Research has shown that dark chocolate can be good for the heart and more. Now scientists report evidence that chocolate might not be acting alone. In some cases, it may get help from bacteria hanging out in your gut. Those bacteria can break down certain compounds in the chocolate. And it’s those smaller molecules that can relax blood vessels to help the heart, a Louisiana team reported March 19 at the American Chemical Society meeting in Dallas, Texas.
Chocolate’s health claims are not new. Back in the 1500s, explorers venturing to the New World saw natives downing unsweetened dark-cocoa drinks to relieve everything from fevers to kidney problems. If that sounds crazy, consider this: Fairly recently scientists have discovered that some chemicals in chocolate can fight skin cancer. Others protect our teeth And a host ofstudies have proposed that chocolate can benefit the heart.
In those heart studies, a group of specific compounds called flavanols appeared responsible. Not surprisingly, some dark chocolates contain these compounds. (To be clear, the good stuff comes from the cocoa beans — chocolate’s key ingredient — not the butter or sugar in chocolate candy. Those ingredients can clog arteries or feed bacteria that rot your teeth.)
The flavanol findings really puzzled chemists. Some noted that cocoa doesn’t appear to have enough of the beneficial compounds to help the heart. Many cocoa chemicals glom together. This creates super-structures, known as polymers. And polymers make up about 90 percent of the chemicals in cocoa powder. These biggies can’t help if they don’t get into the blood. But they are too large to pass out of the gut’s wall and into the bloodstream. Many scientists therefore suspected that cocoa chemicals must just stay in the digestive tract until they got excreted as waste.
But such scientists had failed to account for the activity of bacteria in our gut. Some of these bacteria may come from mom, at birth. Others hitchhike into the gut along with foods and beverages. Indeed, yogurt can deliver some especially beneficial ones.