Study: Chocolate is good for you… and just in time for Easter

With the Easter bunny just around the corner many will be glad to hear that a group of scientists in the US have found that chocolate can actually be good for you.

It may sound completely mad that chocolate, of all things, is good for you, but do you remember the story we brought you about popcorn? Popcorn is supposedly better than fruit or vegetables because it has lots of plant chemicals called polyphenols, which help to flush all the bad toxins out of your system and apparently chocolate is the same. In fairness, isn't it classed as a vegetable in most US primary schools?

Anyway, Beatrice Golomb, professor at the University of California, San Diego, suggests that adults who eat chocolate on a regular basis are actually slimmer than those who don’t. The study looked at almost 1000 American men who had similar an average age of 57.

The authors of the study dared to suggest that consuming chocolate on a regular basis was actually calorie-neutral. Basically, the more chocolate you eat the better your stomach works at breaking down food and therefore you won’t store as much fat.

According to the authors, the size of this effect was modest, but it was definitely ‘significant’. And to add some extra tasty icing to this already delicious cake, those who ate more chocolate had lower BMI scores than those who only ate it occasionally, even though the chocolate eaters intake of calories was higher and their level of exercise was the same.