You Want Chocolate. You Need Flavanols

New findings from Harvard researchers pinpoint reduced inflammation as the key to cocoa’s effects against cardiovascular disease.

The work follows a large probe of the possible health benefits of cocoa that ran from 2014 to 2020. Called COSMOS, the study showed that cocoa supplements reduced cardiovascular disease mortality by 27 percent among 21,442 subjects 60 and older. What that study didn’t explain is how.

The new work, published in the journal Age and Ageing, analyzed COSMOS blood samples and shows that a widely accepted marker of inflammation called high sensitivity C-reactive protein fell 8.4 percent annually compared with placebo.

Howard Sesso, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and associate director of the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said that the findings provide more evidence of the impact of inflammation as we age, evidence that has become strong enough that specialists have coined the term “inflammaging.”