KH9UUMNGGQCG Did you know that eating dark chocolate, just a little every week, has been shown in studies to be good for your heart?  Eating dark chocolate, once or twice per week could protect you or at least, lower your risk for heart failure.  This good health news comes from the BBC news site.  Enjoy, while munching on a little piece of chocolate.  This comes from a recent study in the United States.  Studies show that it helps protect women, especially those in menopause.

“It found those eating chocolate once or twice a week cut the risk of developing heart failure by a third, but those eating it every day did not benefit. The Boston study, in a journal of the American Heart Association, looked at nearly 32,000 Swedish women aged between 48 and 83 over nine years. Dieticians say eating chocolate too often can be damaging and unhealthy. The study notes that one or two 19 to 30 gram servings of dark chocolate a week led to a 32% reduction in heart failure risk. This fell to 26% when one to three servings a month were eaten.

But those who ate chocolate every day did not appear to reduce their risk of heart failure at all.
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Whilst antioxidants in chocolate may be helpful to your heart, they can also be found in fruit and veg – foods which don’t come with the saturated fat and high calories”

The researchers conclude the protective effect of eating chocolate reduces as more or less is eaten than the optimum one to two servings a week.
‘Flavanoids‘

Too much chocolate is unhealthy because it contains high levels of sugar and fat which can make people put on weight, the researchers say.

But chocolate also contains high concentration of compounds called flavonoids which can lower blood pressure and protect against heart disease, previous studies have found.

The researchers behind this study say this is the first time long-term effects related specifically to heart failure have been shown.

Dr Murray Mittleman is study leader and director of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston.

He said: “You can’t ignore that chocolate is a relatively calorie-dense food and large amounts of habitual consumption is going to raise your risks for weight gain.

“But if you’re going to have a treat, dark chocolate is probably a good choice, as long as it’s in moderation,” Dr Mittleman said.
Cocoa content

Differences in chocolate quality will affect the study’s implications, the authors say. Higher cocoa content is associated with greater heart benefits.

Although the chocolate consumed by the Swedish women in the study was milk chocolate, it contained a high concentration of cocoa solids – about 30%.

This is equivalent to dark chocolate by UK standards.

Dark chocolate can contain as much as 75% cocoa while standard milk chocolate may have 25% or less cocoa.

Victoria Taylor, senior dietitian at the British Heart Foundation, said the study showed the importance of finding the right balance in our diets.

“Before you rip open those sweet treats, remember that whilst antioxidants in chocolate may be helpful to your heart, they can also be found in fruit and veg – foods which don’t come with the saturated fat and high calories that chocolate does,” she said.”

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This just in from Reuters health news:

“Calcium supplements, which many people consume hoping to ward off osteoporosis, may increase the risk of heart attack by as much as 30 percent, researchers reported Friday.

These tiny tablets which carry concentrated doses of calcium were also associated with higher incidences of stroke and death, but they were not statistically significant.

The researchers advised people consuming calcium supplements to seek advice from their doctors, take more calcium-rich foods and try other interventions like exercise, not smoking and keeping a healthy weight to prevent osteoporosis.

“People regard calcium supplements as natural but they are really not natural at all,” Ian Reid, professor of medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said in a telephone interview.

Reid and colleagues in Britain and the United States conducted a meta-analysis encompassing 11 studies that tracked nearly 12,000 elderly people over four years.

Half of them were given calcium supplements and the other half placebo or dummy pills with no therapeutic content. The results were published in the British Medical Journal.

“What we found was a 30 percent increase in heart attacks in the people who were randomized to take calcium,” Reid said.
“If you have 1,000 people taking calcium for five years, we will expect to find 14 more heart attacks, 10 more strokes and 13 more deaths in the people given calcium than they would have had if they hadn’t been treated with calcium,” Reid said.

“That is 37 more adverse events and we expect 26 fractures being prevented. So calcium is associated with more bad things happening than with bad things prevented.”

