American researchers show that a fraction of cocoa-specific antioxidants are found to be able to prevent excessive weight gain and lower blood sugar levels in laboratory mice exposed to a high-fat diet.
Cocoa antioxidants, specifically flavanols, have already shown favorable effects in the cardiovascular field, in particular by promoting endothelium-dependent vasodilation. The range of their health benefits may well expand to other modern day scourges, such as diabetes and obesity.
In any case, this is a new avenue opened by this study conducted by Andrew Neilson, of the Department of Food Science and Technology in Blacksburg, Virginia, and his colleagues. One of the particularities of this study is to have separated different fractions of flavanols, mainly procyanidins, to study them separately. Because if all are antioxidants, they do not have the same properties.
They thus separately evaluated the administration of monomers, oligomers and polymers to mice exposed to a diet rich in fat for 12 weeks. Animals that received the oligomer fraction gained less weight, accumulated less fat, and had better glucose tolerance and lower insulin resistance than other animals exposed to the fat diet.
For Neilson, given the low doses used in this study as well as its duration, it is not excluded that such effects may be observed in humans with a few daily servings of cocoa, ideally in a version low in fat and sugar . However, we are still far from a chocolate that would prevent weight gain.