Chocolate Could Be Your Friend When It Comes To Losing Weight
We’ve all heard the advice that eating chocolate is fattening and that when losing weight you can’t have any chocolate goodness, no matter how good you’ve been.
Well it turns out that eat chocolate will make you gain weight may just be an old wives tale and not quite accurate, or at least that is what researchers at UC San Diego think is the results from the study they are conducting is any indication. To be clear we aren’t talking about those calorie laden gooey centered bars of sweet temptation that line the shelves of the corner store and grocery store.
While the researchers realized that our body mass index can be affected by metabolism just as much as blood pressure or cholesterol levels they also believed that it was quite possible given its epicatechin, an antioxidant, levels that there could be enough health benefit to make up for any weight gain from eating even a modest amount of chocolate.
The researchers enlisted 1018 men and women between the ages of 20 and 85 from the San Diego area, none of whom had any known history of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or high cholesterol. They were asked how many times a week they consumed chocolate and their BMI was measured. They were also asked to list the frequency of other foods they ate and how often they exercised.
All the raw data suggested that the chocolate eaters should have the heftier BMI. They showed higher calorie intake, ate more saturated fats, and they didn’t exercise any more than their non-chocolate counterparts. And yet, no matter how the researchers sliced or adjusted the data to account for potentially confounding variables like age, gender, physical activity, or anything else, chocolate consumption was always linked to a lower BMI. The people who ate chocolate were thinner than those who didn’t.
via io9
What the researchers think is that isn’t simply about the amount of calories that determines weight but rather the character of those calories. When it comes to chocolate, which considered to be made up of a lot of ’empty calories’, it can have a major impact on our bodies metabolic, which could be enough to offset the addition of all those calories in the first place.
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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