Eating milk chocolate in the morning can promote fat metabolism

Dark chocolate is often touted as a heart-healthy and relatively nutritious snack, but most chocolate candies are made with milk chocolate, which has higher fat, sugar and calories

In order to better understand how the time consumed by milk chocolate affects human health, the authors of a new study published in the journal FASEB on June 24, each of 19 postmenopausal women underwent a series of random assignments.

Scientists and two authors of the paper-Frank Schell, a neurologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Marta Garaulet Aza, a nutritionist at the University of Murcia in Spain and a guest scientist at the Brigham Women’s Hospital How does the timing of eating chocolate affect our body in different ways

Frank Scheer

What is the motivation for this scientist's research?

Marta Garaulet Aza: The author of our paper, Carolina Escobar, presented an abstract at a sleep conference a few years ago

Frank Scheer: This is based on our previous work and other laboratories where we studied the effect of nutritional intake time on metabolism

TS I think we often hear about the health benefits of dark chocolate, but are you using milk chocolate here?

Garaulet

MGA: We made this decision because the mouse experiment (Escobar's) was made with this kind of chocolate

TS In this study, women ate 100 grams of chocolate each time

This is another reason for using milk [chocolate]

TS What can we learn from this research? Is there good news for those of us who love chocolate?

FS: Surprisingly, even though people ate nearly 550 kcal (chocolate) every day for two consecutive weeks, no matter the morning or evening, they would not gain weight

Interestingly, the morning and evening are slightly different

I think another observation that is more clinically meaningful is that fasting blood glucose and waist circumference decrease in the morning group

MGA: If people do high-intensity exercise the next morning, eating chocolate at night may be a good choice, but for ordinary people who don't want to gain weight, they may eat chocolate in the morning

TS I know you did some research on how the microbiota changes after eating chocolate

MGA: When we analyzed the main components, bacteria and metabolites, that is, short-chain fatty acids, we found that they have different distributions in the morning, evening and control group

TS you mentioned in your paper that the mechanism behind these things needs further research

To know which one it is, we need to repeat similar studies to exclude theobromine or other elements (in chocolate) to see if the same effect can be obtained

Is there any reason for TS to believe that the results you find will be different for premenopausal women?

We don't know, but why not? If the mechanism is related to energy.
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this is not unique to postmenopausal women
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If it is related to the reduction of certain hormones related to menopause, maybe it is, but we have not found it yet
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