Friday, October 12, 2012

Dark Chocolate Relieves Stress and Lowers Blood Pressure

12 October 2012GreenMedInfo.com
Margie King -
Ask most women and they’ll tell you that a good dose of chocolate really takes the edge off.  It’s not a joke.  Science confirms that eating dark chocolate helps relieve emotional stress and also lowers blood pressure.
A study published in the Journal of Proteome Research found that consuming 40 grams (about 1.4 ounces) of dark chocolate daily for a period of two weeks reduced levels of the stress hormone cortisol and catecholamines, the fight-or-flight hormones.
The authors also concluded that their study “provides strong evidence that a daily consumption of 40 g of dark chocolate during a period of 2 weeks is sufficient to modify the metabolism of … healthy human subjects.”
Other studies had already suggested that chocolate relieved stress but this study provided evidence of the biochemical mechanism at work in relieving stress.Read more