Five cups of dark chocolate per week were linked to a decreased incidence of type-2 diabetes in a US study including 192,000 individuals.
The use of milk chocolate, on the other hand, was connected to increased weight gain rather than any preventive effects.
Over 18,000 cases of type-2 diabetes and 34 years of data were used in the study, which demonstrated the potential health benefits of dark chocolate, especially those which contains 70% or more cacao.
First and foremost, everyone should be aware that the study provides the ideal environment for a phenomena known as the “healthy user bias” in scientific literature. Simply said, people who are concerned about their health are more likely to choose dark chocolate over milk chocolate due to its lower sugar level, just as people who are less concerned with controlling their total sugar intake won’t care which chocolate is available.
Additionally, nurses and other health professionals made up the 192,000 participants, making them the most likely to be aware of the dangers of added sugar in meals.
The healthy user bias can appear in other ways, even though the authors of the study, which was published in the British Medical Journal, claim to have adjusted the results for lifestyle, diet, and personal factors. The diets of the individuals were obtained using food frequency questionnaires, which are notorious for having participants enter what they actually ate rather than what they imagine or want to perceive themselves as eating.
Because people lack the time or willingness to sequester themselves in a metabolic ward in order to conduct a randomized controlled trial that would produce the gold standard of medical data, these issues are not exclusive to this study on chocolate; they are present in nearly all dietary literature.
Despite these warnings, eating dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate was still associated with a 21% lower risk of type-2 diabetes, the most common metabolic disease in the US and worldwide.
The study’s finding that eating five or more servings of dark chocolate per week was linked to a 10% lower incidence of type-2 diabetes than those who consumed no chocolate at all may have been one of its strengths.
Their choice of alternative options, like vanilla ice cream, may be the reason, but it could also be a sign that the discovery is more than just a corollary.
