Chocolate in your cells

There is no shortage of good health news emerging about chocolate these days, especially dark chocolate. Dark chocolate is the favoured mode of chocolate because it contains more cocoa and it is the cocoa that contains health promoting flavonoids. One of those flavonoids is called epicatechin and a new study has shown that the effects of chocolate may go deeper than previously expected; as deep as the energy producing units within your cells.

The study examined five extremely ill patients with major damage to their skeletal muscles arising from either heart failure or type 2 diabetes. Both of these conditions lead to damage to components of heart and muscle cells called “mitochondria”. These mitochondria serve as the power generators for each cell and provide the energy necessary for cells to move, divide, and contract.

People with type 2 diabetes and heart failure experience difficulty walking, shortness of breath, and general lack of energy all as a result of inefficient mitochondria.

For the study these people with measurable damage to their skeletal muscle cell mitochondria ate one dark chocolate bar each day for three months. They also had a daily chocolate drink so that in total they were consuming 100mg of epicatechin from dark chocolate each day.

At the beginning of the study and then at the end of the three months the researchers took muscle biopsies and used them to check the health of the mitochondria for these people.

At the end of three months the numbers of cristae in the mitochondria had moved back to normal levels. Cristae are compartments formed by the inner membrane of the mitochondria and they are vital for the mitochondria to function efficiently as well as being easy to measure. There were also indications that the number of mitochondria in the muscle cells were increasing.

These changes led to improved heart and skeletal muscle function.

All of this is not a license to eat as much chocolate as you like in the interests of supporting your mitochondria, especially since you may not know the epicatechin content of your chocolate. It does show though that the effects of chocolate reach down deep into your biology but then, I guess, chocoholics already knew that.