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Eating chocolate when dieting helps accelerate weight loss
If combined with a low-carb diet, dark chocolate increases the effects of weight loss by 10 percent. And maintains them over time.
Combining greed and weight loss is possible. This is what a German study of the Institute of diet and health of Mainz published in the International Archives of Medicine reveals. This piece of research demonstrates that by adding 42 g of dark chocolate with 81 percent cocoa content to their daily diet, people lost 10 percent more weight than people who followed a traditional diet that forbids the consumption of chocolate.
German researchers divided volunteers aged 19 to 67 into three groups: one followed a low-carbohydrates diet, another ate the same diet with an additional daily serving of 42 g of dark chocolate and the third (the control group) didn’t follow any specific diet. After tracking the participants’ weight and measuring a few metabolic parameters, researchers assessed that the two groups on a diet lost weight compared to the control group. However, the low-carb plus chocolate group lost 10 percent more weight than those volunteers who didn’t eat chocolate. Consuming chocolate, furthermore, reduced cholesterol levels in the blood and improved the quality of sleep of the participants. Researchers also found that long-term weight loss occurred easier and more successfully in the former group and not in the latter.
“What is important is the specific combination of foods in your diet”, says Johannes Bohannon, research director of the Institute of Diet and Health and author of the study. “Just lowering the proportion of carbohydrates is not a reliable weight loss intervention because it has different physiological effect depending on the bioactive compounds in your diet.” Chocolate is rich in bioactive compounds and antioxidants, in particular flavonoids, a group of plant metabolites that provide health benefits and probably play an important role in the weight loss process.
“To our surprise, the effect of chocolate is real,” adds Bohannon. “It is not enough to just consume chocolate, but in combination with exercise and reduction in carbohydrates, our data indicate that chocolate can be a weight loss accelerator. The best part about this discovery is that you can buy chocolate everywhere, cheaply and without having to believe diet gurus or purchase expensive nutrition products over the Internet”, Bohannon concludes.
The Institute of diet and health of Mainz is a non-profit medical commission that mostly deals with the spread of obesity worldwide.
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