Type 2 diabetes can increase the risk of developing heart disease, but fortunately, a healthy lifestyle can help ensure a healthy ticker. Along with being physically active, using diabetes medications as needed to keep blood sugar under control, and maintaining a healthy body weight, eating chocolate—particularly if it’s enriched with flavonoids—may be another way to stay heart smart.
Flavonoid-enriched chocolate improved long-term heart disease risk
To study the effects of flavonoids—nutrients found in a variety of foods such as tea, herbs and spices, onions, wine, dark chocolate, and berries—on heart-disease risk in women with diabetes, researchers randomly assigned 118 postmenopausal women to eat 1 ounce of flavonoid-enriched chocolate or 1 ounce of regular chocolate daily for one year. The women were 51 to 74 years old at the start of the study, were instructed to eat equal portions of chocolate with lunch and dinner each day, and were taking medications, such as insulin or cholesterol-lowering drugs, as needed, to manage long-term heart disease risk.
Compared with the women eating regular chocolate, several health markers were favorably changed in the women eating the flavonoid-enriched chocolate, including reductions in:
The flavonoid supplemented group also showed improved insulin sensitivity. There were no differences in blood pressure, an indicator of long-term glucose control (hemoglobin A1c), or glucose levels between the two groups.
This study found that flavonoid-enriched chocolate improved long-term heart disease risk in postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes. The flavonoid-enriched chocolate was made especially for this study, so it is not available on store shelves at this time. However, our tips can help you get your flavonoid fix, with or without chocolate.
(Diabetes Care 2012;35:226–32)