At this point, every chocolate lover with access to the internet or a newspaper knows that dark chocolate is good for you. Now, medical researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston are looking to see if science can give you all the benefits of eating chocolate — specifically, preventing heart attacks and strokes — without any of the joy.
A new study will enroll 18,000 people to test out a pill containing cocoa flavanols, which smaller studies have shown to be beneficial in preventing a host of cardiovascular problems. The capsules will contain many, many more times the flavanols than you'd find in a candy bar.
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Here's the secret ingredient: Mars has patented a method to extract high concentrations of flavanols from cocoa pods and put them in capsules. So this is a win-win for Mars. Just maybe not for chocoholics.
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