Chocolate Reduces Stress, Study Finds

By: Carla Moskowitz

There has been some new evidence that eating dark chocolate every day can reduces stress! People who have rated themselves highly stressed with lower levels of stress hormones after eating chocolate everyday for two weeks! The subjects of this study ate 1.4 ounces of dark chocolate a day. To prove this study doctors took urine and blood plasma samples of the participants in the beginning, middle, and end of the two week study. From these samples they found lower levels of the stress hormones cortisol and catecholamines in samples at the end. Written for everyone to see by the researchers; "The daily consumption of dark chocolate resulted in a significant modification of the metabolism of healthy and free living human volunteers with potential long-term consequences on human health with in only two weeks treatment." Also "This was observable through the reduction of levels of stress-associated hormones and normalization of the systemic stress metabolic signatures." This research shows that certain substances in chocolate such as antioxidants called polyphenols can be helpful health benefits. Previous studies have found chocolate does help fight heart disease and help prevent the chance of developing cancer. But since chocolate is not very healthy for the reason that it contains a lot of sugar and fat you have to watch how much of it you eat. My opinion is that a lot of people will like the fact that chocolate reduces stress because then they could eat more of it. Which will lead to more people being obese and a lot of people in this world are already obese so i don't believe saying to the world dark chocolate reduces stress because people will take advantage of it.

I got my information from: http://www.livescience.com/health/091111-chocolate-reduces-stress.html