People Who Frequently Eat Chocolate May Weigh Less
WebMD Health News
March 26, 2012 -- People who are trying to
lose weight may not need to bar chocolate from their
diets.
A new government-funded
study of nearly 1,000 healthy adults shows that people who frequently
eat chocolate actually weigh less than those who say they eat it less
frequently.
Study researchers say that people who reported eating chocolate five times a week had a
body mass index
(BMI) about one point less, on average, than people who said they ate
chocolate less frequently. For a woman who is 5 feet 6 inches tall and
weighs 125 pounds, one BMI point equals about five pounds. That’s despite the fact that frequent chocolate eaters also
reported eating more total calories and more saturated fat than people
who ate chocolate less often.
Researchers say that may mean that the calories in chocolate are being offset by other ingredients that boost
metabolism. “With modest amounts of chocolate, they may have the effect of
being free calories or even better than free -- at least, the
associations look that way,” says Beatrice A. Golomb, MD, PhD, an
associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San
Diego.
The study is published in the
Archives of Internal Medicine.
He has recently studied the health benefits of chocolate but was not involved in the new study.
“Dark chocolate is
bittersweet. Whereas sweet stimulates appetite, bitter actually
suppresses it. So there may be some lasting benefit from eating dark
chocolate in particular,” Katz says. It’s high in fat, a quality that slows digestion and may help curb appetite longer. Chocolate also has a little
caffeine. Caffeine revs metabolism, increasing the number of calories the body burns at rest. But, he cautions, the study doesn’t mean that the calories in chocolate don’t count. “No calories are free calories,” Katz tells WebMD. “I would not
want people reading this to think that all [they] need to do to lose
weight is eat more chocolate. That would be a huge mistake.” Chocolate comes in many forms, most of which are high in fat and sugar.
To keep chocolate on the healthy side, keep it dark and your portions small. “What you want to consume, ideally, is any dark chocolate that’s
60% cocoa or greater,” says Francisco Villarreal, MD, PhD, a professor
of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Villarreal
studies the effects of chocolate on metabolism, but he was not involved
in the new study. He found that mice fed tiny amounts of epicatechin, one of the
main antioxidants in chocolate, were able to run about twice as far on a
treadmill as their counterparts who got just water. Based on his studies, Villarreal believes chocolate might boost
metabolism slightly more than exercise, though it doesn’t take very much
-- certainly not as much as most of us would hope for -- to get the
effect. “The chocolate should be about the size of a postage stamp or
about the weight of a Hershey’s Kiss. A Hershey’s Kiss is 5 grams. It’s
very small, and it’s only 30 calories,” he says.
