Red wine & chocolate - the new medicines

Red wine & chocolate – the new medicine  

Things are looking up on the nutrition front. First we’re told a glass or two of red wine a day might do more than prevent heart disease, a discovery a few years back. It could also protect the brain from damage following a stroke. Or may even prevent a stroke from occurring.

Now dark chocolate has been given the thumbs up for its potential for cutting blood clot risk. That would make it a more palatable remedy than the usual aspirin.

Of course the catch with both tasty treatments is in the amount necessary to take in for any effect. Apparently, humans would have to drink casks of wine to absorb enough of its beneficial resveratrol. That’s the element believed to increase levels of an enzyme in the brain that protects nerve cells from damage. 

Eat too much chocolate, particularly of the milk not the dark variety, and you also take in high quantities of sugar and fat. 

In the case of the red wine research, tests have only been done on a handful of lucky mice presumably now slurring their squeaks. Participants in the chocolate research are a more providential bunch – they have been human.

But they came to the test as failures in another project.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University had set up an investigation into the effects of aspirin on the miniscule solid particles in blood called platelets that clump together to create a clot. But 139 participants let the side down because they couldn’t give up their chocolate habit. They were thrown off the study.

These chocoholics are the people who went on to provide the researchers with the opportunity to compare speeds of platelet clumping. They looked at how long it would take their platelets to clot as against those who stayed off chocolate. The chocolate abstainers’ platelets clumped up 7 seconds faster than those of the chocolate eaters – at 123 seconds, compared to 130.

Of course it’s not necessary to point out chocolate isn’t a medicine. Eating it isn’t recommended as a way to prevent heart disease. You’d be better off depending upon a healthy diet, low in fats and sugars and full of fruits and vegetables. It just might not be so comforting.

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