Here is an excerpt from Dr. William Li and his new book “Eat to Beat Disease.” As a Harvard undergraduate, he is a medical doctor who is researching the foods that help to beat cancer and disease. Mark this dedicated doctor as someone to follow and take a look at his book.
“While it may seem counterintuitive that eating chocolate could lower the risks of having coronary artery disease, chocolate is a stem cell–recruiting food. Cocoa powder contains bioactives called flavanols.
At the University of California, San Francisco, researchers explored whether a chocolate drink made with cocoa containing high levels of flavanols could influence stem cells and blood vessel health. They recruited sixteen patients with known coronary artery disease and divided them into two groups. One group received hot cocoa with a low flavanol content of only nine milligrams per serving. The other group was given hot cocoa with a high flavanol content of 375 milligrams per serving, made with a powder called CocoaPro. Both groups drank the hot chocolate twice a day for thirty days.
At the end of the study, the researchers compared bloodwork from before and after the experiment. Amazingly, participants who drank the high-flavanol hot cocoa had twice as many stem cells in their circulation compared to the people who drank the low-flavanol cocoa. The researchers wanted to see if there was any improvement in blood flow from the cocoa. So, they used a test called flow mediated dilation. The high-flavanol cocoa group’s results in this test were two times better than at the beginning, demonstrating a functional benefit of the cocoa to circulation. In fact, the beneficial effect on stem cell levels was reported by the researchers to be comparable to that seen from taking statins, common cholesterol-lowering drugs also known to improve stem cell levels.”
From “Eat to Beat Disease,” by Dr. William Li. Click here to view book to be released in March 2019.
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