CHRONIC. Chocolate is a superfood, good for the heart, arteries, brain and even mood. True or false ?
By Boris Hansel, with Guillaume Paret (Video)
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Every Friday, find, on Le Point.fr, the nutrition chronicle of Pr Boris Hansel, endocrinologist and nutritionist at Bichat Hospital in Paris. He is also the host of the PuMS health channel on YouTube.
Chocolate is a fatty, sweet and high-calorie food. And yet, we hear that it is good for health. We will resolve this contradiction together.
A cocoa content of at least 70%
It should be noted immediately that chocolate derives its virtues from cocoa. The rest is fat: above all cocoa butter, of no particular interest, to which other fats and sugar are sometimes added. To hope to derive a health benefit from chocolate, it is therefore necessary that its cocoa content be high, say at least 70%, and that there be no added fats, apart from cocoa butter. This is confirmed in the list of ingredients.
READ ALSOCoffee: how many cups can you drink per day? In theory, a chocolate rich in cocoa is a healthy food. Because cocoa contains flavonols, which give it its bitter taste. Flavanols are a class of polyphenols that are also found in green tea or grapes. They help to make the blood vessels more flexible, more elastic. We can therefore hope that eating chocolate reduces blood pressure and the risk of myocardial infarction.
But the reality is different. Studies have shown that to have a beneficial effect, it would be necessary to absorb at least 200 milligrams of flavanols per day, that is to say a tablet of 100 grams! We are a long way from the advice that limits the tasting of chocolate to two or three squares a day…
Few scientific conclusions
This is probably why scientific studies do not conclude on the benefit of chocolate consumption to reduce diseases, especially cardiovascular. Inverse associations are sometimes found between chocolate consumption and the risk of heart attack or stroke. But these observations are far from constant and there are many statistical biases.
READ ALSOHow to choose the right spreadRegarding the effect of chocolate on mood, it’s pretty much the same scenario. Certainly cocoa is rich in psychoactive substances, which can play a beneficial role in the brain. But here once more, a “reasonable” consumption of chocolate is unlikely to be really sufficient to prevent or cure depression.
In practice, contrary to what we hear, it is exaggerated to consider chocolate as a superfood capable of protecting us once morest cardiovascular disease and making us happier. On the other hand, there is no reason to deprive yourself of consuming, even every day, a good chocolate, rich in cocoa and ideally without added fats. This is not what will hurt you, so take advantage of it!