Dark Chocolate: A Tastier Super Food?

Dark chocolate has long been known as “better for you” than its lighter, milk-based cousin. More than just the lesser of two delicious chocolatey evils, dark chocolate can help you maintain healthy blood pressure, promote blood flow, and even promote heart health. That's all due to the large amounts of flavonols that dark chocolate contains.

Now a study out of Kingston University in London, UK, suggests that dark chocolate could help give sports enthusiasts an extra edge in their fitness training.

Dark chocolate is rich in nitrates, which are converted to nitric oxide in the body, dilate blood vessels and reduce oxygen consumption. It's for this reason that athletes have long taken nitrate-rich beetjuice in their training, and why researchers theorized dark chocolate might be able to serve a similar – and decidedly tastier – role.

To test the theory, the scientists carried out a study with a group of nine amateur cyclists. After undergoing initial fitness tests to establish a baseline for comparison, the participants were then split into two groups. The first group was asked to replace one of its normal daily snacks with 40g of a dark chocolate known to be rich in flavanols for a fortnight, while the other participants substituted 40g of white chocolate for one of their daily snacks as a control.

The effects of the athletes' daily chocolate consumption were then measured in a series of cycling exercise tests. The cyclists' heart rates and oxygen consumption levels were measured during moderate exercise and in time trials. After a seven-day interval, the groups then switched chocolate types and the two-week trial and subsequent exercise tests were repeated.

The study, which has now been published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, found that after eating dark chocolate, the riders used less oxygen when cycling at a moderate pace and also covered more distance in a two-minute flat-out time trial.

Researcher Rishikesh Patel who led the team said the results opened the door for more research which could eventually lead to dark chocolate becoming a staple part of endurance athletes' diets.

"We want to see whether the boost in performance is a short term effect – you eat a bar and within a day it works – or whether it takes slightly longer, which is what the initial research is showing," Mr Patel said. "We are also investigating the optimal level of flavanols. At the moment there is not a lot of consistency in flavanol levels in commercially-available chocolate. Once we've found the optimal chocolate dose and duration, we'll compare its effects to those of beetroot juice, and also test the influence of combining consumption of both, as they produce an increase in nitric oxide in slightly different ways."