Photo: Monika Grabkowska, Unsplash
The Old “Magic Elixir” Name Might Be Right, Especially For Anti-Aging:
No matter who you are, it’s tough to live a life without at least some kind of problems or complication.
What’s even worse is to have a problem you didn’t know about.
So, some of the best things you can do are to get into great general habits.
Because things like regular exercise and great nutrition can help head-off a lot of stuff before it even starts.
The list of problems exercise reduces or helps you avoid is pretty impressive.
So is the one that nutrition helps with as well.
And the team at Mass-General Brigham is finding out that chocolate might help you avoid a very sneaky hidden problem over time…
The Short Answer:
- A lot of food & drink has helpful properties beyond just calories.
- Mass-General ran a 2 year study on 600 subjects, aged 70 and tested 5 markers.
- It concerned itself with cocoa’s impact on health.
- The average subject had an 8.4%/year reduction of inflammation.
- The worst subjects had a 38%/year reduction.
- The hidden problem this helps fix is age-related inflammation that sets-in over time.
- This type can cause problems with heart-disease, stroke, bones, and other serious disease.
- The greater body of work shows decreases from 7-23% in cardiovascular diseases and 27% for early-mortality.
- CocoVia is probably the supplement they used, but you can get similar effects from tea, coffee, and berries.
- It would be hard to get enough strong dark chocolate to get the same effect.
- Inflammation can sometimes be identified by mental fatigue that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t feel exactly the same as sleepiness.
- Regular exercise can also fight off this age-related “Inflammaging”.
Read on to find out the details…
> Show/Hide Table Of Contents <
The Health Benefits Hidden In Common Food & Drink:
So, it’s pretty funny that a lot of the foods we eat, and the things we put on them, turn out to be not just tasty, but helpful.
For example, lots of tasty herbs and spices actually have anti-microbial properties, like all the ones traditionally put in sausages.
Tea isn’t just tasty, tannic, and toasty, coffee isn’t just full-bodied and invigorating.
And it looks like the same is true for another dark roasted thing you can drink.
The Most Extensive Study On Cocoa Yields Real Results!:
So in a small/mid-size trial of about 600 adults, average aged 70, researchers looked at the effects of cocoa-products on health.
But what distinguished this work was its length: two years; when most studies on cocoa last either weeks or months.
Across that time, subjects were given a high-strength cocoa supplement and had their blood tested for 5 different markers.
And it actually made a surprising difference!
The Numbers Don’t Lie! A Reduction Of Inflammation Is Not “Woo-Woo”:
Because the stand-out marker turned out to be one for inflammation!
And subjects taking the magic supplement had an average 8.4% reduction in it every single year of the trial.
Even better? Those with the highest marker score at the beginning reduced theirs by an amazing 38%/year!
Well, other than helping the tiny percentage of worst-cases, so what; right?
Who cares if you have a little inflammation. That’s what you take Advil for!
Age-Acquired Inflammation Is Actually Not So Trivial:
Well that’s the problem. Because it’s not so little.
For some weird & unfortunate reason, inflammation seems to set-in and very likely increase as you get older.
The general term used for this and anything that accelerates your aging through the process is called, “Inflammaging”.
The scary part of that is there were subjects in the trial who had “Danger Zone” levels of that marker at or above the threshold of 10mg/l.
So for them, the problem may have been hidden, but it was a big one.
And the idea that a simple thing like fancy cocoa making such a difference is pretty big news.
Some Of The Problems That Can Result From Inflammaging:
For example, here are just a few of the problems tied to this kind of inflammation that many people just seem to pick up with age:
1) Heart attack
2) Stroke
3) Hardening arteries
4) Cardio diseases
5) Memory problems
6) Bone frailty
7) Muscle damage
8) Brain damage
9) Arthritis
10) Autoimmune issues
11) Diabetes
12) Other serious diseases
A Real Drop In Early-Mortality If You Get Great Stuff In Your Diet!:
For example given the current results, researchers estimate the range of decrease in cardio disease could go from 7-23%.
And their previous work with 21,000 subjects over 6 years showed reductions in cardio-based mortality and serious disease by 27%!
But here’s some bad news & good news.
First, you can’t really eat enough dark chocolate, even at the strongest concentration made, which is currently Lindt 100%.
The supplements subjects took (in 500mg doses/day) had somewhere around 24x the specific compounds you might find in chocolate.
They’re very likely the CocoaVia ones you see on Amazon.
However, because these compounds are everywhere in things like tea, coffee, berries and many other plant-based foods,
That means you can get them in many different places and without all the fat & sugar that’s in the kind of chocolate most people eat.
You can find some great sources right here in the flavonoid superpost.
Cocoa Might Be One Of The Few True “Superfoods”:
It might be hard to find the ultimate Superfood, especially because that term gets thrown-around so much.
But it’s looking like cocoa might be right up there with blueberries and nuts.
And for those who are curious, you can always have a small guess at your own inflammation.
A lot of time, it will show up as sniffles, feeling a little “sinusy”, a mild headache,
Or even feeling not sleepy, but mentally-fatigued, usually out of nowhere.
This is also how you can tell whether or not you ate something that caused inflammation, like UPFs.
Mental Fatigue Signals And How To Fight Back Against Inflammaging:
The tendency will be not “carbohydrate sleepiness”, but mental fatigue.
Also, there’s no real guarantee that excess inflammation is restricted to older people.
And among things like flavonoids in that superpost, it also turns-out that Exercise itself is anti-inflammatory!
So, you may not have to buy an expensive supplement if you can avoid the wrong foods, and get the right ones.
-Especially if you get things like tea, coffee, or the occasional piece of the highest-powered dark chocolate you can stand!
That, and regular exercise could help ward-off stealth-health problems like “Inflammaging” before you even thought about them.
Living To 100+? -HERE WE COME!!
References & Links:
• Source: MassGen Brigham
• More Coverage: The COSMOS Trial
• Source Study: Age&Aging – Effects of 2-year cocoa extract supplementation on inflammaging biomarkers in older US adults: findings from the COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study randomised clinical trial
