A few weeks back I did a blog post on eating chocolate in moderation and its benefits. After looking back, I wanted to find some of the studies that researched these benefits.

In my last blog post about chocolate, I did talk briefly about two studies that I read briefly about that talked about the benefits of eating chocolate. One study was done in Germany and the other was done in Sweden.  Both of these studies were with women, were very large,  and long term, which means chance can play a role within this because the more people and a  longer time span gives the study the likelihood for something to occur, or also a third variable to be very high in this instance.  One thing that I also found that always came up when it came to chocolate and its benefits, were the flavonoids inside of the chocolate which is apparently whats giving the chocolate its good benefits.

I recently just game across another study that was also done in Sweden, that talks about how eating chocolate can help with the likelihood of getting a stroke for men, and wanted to look into it. This study dealt with 37,000 men. In the study, the researchers asked about the “participants eating habits, and also the health of the participants were monitored for a decade.”(BBCnews). “The participants were split into four different groups based on the amount of chocolate they had eaten. The bottom group ate on average, no chocolate during the week, and the top group ate 63 grams of chocolate.”,(BBCnews), and I assume the other two groups were just in between.  The researchers then compared the groups, ” those eating the most chocolate were 17% less likely to have a stroke during the study”. (BBCnews).

Now after reading this study I wondered about a few things. The researchers did ask the participants about their eating habits, so what if the participants who ate more chocolate had different eating habits, than the participants who ate less chocolate. This would be a third variable that can be taken into hand in this instance. I think the kind of diet that the participants had should have been more controlled as well because, I think diet could play a significant role as to why these participants had a less likely chance of having the stroke. Unless the researchers looked at exactly what the participants were eating, it is hard for these third variables to be ruled out. The study did said that the participants health was monitored, but was their a difference in the exercise, and eating habits of the groups? Also since this study was done over a decade , chance can also play a key role in this study, because the body changes over time, even though the amount of chocolate that the participants ate in these groups did not change, the body still does.  I would also like to know the health of the participants in each of groups, and see how similar each one was. What if a person in the less eating chocolate group, had the same eating habits, and health as a person in the  higher consumed chocolate  group?  When it comes to direct causation, for this study, it would be that eating more chocolate  can lessen the chance for a man to get a stroke. For reverse causation,  it would be that if a man has less of a chance to get a stroke, he eats more chocolate, but since this was a study done over time, it can be ruled out.  Since this was also a large study, chance also comes into play once again because there are so many people being observed.

Overall, this was an interesting study to me. I like how the researchers put the men into four different groups to show the chocolate consumption, which makes this part of the study more controlled, which gives the study a more organized touch. I would like to have had more information about the participants eating habits, and their health to see how big of a role they played when it came to the study.  This study is just one of many “chocolate and its benefits studies’ that I came across.After finding the information in my last post, and reading this study and others, I somewhat believe that there is a correlation between eating chocolate in moderation and good health but once again this can just be due to chance because, everyone is different, and maybe chocolate can help one person, and hurt another. This tasty treat is still a little mysterious to me.  Here are a couple more chocolate studies that I came across.

http://www.nordstjernan.com/news/education|research/2842/

http://www.escardio.org/about/press/press-releases/pr-10/Pages/chocolate-reduces-blood-pressure.aspx

Sources:

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-19402143