You may have heard that chocolate can be good for your health. But did you know chocolate may have this health benefit?
Remember when you were a child, and you’d get a piece of chocolate? Maybe it was spring, and the snow was starting to melt, and you just happened to get a little treat because your parents were in a good mood. So you slowly unwrap that crinkling foil; inside is delicious chocolate. With a taste like that, it’s no wonder chocolate is a staple of sweets and desserts worldwide.
You’ve always considered it a guilty pleasure. The surprising part is that chocolate may be good for you–at least as far as your ears are concerned.
That’s what some novel research out of Seoul, South Korea suggests. According to the researchers, eating a fair amount of chocolate could prevent developing hearing loss symptoms. Moreover, a “chocolate-based diet” may also keep those symptoms from worsening over time.
So… chocolate is good for your health?
You’ll be forgiven for being immediately suspicious of these findings. From a very young age, we’re taught that most things that are good for us tend to taste unpleasant. Broccoli, Brussel sprouts, fish oil–it’s all wonderful for us but not exactly what we secretly binge on.
That’s not to say you can’t enjoy the taste of vegetables (roasted vegetables tend to pack a lot more flavor than boiled vegetables, so they’re much more in favor these days). It’s just that suspicion against anything tasty being nutritious is deeply ingrained.
But there are some excellent reasons to give this study a little more credibility than your typical headline-grabbing “bad thing is actually good for you” study:
- First and foremost, this study included real people (not mice; many published studies are conducted on mice, and the conclusions are not always applicable to humans).
- The sample size of this study was relatively large. Slightly over 3500 subjects were interviewed as part of this study.
- Those subjects who ate sweets but not chocolate-related sweets, did not see a correlational increase in hearing loss prevention. So in other words, the researchers are fairly certain that the chocolate in the diet is doing good work here.
- The severity of hearing loss seems to be inversely related to how much chocolate they ate.
- There’s more than a 9 percent difference in hearing loss between the two groups–which is statistically significant.
Unexpected health benefits of chocolate
So, chocolate seems like it’s sort of good for you… and now your world is turning upside down, right? So, should you run out and eat a whole bunch of chocolate? Well… you might want to finish reading this article first (it won’t take long, I promise).
The researchers behind this study attribute the lower relative diagnosis of hearing loss to the cocoa in chocolate. Cocoa, it turns out, has a few well-known health benefits–the chief of which is as an anti-inflammatory agent. Researchers point to this feature as the one most likely to prevent hearing loss. (Inflammation tends to exacerbate just about any underlying health issue, so minimizing it where possible is fantastic.)
Can I buy that chocolate now?
There are, unfortunately, a few caveats. The first and most prominent is that this study has yet to be replicated in a reputable and well-publicized way. (In scientific circles, replication is the last great test of any new evidence.)
Second, and perhaps even more important: chocolate in the United States is not at all like chocolate in South Korea. Well, okay, the chocolate is similar. It’s just that in the U.S. we add insane amounts of sugar–and while that may be tasty, all that sugar tends to negate any nutritional benefits chocolate might have.
So we can’t expect the results of this South Korean study to necessarily inform our behavior where the chocolate tends to be sweeter.
So how do I protect my hearing?
That doesn’t mean you can’t eat chocolate, of course. It just means that if you want to protect your hearing, these are better methods:
- Wearing hearing protection when necessary (ear muffs or earplugs, for example).
- Wearing hearing aids when deemed necessary by a hearing professional (this usually keeps hearing loss from progressing quickly).
- Getting regular hearing screenings.
It’s true that, at some point, certain dietary choices (such as eating chocolate–which, again, we are pro-chocolate around here) could have some influence on whether hearing loss eventually develops.
But there’s absolutely nothing that works better than protecting your hearing in the first place–not even chocolate.
