Conventional wisdom suggests that eating dark chocolate should be bad for diabetes. Conventional wisdom is wrong.
Flavonoids have been established to reduce the risk of diabetes. Chocolate is one of the richest food sources of flavonoids. Dark chocolate is much higher in flavonoids than milk chocolate.
This massive study of 111,654 people looked at the association between eating chocolate and, importantly, compared dark chocolate to milk chocolate.
The results showed that people who ate more than 5 servings (each serving seems to have been 1 ounce) of dark chocolate a week had a significant 21% lower risk of type 2 diabetes than people who never or rarely ate dark chocolate. There was a significant 3% reduction in risk for each serving per week of dark chocolate. There was no protective effect for milk chocolate.
Again showing that conventional wisdom can be wrong, eating dark chocolate did not lead to weight gain.
This large study provides the very good news that enjoying dark chocolate is not fattening and actually prevents diabetes.
BMJ 2024;387:e078386.