Dark Chocolate Is Medicine, but Not Milk Chocolate?

The concept of turning food into medicine mildly repels us. But telling us chocolate is medicine simply goes over the line. Yet here comes a study in the BMJ, spinning off headlines about dark chocolate as a “bittersweet remedy for diabetes risk.” Milk chocolate? Nope. In fact, the authors of this observational study say milk chocolate has a significant association with long-term weight gain.

Not surprisingly, one of the most visible champions of food-is-medicine, Dariush Mozaffarian, “fully embraces” this. He told the New York Times:

“People have this concept that healthy eating means eating things that don’t taste good. But many delicious foods are also healthy.

“Dark chocolate is a great example of that.”

Observational Research

This is where we remind you that all of this inference about the healthfulness of dark chocolate and the harmfulness of milk chocolate comes from observational research. Specifically, these researchers dredged through data from the Nurses’ Health Study, the Nurses’ Health Study II, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study to find these associations. What they found was a 21% lower risk of type 2 diabetes with higher consumption of dark chocolate.

To their credit, the authors are careful throughout their manuscript to write only in terms of finding associations between chocolate consumption and health outcomes.

But people get the idea. Even the Times suggests it: “Could dark chocolate reduce your risk of diabetes?” One must read well past the headlines to get the real story:

“The research did not prove that the chocolate itself was responsible for this health benefit; it could be something else about the people who ate dark chocolate that made them less likely to develop diabetes. And dark chocolate should not be considered a ‘magic bullet’ for preventing diabetes, said Dr. Qi Sun, an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the lead investigator on the study.”

Leave Chocolate Out of This

Our plea is simple. Let food be food. It is important all by itself, but it’s no substitute for medicine when that’s what a person needs. This goes double for chocolate. We love dark chocolate. Don’t ruin it by pretending it’s akin to metformin.

Click here for the study in BMJ, here and here for further perspective.

Dark Chocolate from My Advent Calendar, photograph by Ted Kyle / ConscienHealth

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December 7, 2024