Can dark chocolate lower blood pressure?

Pairing a square of dark chocolate with berries, orange sections, or your favorite fruit is like sending your arteries to a day spa. Eating a half ounce of dark chocolate regularly can drop your blood pressure numbers by 5 points -- enough to lower your risk for a heart attack or stroke by 20%. Credit the flavonols packed into dark chocolate. They boost production of artery-relaxing nitric oxide.

A recent randomized controlled trial published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that eating a small piece of dark chocolate (6 grams, or about 1⁄5 ounce) each day for eighteen weeks caused a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure (about 3 mm/Hg) and diastolic blood pressure (about 2 mm/Hg).

Why? Dark chocolate (but not white chocolate or milk chocolate) is high in protective substances called flavonols. Flavonols cause your arteries to produce more of a substance called “S-nitrosoglutathione,” which is converted to nitric oxide. As noted earlier, nitric oxide relaxes your arteries and lowers your blood pressure.

An earlier study, also published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that a single dose of a cocoa drink rich in flavonols caused an increase in nitric oxide production and improvement in blood flow. Another study reported that chocolate may improve blood flow to your brain as measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

Of course, chocolate is usually high in fat and sugar as well as flavonols, so the point here is to enjoy small amounts of chocolate. In chapter 3 of the book The Spectrum, I described how meditating on a single piece of rich, dark chocolate can be exquisitely satisfying.

In Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper, twenty-second-century doctors marveled at how previous generations once avoided foods like hot fudge. “Those were thought to be unhealthy,” a doctor said. “Precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.”

Won’t be long . . .