I could, without pausing for breath, name a dozen people who must never know of this research.
From The Scientist:
A study of 19 postmenopausal women found that eating a bar of chocolate in the morning affected their bodies differently than eating it at night, but neither led to weight gain.
Dark chocolate is often touted as a heart-healthy and relatively nutritious snack, yet most chocolate sweets are made using milk chocolate, a version that is higher in fat, sugar, and calories. Recent studies have found that giving rats milk chocolate when they wake keeps their circadian rhythms from being disrupted during simulated jet lag, adding to a long line of evidence showing that when we eat can have as much bearing on our health as what goes into our bellies.
To better understand how the timing of milk chocolate consumption affects human health, the authors of a new study, published June 24 in The FASEB Journal, 19 postmenopausal women each underwent a series of two-week experimental sessions in a randomly assigned order, with one-week breaks in between. The sessions included one in which they ate no chocolate, one where they ate 100 grams of milk chocolate within an hour of waking, and one in which they ate the same amount of chocolate, but an hour before bed. During each two-week phase, the researchers tracked metrics such as the women’s weight, hunger and cortisol levels, the number of calories they consumed each day in addition to the chocolate, physical activity, lipid and carbohydrate oxidation (a measure of energy expenditure), glucose metabolism, and changes to their gut microbiota. Among the study’s findings was that none of the groups gained weight and that, in fact, eating chocolate in the morning led to declines in the women’s waist circumference and their fasting glucose levels—potentially lowering their risk of pre-diabetes and other metabolic disorders.
The Scientist spoke with two authors of the paper—Frank Scheer, a neuroscientist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Marta Garaulet Aza, a nutritionist at the University of Murcia in Spain and a visiting scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital—about how the timing of eating chocolate could affect our bodies in different ways....
....MUCH MORE
