Skip to main content

More good news about chocolate and wine

Just in time for your Easter egg hunt, more news that chocolate is good for you. A report out just this week from the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam confirmed that people consuming chocolate on a regular basis had lower rates of heart attack and stroke. The study was impressive in scope, monitoring nearly twenty thousand subjects over a ten-year period, after a dietary assessment at the beginning. It was part of a large project called the European Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. Those in the top chocolate consumption group had 40% fewer heart attacks and strokes over the course of the study as compared to the low chocolate consumers. A reduction in blood pressure was identified as the reason.


It has been known for some time that compounds called polyphenols, found in both chocolate and wine, are able to relax blood vessels and thereby lower blood pressure. A study from the Institute of Food Safety in the Netherlands (why are the Europeans having all the fun with wine and chocolate studies?) identified exactly how this occurs. A molecule called Nitric Oxide, or NO, is the chemical signal for blood vessels to relax, and certain compounds from wine and chocolate have the specific ability to stimulate NO release. Among these are resveratrol (from wine) and compounds in a family of molecules called catechins, from both wine and chocolate.

These molecules are in much higher quantities in dark chocolate and red wine, so the chocolate eggs in your Easter basket might not be the best way to get the health benefits. Go for something dark and leave the milk chocolate goodies for the kids. And my recommendation for the wine with your ham (a problem match because of the saltiness) is Grenache.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Which came first: Beer or wine? (or something else?)

Actually neither beer nor wine was the first fermented beverage, and wine arguably has a closer connection to health, but recent evidence indicates that humans developed the ability to metabolize alcohol long before we were even human. The uniquely human ability to handle alcohol comes from the digestive enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, or ADH4. A new science called paleogenetics identifies the emergence of the modern version of the ADH4 gene in our ape ancestors some 10 million years ago. Interestingly, this corresponds to the time when our arboreal forebears transitioned to a nomadic lifestyle on the ground. We went from swinging from tree limbs to walking upright, and the rest is history. Understanding the circumstances that led to perpetuation of the ADH4 mutation may contain clues to what made us human in the first place. How the ability to metabolize alcohol made us human Paleogenetecist Matthew Carrigan has an idea about how this happened . Arboreal species rely on fruit tha

Why I am not surprised that the NIH cancelled the alcohol-health study

Not long after enrolling the first patients in the much hyped prospective study on alcohol and health, the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they were pulling the plug. I am actually more surprised that they ever got it off the ground in the first place. As I wrote a year ago when the study was still in its planning stages, there were too many competing interests, criticisms of the study design, and concerns about funding to expect that whatever results came out would be universally accepted. Nevertheless, I am disappointed. The study, called Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health Trial (MACH) was intended to provide hard evidence about the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption by prospectively assigning subjects with heart disease to one drink per day or not drinking, which they were to follow for up to 10 years. Most existing data on the question is retrospective, or simply tracks a subject population according to their drinking preferences, w