Could dark chocolate reduce risk of diabetes?

If you have long assumed that you must deprive yourself of delicious foods to be healthy, a new study in medical journal The BMJ offers encouraging news: Eating dark chocolate has been associated with a reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

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The research did not prove that the chocolate itself was responsible for this health benefit. It could be something else about the people who ate dark chocolate that made them less likely to develop diabetes. And dark chocolate should not be considered a "magic bullet" for preventing diabetes, said Dr Qi Sun, an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and lead investigator on the study.

But the findings do build on a larger body of research demonstrating links between dark chocolate consumption and reduced risks of certain health conditions such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and insulin resistance.

The results, Dr Sun added, suggest that a little dark chocolate can be part of a healthy diet.

THE STUDY'S FINDINGS

In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, researchers began studying three groups of predominantly white health professionals. Every four years, the more than 190,000 participants completed detailed diet questionnaires, which asked how often they consumed chocolate.

Beginning in 2006 and 2007, depending on the group, the researchers tweaked the questionnaires to ask how often participants ate dark chocolate and milk chocolate. They followed the participants' health for up to 34 years.