Chocolate helps young people reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease

Chocolate consumption has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease by around a third, according to a study at the University of Cambridge.

In the past, when it comes to cardiovascular disease, it is certain that it is a disease "exclusively" to the elderly. However, according to recent statistics, the trend of cardiovascular disease is getting younger. The youngest patients with cardiovascular disease are just under 30 years old.

Chocolate is loved by young people.

Cardiovascular disease is considered the leading cause of death worldwide. According to statistics from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the US, each year about 610,000 people die from cardiovascular disease (about 23.5%), equivalent to 1 in 4 deaths due to cardiovascular disease. Coronary artery disease is the most common form of cardiovascular disease, claiming over 370,000 lives each year. Each year in the US, 735,000 people suffer from heart attacks and 800,000 people suffer from strokes (equivalent to one person suffering from a stroke every 4 minutes).

In Vietnam, as of May 2015, the country has about 1.4 million people suffering from cardiovascular diseases. According to estimates from the World Health Organization, by 2030, each year the world will have about 23.6 million people die from cardiovascular diseases.

In the past, different types of cardiovascular disease were age-specific. For example, congenital heart defects were a group of diseases that often appeared in young patients (congenital), heart valve defects were common in adolescents, and heart diseases related to high blood pressure and myocardial infarction were diseases of the elderly.

However, recently, cardiovascular diseases related to high blood pressure and myocardial infarction tend to appear in people under 30 years old. The main causes of cardiovascular diseases in this age group are unhealthy lifestyles, lack of exercise, unhealthy diets (eating too much sweet/salty food, eating too much fat, drinking too much alcohol, beer, coffee), smoking, being overweight and obese, along with mental health problems (such as stress, depression, substance addiction).

So, how to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in young people? The most important thing is still to change your lifestyle: exercise regularly, have a balanced diet (eat lots of fiber, cereals, green vegetables, limit salt, sugar and fat), quit smoking, limit alcohol consumption and maintain a reasonable weight. However, there is another way, very easy to do but can still reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in young people: that is eating chocolate - a favorite food of young people!

Chocolate consumption has been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by about a third, according to a study at the University of Cambridge in the UK and published in the British Medical Journal. In this study, researchers combined data from seven other studies, conducted on 114,009 subjects. The combined results showed:

There are five studies that show evidence that eating more chocolate reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease.

People who ate the most chocolate had a 37% lower risk of heart disease and a 29% lower risk of stroke, compared with those who ate the least chocolate.

Another study, conducted on nearly 21,000 adults in the UK, also showed surprising evidence of a link between eating chocolate and cardiovascular disease.

In this study, about 20% of people said they never ate chocolate, the remaining 80% had the habit of eating an average of 7g of chocolate/day, with the person who ate the most up to 100g/day.

The results after analysis showed that, compared with people who never eat chocolate, people who regularly eat chocolate will reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by 11% and reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular diseases by 25%.

These people also had a 9% lower risk of being hospitalized or dying from coronary heart disease and a 23% lower risk of having a stroke, compared with those who did not eat chocolate.

Additionally, in this study, eating more chocolate was also associated with lower body mass index (BMI), lower waist-to-hip ratio, lower systolic blood pressure, lower diabetes risk, and regular exercise – all important factors in preventing cardiovascular disease.

Chocolate contains many anti-inflammatory and antioxidant ingredients that have been proven by many scientific studies to have many beneficial effects on human health, including regulating insulin sensitivity, controlling blood pressure, reducing blood fat (cholesterol), preventing cognitive decline and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease.

However, one very important thing that you need to remember, if you want to use chocolate to prevent cardiovascular problems later, is: the higher the cocoa content in chocolate, the less sugar, the more health benefits of chocolate. Therefore, pay attention to read the product label carefully and choose chocolates with a lot of cocoa and less sugar to achieve the most optimal benefits.

Chocolate should be just one part of a heart disease prevention plan.

In addition, you should also pay attention to the amount of energy that each chocolate bar provides (this is also stated on the product label). Because many types of chocolate products today contain a lot of energy (calories), about 500 calories for every 100g of chocolate. Therefore, if you consume too much of such products, not only will you not reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease in the future, but chocolate will also have the opposite effect, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

Of course, eating chocolate alone is not enough. Chocolate should be part of your heart disease prevention plan. In addition to eating chocolate, you should also practice a healthy lifestyle to minimize the risk of heart disease.

If you are a young person, sedentary and have a less than healthy diet, plan to change all of those things now to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease in the future, and don't forget to add chocolate to your plan!./.

According to VOV