Should We Really Be Eating 2 Chocolate Bars a Day to Lower Heart Risks?

A new study suggests eating up to two chocolate bars a day can lower your risk of heart disease. But is there a catch? (Photo: Alamy)

Health reporters took note last month when journalist John Bohannon revealed that he had faked a widely reported study concluding that chocolate can help you lose weight. Many elements of the study were flawed (among other red flags, it only included 16 people), but it still made headlines.

So in the wake of that study, we’re naturally a little wary of new research touting surprising health benefits of chocolate. However, this one is worth calling out: A new study of nearly 21,000 middle-aged and older people published in the journal Heart found that those who ate 16 to 100 grams of chocolate a day had a decreased risk of heart disease and stroke.

For their research, scientists looked at the food habits of people over 12 years, and found that those who ate higher amounts of chocolate weighed less and regularly exercised. They also had lower waist-to-hip ratios, blood pressure, and other factors that point to a lowered risk of developing heart disease.

As a result, researchers concluded that eating more chocolate is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease — though they noted that there were still some factors that they couldn’t exclude from the data that could also affect the lower risk. For instance: Middle-aged people in the study ate higher amounts of chocolate and were also more likely to exercise, weigh less, and have better blood pressure levels compared with older people, but it’s unknown if it’s the chocolate or the younger age having these effects.

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Ultimately, “there does not appear to be any evidence to say that chocolate should be avoided in those who are concerned about cardiovascular risk,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Of course, this is just an observational study — meaning it doesn’t prove a causal relationship — and scientists didn’t monitor each subject during the research. It also doesn’t claim that eating chocolate can improve your heart health — just that it may lower your risk of developing heart disease.

But the amount of chocolate consumed in the study is, well, a lot. For comparison’s sake, one Hershey’s milk chocolate bar is 43 grams — meaning you’d have to eat more than two bars a day to reach the upper limits of the beneficial range, per this study — and you’d take in more than 440 calories, 26 grams of fat, and 48 grams of sugar in the process.

That can’t be healthy.

It’s not, says Kate Patton, a registered dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic’s Heart and Vascular Institute.

“I would not put this in practice or have anybody follow this in any way, shape, or form,” she tells Yahoo Health. “That portion size is way too large — it could cause more harm than benefit.”

Related: Can You Out-Exercise Bad Eating Habits?

Patton points to previous research that has found several links between the added sugar and fat you’d ingest by eating that much chocolate, and negative health repercussions. A large-scale study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine last year found a link between eating processed sugar and an increased risk of dying from heart disease, and several studies have found a link between excess dietary fat and the development of Type 2 diabetes.

Of course, chocolate isn’t all bad for you, says registered dietitian Jill Weisenberger, author of The Overworked Person’s Guide to Better Nutrition. You just shouldn’t be eating 100 grams of it a day.

She tells Yahoo Health that the flavonols in certain forms of chocolate are associated with a healthy brain and heart. They may help keep your blood vessels flexible, reduce your blood pressure, and help with overall brain function, but she points out that you only need a small serving of chocolate to do that.

If you love chocolate and want to reap the benefits, Patton recommends having no more than an ounce of it a day (equivalent to two-thirds of a chocolate bar) and looking for a bar that’s 70 percent dark chocolate, as that’s the type that contains the highest amount of flavonols. “With any type of chocolate, the least processed it is, the better,” she says.

Study author Phyo Myint, MD, tells Yahoo Health that the key takeaway from his findings should be that “having chocolate in moderation is OK and may not produce any harmful effect with regard to cardiovascular disease.” However, he also points out that there may be some people who don’t benefit at all from eating chocolate, and that there were a lot of variables of the study that were outside of the researchers’ control (one being that people may have changed their chocolate-eating habits over time, which researchers didn’t measure during their follow-up).

While it would be great to know that eating two bars of chocolate a day can make us healthier, it really is too good to be true.

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