BMJ\u00a0<\/em>study<\/a> reported that daily consumption of dark chocolate can prevent cardiovascular events in people with metabolic syndrome. Dark chocolate has been shown to lower blood pressure, and may have additional beneficial effects on lipids and other metabolic factors.<\/p>\nAustralian researchers used a sophisticated mathematical model to estimate the effect of eating chocolate in people with metabolic syndrome who had a systolic blood pressure 121 mm Hg or higher and were not taking antihypertensive medication.\u00a0They calculated that daily dark chocolate\u00a0could prevent 8.5 CV events over 10 years in 1000 people with metabolic syndrome.<\/p>\n
The researchers concluded that the findings of their study “suggest that the blood pressure lowering and lipid effects of plain dark chocolate could represent an effective and cost effective strategy for the prevention of cardiovascular disease in people with metabolic syndrome (and no diabetes).”<\/p>\n
I’d like to call attention to one additional detail of the study. The authors note that they modeled\u00a0a “best case scenario” that assumed 100% compliance. Normally I would be skeptical about this sort of assumption, but since we’re talking about chocolate I think we’re much more likely to see a problem of over-compliance rather than under-compliance.\u00a0The authors acknowledge that their study did not include any of the other possible effects of dark chocolate, including its “additional caloric and glycemic load.” But in a study population of metabolic syndrome, and in a world in which obesity and diabetes are growing exponentially, this seems a strange omission.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to imagine how these two studies might contribute to efforts to combat cardiovascular disease. Would anyone seriously suggest that exercise should not be recommended to the vast majority of people? Does anyone really believe that chocolate has an important role to play in curbing the impact of metabolic syndrome? These studies may provide a small addition to the academic literature on cardiovascular disease, but it’s difficult to see how they contribute to public health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two recent studies may add value to the academic literature, but what’s their public health value?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[304,1224,749,454,730,271],"class_list":["post-29453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prevention","tag-chocolate","tag-cv-disease","tag-exercise","tag-hypertension","tag-metabolic-syndrome","tag-risk-factors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}