By Music to my ears and others, no doubt, after you read this
Hmmm, a bit of chocolate doesn’t do any harm at all! Image from Freepik. When I saw this research, I jumped! Could one of my most loved obsessions be good for my health? I knew there must be a catch somewhere. But, unfortunately, these things are usually far too good to be true! We associated this one ingredient with weight gain for a long time and kept it at a minimum in case our backside grew more significant. But now, there is evidence proving that eating this one has unexpected benefits! Before I begin, these findings highlight that ‘what’ and ‘when’ we eat can impact our psychological mechanisms in regulating body weight. This makes perfect sense, but how do we break it down? During a full 24, hour day, we must be mindful of when we eat certain things, as that can impact how it affects our weight. Hopefully, this makes sense. It’s much like carb timing. We eat our carbs after training so that we can increase muscle glycogen. That encourages our carbs to feed our muscles instead of those fat cells! Researcher’s from Brigham collaborated with investigators at the University of Murcia in Spain to learn more about the effects of eating milk chocolate at different times of the day. They conducted a randomised trial of 19 postmenopausal women that consumed 100g of chocolate in the mornings (within an hour of waking) Or at night (within an hour of going to bed). They compared weight gain and a few other measurements to no chocolate intake.
Here are the following points from this report.
- Morning or night chocolate intake did not lead to weight gain
- Eating chocolate in the morning leads to lower stress levels during the day
- Eating chocolate in the morning or evening can influence hunger and appetite, microbiota composition, sleep and more
- A high intake of chocolate in the morning could help burn more fat and reduce blood glucose levels
- Evening/night chocolate altered next morning resting and exercise metabolic rate
- Females who consumed chocolate in the mornings reduced their waist circumference!
The volunteers did not gain weight despite the increase in caloric intake -and these were postmenopausal women, who are more vulnerable to gaining weight. It seems that the consumption of chocolate reduced energy intake, whilst reduced hunger, appetite and the desire for sweets shown in previous studies! Could this mean that a little bit of good quality chocolate could lead to fewer cravings and no weight gain? From the sound evidence of this study, the answer could well, in fact, be a sound YES! I don’t know about you, but I’m too keen on eating chocolate in the morning, but after my lunch (before I begin fasting), I’d be super glad to try this! I ready do eat chocolate after lunch — but the vegan, dark variety. Who has tried this experiment and found it to be beneficial? Here is the study if you want a closer look — but honestly, we don’t need science to tell us it’s ok, as we probably already eat chocolate anyway!
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