A new study shows that chocolate can help mice stop gaining weight and lower their blood sugar levels due to an antioxidant in cocoa, chocolate's main ingredient.
The research was done by the Department of Food Science and Technology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, according to LA Weekly.
The results confirm earlier research that chocolate protects the body against type 2 diabetes, just as berries and wine do.
Such research states that chocolate has this effect due to the flavanols, a form of antioxidant, that it has, Medical News Today reported. However, this study's researchers claim that not all flavanols have the same effect, and that cocoa has different kinds of effects.
Andrew P. Neilson of the Department of Food Science and Technology led a team that looked to find out which flavanol is responsible for the changes in weight and blood sugar levels. The team assigned each mouse to one of six different diets for 12 weeks, which consisted of high- and low-fat diets, as well as high-fat diets with either the monomeric, oligomeric or polymeric procyandins (PCs) flavanol. Mice received 25 milligrams of these flavanols each day for each kilogram of their body weight.
The researchers found that a high-fat diet that had oligomeric PCs was the most effective diet for maintaining weight and improving glucose tolerance in the mice, LA Weekly reported. Tolerance of glucose is important in helping prevent type 2 diabetes.
"Oligomeric PCs appear to process the greatest anti-obesity and antidiabetic bioactivities of the flavanols in cocoa, particularly at the low doses employed for the present study," the researchers said. "Additional studies of prolonged feeding of flavanol fractions in vivo are needed to further identify the fractions with the highest bioactivities and, therefore, the greatest potential for translation to human clinical applications at reasonable doses."
The researchers added that the doses of flavanols used in the study are much lower than doses used in past studies and are more convenient when translated into flavanol levels for humans to consume, Medical News Today reported.
"Therefore, our data suggests that moderate doses of cocoa flavanols or cocoa powder have the potential to be more effective in human clinical trials that previously thought," they said.
The study was published in The Journal of Agricultural Food and Chemistry.
