5 Reasons Chocolate Is Good For You At Menopause

Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Birthdays, Easter. What do they all have in common? Gifts of chocolate usually, and although welcome we may worry that it isn’t really healthy – but we would be wrong, particularly as we get older.

Healthy benefits from eating chocolate

I have to admit I would eat chocolate whether it was healthy or not – but good to know that actually it can be helpful. Of course it depends on the type of chocolate and that means one with a minimum 70-85% cocoa content. A single 100 gram bar of dark chocolate will give you fibre, iron, magnesium, copper, manganese, potassium, phosphorus, zinc and selenium – so that’s plenty of good-tasting minerals right there. Make sure it is also organic and you are getting even more benefit.

These are good reasons to not give up on chocolate, plus how bioidentical hormones can also help.

1. Eating chocolate can help you stay thin

A new study by researchers at the University of California-San Diego found that people who frequently eat chocolate have lower body-mass indexes than people who don’t. Of course it will depend on how healthy the rest of your diet is!

2. Chocolate decreases stroke risk

A Swedish study found that eating more than 45 grams of chocolate a week led to a 20 percent decrease in stroke risk among women. Chocolate contains flavonoids (antioxidant compounds that protect against free radical damage), whose properties help fight strokes. Also, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University found that Epicatechin, a compound found in chocolate dark shields cells in your brain, and so protects it from damage caused by strokes.

3. Chocolate reduces the likelihood of a heart attack

Blood platelets clump together more slowly in chocolate eaters which means that it may prevents blood clots, which in turn reduces the risk of heart attacks.

4. Chocolate helps your brain function better

It didn’t work for me, but British psychologists found that flavanols in chocolate helped people with their mental arithmetic. Study subjects had an easier time counting backwards from a randomly-generated number between 800 and 999 after drinking a cup of hot chocolate than they did without the cocoa. For the latest study researchers asked healthy elderly patients to drink a daily cocoa supplement that contained 138 milligrams of epicatechin flavanols. After three months, when tested, they performed as well on memory tests as a control group of participants 20 or 30 years younger.

So if the common ‘brain fog’ is hitting you at menopause then a cup of cocoa might just do the trick, but you will also find the same flavanols in cinnamon, apples, and green tea.

5. Chocolate can help reduce blood pressure

Scientists have discovered that the antioxidant flavonoids in chocolate can lower blood pressure, improve the elasticity of blood vessels, and may increase HDL (the good cholesterol). But remember it can also be high in fat and sugar, which can pile on the pounds and that is definitely not too good for blood pressure.