Heart Benefit from Chocolate?

Australian scientists found that older women who ate chocolate at least once a week had fewer heart attacks and other events attributed to atherosclerotic vascular disease. The data were collected from more than 1200 women over the course of five years in conjunction with a study on the effects of calcium supplementation. These data don’t indicate a cause-and-effect connection. Still, it is impressive that the rate of heart failure among the chocolate consumers was about half that of the abstainers. The overall risk was about 24 percent lower. The researchers suggest a randomized controlled trial to determine if cocoa or chocolate might be a safe and acceptable method of reducing the risk of vascular disease.
[Archives of Internal Medicine, Nov 8, 2010]