It seems to go against everything you’ve been told, but eating more chocolate–as long as it’s dark chocolate–can actually prevent diabetes.
There is little worse for diabetes than sweets. But real dark chocolate isn’t sweet. The flavonoids in it make it bitter. And flavonoids are great for diabetes.
Several meta-analyses have shown that dark chocolate improves insulin resistance (Am J Clin Nutr. 2012;95:740-51; J Nutr 2011;141:1982-1988; J Nutr. 2016;146(11):2325-2333).
But much of the research on chocolate and diabetes has been muddied by the failure to distinguish between milk chocolate and dark chocolate. That’s what this huge new study of over 100,000 people did.
And the good news is that it found that people who eat 5 or more servings of dark chocolate a week have a significant 21% lower risk of type 2 diabetes compared to people who never or rarely eat dark chocolate. Each serving of dark chocolate a week reduced the risk by a significant 3%. Milk chocolate, on the other hand, did not significantly reduce the risk.
Pleasantly shattering another myth, while eating more milk chocolate increased weight gain, eating more dark chocolate did not cause any weight gain.
This study shows that, as long as your chocolate is dark chocolate, eating more of it actually prevents diabetes without causing any weight gain.
BMJ 2024;387:e078386.