Chocolate May be good for you.

The most recent group of papers sent to us included two seperate papers making reference to chocolate and its anti-inflammatory effects. The first was "Snacking in the Line of Duty." Here was a very quick reference to flavanols which "relax blood vessels, improve blood flow, decrease blood clotting and redue inflammation." The second article was "Chocolate 'has health benefits'". After reading these articles idecided to look at this more closely. When I typed in "flavanol" in the Yahoo search engine 4 of the first 5 entries were from the Hershey Company. Looking at these entries they were using their website to explain the benefits of flavanol. Surprisingly they also mentioned flavanols could be found in berries, teas and red wines as well. Without disputing the positive effects of flavanol I think we can still say chocolate will not be changing it's status to "health food." As the Snacking in the Line of Duty article shows, having some benefits, such as flavanols, does not necessarily outweigh the downside, such as fat and sugar. The second article makes mention of diabetics eating chocolate. However, if you look at the ingredients in Hershey's Special Dark chocolate bar the first ingredient listed is still sugar. If the individual has Type 2 diabetes, the flavanols might help with the metabolizing of sugar but if the individual is a Type 1 diabetic, the pancreas is not producing insulin and the individual will need to inject higher doses of insulin to compensate for the higher intake of sugar.
Unfortunately for the many chocolate lovers in the world it looks like more evidence will be needed to say it actually has "benefits".