A lot of major scientific break throughs that would make a lot of people happy, understandably, would revolve around a cure for terrible diseases, better treatments for others, or even some other highly scientific discovery that I won’t be able to wrap my mind around.
But one that might also make a lot of people happy is a recent study proving that eating more chocolate is good for you.
A Danish research team have been studying the relationship between eating three serves of chocolate equating to 30g each a month verses one serving a month and developing atrial fibrillation, or AF for short, a common abnormal heart rhythm affecting 2 per cent of Australians, according to the Heart Foundation.
Over the last 13 years, the research team took their data from examining the health and lifestyle of 55,000 Danes aged between 55 and 64 years and found that, those who ate three serves of chocolate per month were diagnosed less often, 10 per cent less, than those who only ate one.
But their findings don’t stop there. They also found that, of those they studied, 17 per cent were less likely to develop AF for consuming one weekly serving of chocolate, 20 per cent if they consumed between two and six weekly servings, and 14 per cent if their weekly serving was one or more.
The research team have published their findings in the British Journal of Sports Medicine Heart and released a statement about their findings, saying that, ‘while chocolate is a high calorie product containing fat and sugar’, “Despite the fact that most of the chocolate consumed in our sample probably contained relatively low concentrations of the potentially protective ingredients, we still observed a robust statistically significant association”.
Similarly, a US editorial was written about the Danish study, with the authors of the editorial saying, “Regardless of the limitations of the Danish chocolate study, the findings are interesting and warrant further consideration”.
But hey, yay chocolate.