Want to Eat Chocolate Every Day For a Year? 158
Scientists from the University of East Anglia are studying the potential health benefits of dark chocolate, and need 40 female volunteers who would like to eat chocolate every day for a year. The chocolate loving 40 must be post-menopausal and have type 2 diabetes so it can be determined if the flavonoid compounds in chocolate can reduce the risk of heart disease. Dr Peter Curtis, of the UEA's School of Medicine, said, "Our first volunteers are about to return for their final visit to see if the markers of heart health - such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels — have changed. A successful outcome could be the first step in developing new ways to improve the lives of people at increased risk of heart disease."
slashdot demographics (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure the post-menopausal, type-2 diabetic woman that regularly reads slashdot appreciates knowing about this study.
Re:If there's a more underrepresented demographic. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:demographics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exercise? (Score:4, Insightful)
What will the control group be? (Score:2, Insightful)
And how much chocolate are they feeding these people? Just a few grams a day or ???
Regardless of whether the dark chocolate may have beneficial compounds, the other components (lots of fat and sugar) are in general rather unhealthy, and EXTREMELY so for a type 2 diabetic.
Is the control group going to be fed a combination of fats/sugar? The control group will have to volunteer to engage in a fundamentally unhealthy and risky practice for a year.
Or are they going to be attempting to create some sort of "chocolate extract" with the chemicals being studied present but no sugar added and the fatty components removed? It'll taste awful but at least won't have significant negative health effects.
One floor up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Chocolate.... type 2 diabetes..... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure what exactly you have against a perfectly natural food. If we were arguing about saltine crackers or bagels with cream cheese or something I could understand it, but this not so much.
Really dark chocolate doesn't have all that many calories. It's not that fatty. It isn't loaded with sugar. (Have you ever had, say, 80% dark chocolate? It's quite bitter, very slightly dry, and 90% is even more so...) I'd personally expect that it would be somewhat difficult to get a comparable amount of calories of dark chocolate compared to any reasonable amount of steak. (Hershey's "dark" chocolate, which is loaded with sugar and fat, doesn't count, of course.)
Re:Chocolate.... type 2 diabetes..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep in mind, that chocolates may have cocoa butter added, but very rarely do they have cocoa butter removed. What this means, is that baking chocolate is a lower bound for the amount of fat in dark chocolate. I have already shown that baking chocolate is very fatty, which implies that dark chocolate is, and I have nothing more to say here.
Yes, vegetable fats may be "healthier" overall (although I think the benefit is overstated), but the fact is, there is still an awful lot of them in chocolate; and a lot of them are saturated...
In re how "natural" various foods are, your subjective taxonomy is of no interest to me.
Re:slashdot demographics (Score:3, Insightful)
White chocolate is nasty, nasty stuff that shouldn't be permitted to carry the name.
(Okay, it's fair enough in its own right, but it still shouldn't sport the name "chocolate".)