The Heart Of The Health Problem?

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Summary

• The modern belief that chocolate is good for your heart can be traced to a now debunked series of studies about heart health, flavonols and Dr. Benjamin Kean’s work with the Kuna tribe in Panama.
• Yes, the peninsular Kuna enjoy good cardiovascular health and drink chocolate, but they also eat plenty of fish and fruit. The cacao they were consuming could not be the claimed local superfood as most of the local trees had been cut down or destroyed in the 1950s.
• Even though these studies are now thoroughly debunked and excoriated, journalists and marketers still peddle these claims which have taken on a life of their own.

Chocolate and Heart Health

Google “chocolate health” and you’ll find that the top results all have to do with chocolate improving your ‘heart’s health’.

Where does the belief that chocolate is good for your heart come from? And more importantly, is it true?

The modern belief that chocolate is good for your heart date back to a now debunked series of studies about heart health, flavonols and a mysterious tribe of chocolate lovers off the Panama coast.

Although thoroughly disproved and excoriated by subsequent research, these studies have taken on a compelling life of their own. Regardless of scientific truth, the biggest breakthrough in this case was for marketers, who realised that people are always willing (and even eager) to believe that their ‘impulse’ chocolate purchases can be justified with a health claim.

The Curious Case of Dr. Benjamin Kean

For as long as chocolate has been around, people have associated it with medicinal properties, with the ability to cure a range of illnesses from coughs to fevers, and from hypertension to coronary diseases.

But over the last 30 years, these claims have become more and more prominent.

It may well be that the same man who helped save US pilots from shark attacks, (accidentally) kicked off the US Iranian hostage crisis, and helped explain why adding ice to your drinks can cause an upset stomach when travelling abroad is – again accidentally – responsible for these never-ending health claims.

Welcome to the curious case of Dr. Benjamin Kean and the Kuna Indians’ love of chocolate.

Kean was an eminent cardiologist who rose through the ranks of the US medical corps. Needless to say, he led an adventurous and interesting life. When he was stationed at the Panama Canal in the 1940s, he discovered that the Kuna, an isolated tribe who lived 20 kms off the Panama coast in the San Blas archipelago, enjoyed astoundingly good cardiovascular health, with an “extraordinary lack of coronary diseases and low blood pressure”.

A Tribe of Chocolate Lovers Who Enjoyed Extraordinary Heart Health

In the 1990s, a Harvard professor named Dr. Norman Hollenberg stumbled across these findings during his own research on cardiovascular health and potential links to genetics.  And so he jumped upon the case of the Kuna – a tribe living an isolated existence off the coast of PAnama and seemingly blessed with great heart health.

His initial findings were promising: the Kuna did enjoy extraordinarily good cardiovascular health. He also discovered that this couldn’t be genetic as Kuna who moved to Panama city had all sorts of stress-related heart issues and cardiovascular diseases.

He began looking for alternative explanations and found one dating back to Kean’s early observations and research: the Kuna drank HUGE amounts of chocolate.

“The Kuna are exposed to more cocoa than anyone else on Earth, and they are living longer. This could reflect the exposure to flavonoid-rich cocoa, and if it does, then this is the most important observation since anaesthesia“.

This kicked off a bonanza of scientific research and journalistic articles about the benefits of cacao as “being rich in flavonoids”, which helped “vasodilation and decreased blood pressure” and in turn “led to the island Kuna’s increased life expectancy, and decreased incidence of common chronic conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer“.

Many of the studies in this veritable storm of research around chocolate’s so-called health benefits were shadow-sponsored by Big Chocolate giants such as Mars.  And despite the clear conflict of interest, Mars financing of these studies was kept in the dark.

Journalists and marketers lapped it all up – chocolate was touted as a superfood that could cure heart disease, stress, and many other conditions.

More Wishful Thinking than Fact

Hollenberg’s work was eventually challenged and debunked, not by medical researchers but by social scientists, who were sceptical of many of the assumptions in these studies.

For instance, it turned out that whilst the Kuna do drink a lot of chocolate, they also eat a lot of fish and fruit (to be fair, Hollenberg did acknowledge this as well).

Furthermore, the supposedly flavonol-rich cocoa that the Kuna were drinking at the time of Hollenberg’s work could NOT have been the special, local superfood it was claimed to be. Since Kean’s earlier observations, most of the local cacao trees had been cut down or destroyed by various diseases in the 1950s, so they were importing processed cocoa powder from Colombia.

But Once the Cat’s Out of the Bag…

Nevertheless, these claims tend to take on a compelling life of their own despite being thoroughly debunked by later research. It could be the power or marketing, or it could be that as consumers, we’re keen to latch on to a ‘good’ reason for our impulse purchases.

Take raw chocolate, for instance, which is marketed as being rich in antioxidants and flavonoids, despite no scientific study bearing out these claims.

The biggest insight from the now-debunked studies on chocolate and heart health, perhaps, is that health claims about chocolate do work – as marketing, not as scientific truth.

For more on this, please see our article on “raw chocolate”.