While experts are not certain about the biological mechanism by which calcium supplements may damage the body, studies in the past have linked high levels of blood calcium to more heart attacks and damage to blood vessels, Reid said.

“When you take calcium supplements, your blood calcium level goes up over the following four to six hours and goes up to the top end of the normal range,” he said.

“That doesn’t happen when you have calcium to eat in your diet because the calcium from food is very slowly absorbed and so the blood calcium level hardly changes at all.”

Higher blood calcium may lead to the formation of plaques in blood vessels, which can lead to heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases, Reid explained.

“People have always focused on fat levels in the blood as driving that process (plaque formation) but there is increasing evidence now that calcium levels in the blood might drive that as well,” he added.”

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We’ve been hearing it for years that sugar is bad for you.  Long ago, it was bad for you because it rots your teeth and causes cavities.  Then we heard it was bad for you because it made you gain weight.  After that, we slowly began to hear rumours that it actually fed cancers.  We now know also that consuming too much sugar and junk food will cause diabetes.  Now the latest health news updates are showing that sugar increases the risk factors for heart disease.  Sugar is the number one enemy and we should start eliminating it from our diets – sugars in all shapes and forms.

Americans who consumed more added sugars than the average adult were more likely to have risk factors for heart disease than those who consumed less than the average, a new study suggests.  Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta found that among the people they studied, those who ate the greatest amount of caloric sweeteners in processed or prepared foods and beverages had the lowest high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, known as the good cholesterol, and the highest blood triglyceride levels.

The results appear in Tuesday’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found added sugars have no nutritional value, the researchers said.

“Just like eating a high-fat diet can increase your levels of triglycerides and high [density] cholesterol, eating sugar can also affect those same lipids,” study co-author Dr. Miriam Vos, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Emory School of Medicine, said in a news release. The researchers analyzed U.S. government nutritional data and blood lipid levels of 6,113 adult men and women between 1999 and 2006.
They found that within the sample group, those who ate the least sugar had the highest HDL and lowest triglyceride levels,
Sugar consumption within the group ranged from an average of three teaspoons of added sugars per day (12.6 grams) to 46 teaspoons per day (193 grams).
The average adult in the U.S. consumes the equivalent of 21.4 teaspoons, or 359 calories, of added sugars per day, according to the study.
Spot sugar on the label
The American Heart Association says too much sugar contributes to obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.
Last August, the group said Americans need to cut back dramatically on sugar consumption.
It recommended women eat no more than 100 calories per day of added processed sugar, the equivalent of six teaspoons (25 grams), and men no more than 150 calories, or nine teaspoons (37.5 grams).
“If we are concerned about heart disease risk, then we also need to be paying attention to the amount of caloric sweeteners and added sugars in the foods we eat,” said the study’s lead author, Jean Welsh, a registered nurse.
The researchers said Americans are consuming more sugar than 30 years ago. Much of it comes from sweeteners added to increase the desirability of processed foods such as sugar-sweetened beverages, cereals and desserts.
Identifying added sugars on nutrition labels is the first step to reducing sugar intake, the U.S. government site womenshealth.gov suggest.

Added sugars can appear under terms such as:

•    Corn sweetener.
•    Corn syrup.
•    High-fructose corn syrup.
•    Dextrose.
•    Fructose.
•    Glucose.
•    Lactose.
•    Maltose.
•    Sucrose.
•    Honey.
•    Sugar.
•    Brown sugar.
•    Invert sugar.
•    Molasses.
•    Malt syrup.
•    Syrup.
But the industry group the Sugar Association told the health news website Health Day it “disputes the notion that sugar consumption has increased.”  It cited a U.S. Department of Agriculture report that claimed consumption of caloric sweeteners, including sugar, has decreased 9.7 per cent over the past decade.

The Sugar Association said the same advice holds for sugar as for all foods and beverages: consume in moderation.

Source:  CBC News