Isn’t it nice to start the week with a bit of good news?! The Journal of Internal Medicine has published (yet another) study indicating that chocolate is good for us; specifically, it’s good for people who’ve had a heart attack. The chocolate-as-health-food studies are starting to pile up–works for me.
I’ve seen articles about this new study in several places in the last few days. It says, basically, that heart attack survivors who eat two or three servings of chocolate per week are less likely to die of another heart attack than those who don’t eat chocolate.
BUT–and this is a big but–that’s assuming the survivor’s weight was under control. The fact that chocolate is good for you is NOT a license to go out and eat as much candy as you want.Weighing too much is a much higher risk factor than how much chocolate (or anything else, for that matter) you do or don’t eat. Forgive me if I’m starting to sound repetitive, but getting (or staying) slim will have a much greater impact on your health than eating any one food rather than another. No amount of chocolate or blueberries or red wine or salmon or oat bran (or whatever the superfood of the week happens to be) will protect you from heart disease (and a whole list of other problems) if you are overweight.
The problem with chocolate is that, so often, we eat it in the form of cookies or cake or ice cream–all fabulous, yes, but also laden with more fat and calories than our bodies can handle. I’m going to use my excellent skills of deduction (or is that induction? I can never remember the difference) to conclude that the only sensible interpretation of the study is this: all things being equal, I should probably have a few squares of dark chocolate today.
If the scientists change their minds about this one, I’m just going to plug up my ears and ignore them.