midori Could Dark Chocolate Reduce Your Risk of Diabetes?

If you’ve long assumed that you must deprive yourself of delicious foods in order to be healthy, a new study published today in The BMJ offers encouraging news: Eating dark chocolate has been associated with a reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

The research did not prove that the chocolate itself was responsible for this health benefit; it could be something else about the people who ate dark chocolate that made them less likely to develop diabetes. And dark chocolate should not be considered a “magic bullet” for preventing diabetes, said Dr. Qi Sun, an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the lead investigator on the study.

But the findings do build on a larger body of research demonstrating links between dark chocolate consumption and reduced risks of certain health conditions like high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and insulin resistance.

The results, Dr. Sun added, suggest that a little dark chocolate can be part of a healthy diet.

What did the study find?

In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, researchers began studying three groups of predominantly white health professionals. Every four years, the more than 190,000 participants completed detailed diet questionnaires, which asked how often they consumed chocolate. Beginning in 2006 and 2007, depending on the group, the researchers tweaked the questionnaires to ask how often participants ate dark chocolate and milk chocolate. They followed the participants’ health for up to 34 years.

During that time, nearly 19,000 participants developed Type 2 diabetes. After adjusting for other aspects of their lifestyles, such as exercise, alcohol consumption, smoking and the overall healthfulness of their diets, as well as their age and family history of diabetes, the researchers found that people who consumed at least five servings of any type of chocolate per week had a 10 percent lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes compared with those who rarely or never ate chocolate.

But when they drilled down into the data from the nearly 112,000 people who provided details on the types of chocolate they consumed, the researchers found an even more striking result: Those who consumed at least five servings of dark chocolate per week had a 21 percent lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes than those who consumed dark chocolate less than once per month.

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