According to recent research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, people who ate chocolate the most frequently had the lowest BMIs. It was all the recent healthy chocolate headlines—linking the sweet stuff to everything from lowering blood pressure to making the body more sensitivity to insulin—that got researcher Beatrice Golomb, MD, and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, thinking: Since these other studies are linking the benefit of chocolate with metabolism, is it possible that chocolate could affect metabolism in terms of weight loss, too? Could your average candy bar or cup of cocoa—complete with all the sugar and fat that usually come along with it—help you actually lose weight? To find answers, the researchers asked more than 1,000 men and women how many times a week they ate chocolate (any kind) and how much. Those who ate chocolate the most frequently had lower BMIs; specifically, eating chocolate five times a week translated to a lower BMI of one point—that’s about five fewer pounds for someone who’s 5-feet tall. And while conventional diet wisdom might say, “Ah, well, that’s because people who indulge cravings instead of depriving themselves are less likely to binge and overeat,” this new study shows that chocoholics were usually eating more calories than those who weren’t as slender, and they weren’t exercising any more or less. In other words, it looks like it’s the chocolate itself that’s keeping people trim. So how much chocolate are we talking? The amount people ate ranged from just a handful of M&M’s to a whole candy bar. And while previous studies have suggested that dark chocolate has more health benefits than the milk variety, what seemed to matter in this study was simply how often people ate chocolate, not what kind. If chocolate is indeed responsible for this effect—as the results suggest—it’s probably because of its phytochemicals, specifically those called “catechins,” says Dr. Golomb. These plant-derived molecules show lots of metabolism-boosting effects in animal studies, such as increasing energy production in cells. Future studies are needed before we can advise people to add a certain amount of chocolate to their diets, says Dr. Golomb, but what these results do suggest is that a nip (as in, don’t go overboard!) of your favorite treat here and there won’t harm your waistline—and might even help it. In other words, “It means I can feel a little less guilty when I say that chocolate is my favorite vegetable,” she says. More from Prevention: 15 Surprising Ways To Lower Cholesterol
