A Virginia Tech scientist who conducted a long term research project has found that a specific antioxidant in cocoa can “dramatically” increase the body’s ability to fight many modern-day ailments such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.
Andrew Neilson, an Assistant Professor of food science and technology at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech, discovered that one particular type of antioxidant in cocoa prevented laboratory mice from gaining excess weight and lowered their blood sugar levels. An article about the study was recently published in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry.
“Initially cocoa was shown to have cardiovascular benefits. Now, we are looking at other benefits of cocoa beyond the heart,” said Professor Neilson, who is an affiliated researcher with the Fralin Life Science Institute, noting that the research could lead to the development of healthy food additives made from cocoa compounds. “We are trying to identify compounds and insert them into products that can be enhanced to elicit desired health effects,” he said.
Professor Neilson’s research showed that one particular type of compound in cocoa prevented laboratory mice from gaining excess weight and lowered their blood sugar levels when fed a diet high in fat. The flavanol oligomers appear to possess the greatest ability to prevent obesity and elevated blood sugar.
Research regarding the health benefits of cocoa is not new, but three things set this study apart from its predecessors. The research performed by Professor Neilson and his team was designed to be long-term, incorporated live animal models, and used a lower amount of cocoa compounds as compared to other studies. “It’s important to use translatable doses to really see the effects of the compounds and how they function,” he said.
Not all of the flavanols (a type of antioxidant) in cocoa and other foods are created equal, said Virginia Tech in a statement. Cocoa has several different kinds of these compounds, so Professor Neilson’s team decided to tease them apart and test each one individually for health benefits.
For the study, Neilson and his research team painstakingly created flavanols in three different variations: monomers, oligomers, and polymers. Oligomeric cocoa procyanidins appear to possess the greatest anti-obesity and anti-diabetic bioactivities of the flavanols in cocoa, particularly at the low doses employed for the present study.
Because of the long-term nature of the study and the low doses involved, Professor Neilson said that the desired results could potentially be translatable to humans and “reasonably achieved with a couple of servings a day, ideally from low-fat, low-sugar sources of cocoa such as dark chocolate, cocoa nibs, and hot cocoa.”
