Over the Edge

There's a new health study today -- and isn't there always -- that contains unaccustomed good news. Well, good for me, anyway.

Seems that the Journal of the American Medical Association and the journal Nature published studies this week indicating that eating chocolate will lower your cholesterol. Not just any chocolate. Dark chocolate. The good stuff. The darker the better, apparently. Clutter it up with too much milk and you lose the benefits, because the flavinoids and antioxidants are in the cocoa.

From the AP, via CNN:

Blood pressure remained pretty much unchanged in the group that ate white chocolate, which does not contain polyphenols. But after two weeks, systolic blood pressure -- the top number -- had dropped an average of five points in the dark-chocolate group. The lower, or diastolic, reading fell an average of almost two points.

This is a whole lot more encouraging than the other studies I heard about this week. One says that farmed salmon is loaded with PCBs; the other says that skin carcinomas that start on your feet have a higher mortality rate than ones that start on your arms. I eat a fair amount of salmon, and my feet are tanned.

So am I eating less salmon and using sunscreen on my feet? Nope. But I hereby resolve to eat more dark chocolate. And drink more tea and red wine. Gotta load up on those flavinoids...