Dark Chocolate & Your Age

It’s well-established that chocolate has some health-giving properties, mostly because of its very impressive polyphenol profile.

See for example:

• Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain ← this is because foods that are bitter, astringent, and/or pungent, tend to be rich in polyphenols, which as well as their strong antioxidant properties, also exhibit specifically cardioprotective and neuroprotective effects
• Sharp Tastes, Sharp Brain? ← this one’s about how the taste of flavonols (a category under the general umbrella of of flavonoids, which itself is under the general umbrella of polyphenols) itself helps, even before the compound itself is absorbed
• Are You Getting The Right Kinds Of Flavonoids? ← for more about what we just mentioned

So now for some of the latest science…

Come to the dark side; we have chocolate

First of all: why not milk chocolate, doesn’t that have polyphenols too?

And well yes, it does, but in much smaller quantities because the cocoa percentage is much, much lower.

• In the US, 10% cocoa is the norm for milk chocolate
• In Europe, 25% is the threshold that if it’s not met, you can’t legally call it chocolate
• Anywhere, 80–90% is a reasonable range for dark chocolate

So, to get the same polyphenol benefits, you might need to eat 8–9x as much chocolate, and as you can imagine, that might cause different problems.

See also: 10 “Healthy” Foods That Are Often Worse Than You Think ← since milk chocolate often has not just the plummeting cocoa percentage, but also, much more saturated fat and sugar (and that latter’s one to watch out for when choosing dark chocolate, too; some are very different from others!)

Most recently, a team of researchers (Dr. Jordana Bell et al.) did a study with 509 healthy women with an average age of 60, and tested six common cocoa-related chemicals, including caffeine and theobromine, to see whether any were linked to faster or slower biological aging.

A quick note before we continue, about that “biological aging”, we’ve written before about how biological age often gets talked about as a simplified number, but it’s more complex than that, as we can age in different ways at different rates, for example:

• Visual markers of aging (e.g. wrinkles, graying hair)
• Performative markers of aging (e.g. mobility tests)
• Internal functional markers of aging (e.g. tests for cognitive decline, eyesight, hearing, etc)
• Cellular markers of aging (e.g. telomere length)
• …and more, but we only have so much room here

For more on that (including what we can do about each of them to slow or in some cases reverse biological aging), see:

Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?

Now, back to the study: what Dr. Bell and her team mainly used as the key epigenetic clock was a DNA methylation model, and what they found was that theobromine stood out—women with higher levels of this chocolate-derived compound had biological-age scores that were about 1.5 years younger.

This association was incredibly statistically significant, p = 3.99e-6, which means the chance of getting these results by chance (i.e. coincidence) is so small that the scientists are putting letters into their numbers to express it. It’s the equivalent of about 1 in 250,627 odds.

You can find the paper in full here: Theobromine is Associated with Slower Epigenetic Ageing ← when you click, on the abstract is visible at first, but if you then click on PDF, you’ll get the rest.

This is a very strong extra benefit, which builds on the previous work we wrote about in Cocoa vs Biological Aging! ← which had to do with inflammatory aging biomarkers

Want to learn more?

You want like to read about…

The “Love Drug” ← this is about phenylethlyamine, a compound found in chocolate that works similarly the amphetamine (but with rather less potential for abuse/harm, for most people).

Enjoy!