Chocolate Could Protect You From a Dangerous Heart Abnormality, Study Says

Remember that time uptight researchers concluded that chocolate wasn't the heart-disease-fighting flavanol bomb that we're often told it is? Well, now, more research is suggesting that your favorite chocolate bar may have very real effects on your heart and could protect you from a threatening heart condition.

By homing in on atrial fibrillation (AF), a potentially dangerous form of abnormal heart rhythm that affects as many as 6.1 million Americans and 8.8 million Europeans, a team of researchers from the US, Canada, and Denmark were able to find an interesting relationship between AF and chocolate consumption.

The new study looked at data from 55,502 participants (26,400 men and 29,102 women) between the ages of 50 and 64,3346 of whom had AF. When they looked at subjects' chocolate intake, they found that those who ate chocolate three times per week were 10 percent less likely to develop AF, while those who ate it two to six times per week had a 20 percent lower risk of developing the condition.

It's worth noting, however, that daily chocolate eaters were only 16 percent less likely to develop AF, meaning that two to six times per week seems to be the sweet spot. It's also worth mentioning that dark chocolate seems to have more health benefits than your run-of-the-mill super-sweet milk chocolate, probably because of its flavonoid levels. "The higher flavonoid content of dark chocolate compared with milk chocolate may yield greater cardiovascular benefits," authors pointed out in the study, adding that, "flavanol content and total antioxidant capacity in plasma may be lower if cocoa is consumed with milk or if cocoa is ingested as milk chocolate."

In other words, you're not going to avoid the dangers of an irregular heartbeat by eating Three Musketeers. "Furthermore, cocoa is usually consumed in high-calorie products that use fat and sugar, and modern manufacturing of chocolate may result in losses of more than 80 percent of the original flavonoids from the cocoa beans. Therefore, it may be advantageous to find ways to consume cocoa in forms other than chocolate bars."

And while authors agreed that their result—that showed participants with higher levels of chocolate intake had a lower rate of clinically apparent incident AF—needed to be confirmed by further research, it's still a day of vindication for chocolate lovers everywhere.