacao and 30 percent organic cane sugar. For the study, researchers used chocolate from Redlands, California-based Parliament Chocolate, which lists the cacao and sugar concentrations on the front of the bar, according to principal study investigator Lee S. Berk. The studies examined how chocolate consumption affects certain gene expression and how it affects electrical brain activity when consuming chocolate over shorter and longer periods of time. For the latter study, researchers were looking to figure out if they “needed to increase or decrease the amount of dark chocolate consumed” depending on how long the responses lasted.
Researchers say their work is unprecedented.
