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My mother would never
allow me to eat sweets and chocolate. She said that chocolates were bad for me
and that they would damage my teeth. What would she say about the new research
which says that chocolate is good for you?
Over the last couple
of years a number of surprising claims have been made about chocolate.
Chocolate improves the memory and helps children to pass exams. Can these
claims be true?
Researchers have
found that men who eat sweets and chocolates regularly live for almost a year
longer than those men who never, or only occasionally eat them.
This new evidence
comes from a study of approximately eight thousand American men over a period
of eighty years. The longest living men were those who ate chocolate between
once and three times a month. They cut their risk of death by a third. Men who
ate chocolate and sweets once or twice a week cut their risks by a quarter.
Even those men who ate chocolate more than three times a week lived longer than
those who never or seldom ate sweets or chocolate.
It is believed that
the answer to these findings lies in the antioxidant effect of phenols which
are found in chocolate. A small piece of chocolate contains the same number of
phenols as a glass of red wine. Phenols have been found to help to reduce
cholesterol and may help to protect against forms of cancer.
However, before we
all rush off to the sweet shop and eat all the chocolate we can buy, doctors
advise against over-indulgence. Research is still going on. As with all things,
the best advice is to eat all the chocolate you want to – but in moderation!
