Eating two chocolate bars a day cuts your risk of heart attack and stroke by up to 25%

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Tuesday 16 Jun 2015 - 20:36 Makkah mean time-29-8-1436 (File image) London, (IINA) - A new study has found that people who regularly eat chocolate are less likely to fall victim to strokes and heart disease, Daily Mail reported. Scientists now say that regularly tucking into a few pieces of chocolate may actually be good for us. A study has found that people who regularly eat chocolate are less likely to fall victim to strokes and heart disease. The findings based on a 12-year study of 21,000 Britons suggest that eating dark or milk chocolate could be beneficial for health. The new study appeared in Heart, a well-respected, peer-reviewed journal, and drew on the experiences of 21,000 adults participating in the EPIC-Norfolk study, which is tracking connections between diet and long-term health, Forbes reported. Researchers from the University of Aberdeen found that participants who ate up to 100 gram of chocolate per day basically, two Hershey’s bars had an 11% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 25 percent lower risk of associated death compared to participants who didn’t eat chocolate. The study authors from the universities of Aberdeen, Manchester, Cambridge and East Anglia stressed that their investigation merely looked at statistical trends, and could not draw definitive conclusions about cause and effect. However, the researchers suspect that chocolate’s health benefits are linked to flavonoids – antioxidants present in dark chocolate that are thought to help blood flow. The study involved 9,200 men and 11,700 women in Norwich, who were monitored for an average 12 years. The scientists, whose work was funded by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK, also carried out a review of nine previous studies into chocolate involving 158,000 participants, which backed up their results. Dr Tim Chico, cardiologist at the University of Sheffield, said: ‘This study adds to the evidence that people who consume chocolate tend to have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, although such studies cannot say whether the chocolate is the cause of this protective effect. A University of Sydney study said that with cocoa bean production falling and demand for chocolate rising in growing economies such as China, shoppers can expect prices to increase by 60 per cent in the next five years. There has already been a 20 per cent rise in the past year. SM/IINA