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# Could Eating Chocolate Prevent Heart Attack Death?
- URL: https://www.foodconsumer.org/eating_chocolate_to_prevent_cardiac_death_1202100735/
- Published: 2010-02-12T07:34:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T16:13:54.000Z
- Description: Among 1,169 Swedish patients followed eight years after a first heart attack, those eating chocolate twice or more a week had 56% lower cardiac mortality than those who never ate it. The observational design cannot show cause, and the authors want confirmation.
- Author: Food Consumer
- Tags: Food, Nutrition, #vivvo-import

A new study in the Sept 2009 issue of Journal of internal medicine suggests that eating chocolate may reduce the risk of dying from acute myocardial infarction or heart attack.

The study led by Janszky I and colleagues from Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden shows that people who ate up to once each week were at a 45 percent reduced risk of dying from hear attack.

The researchers started to follow 1169 non-diabetic patients hospitalized with a confirmed first acute myocardial infarction between 1992 and 1994 in Stockholm, Sweden. The patients returned a standardized questionnaire about their chocolate eating habits for the proceeding 12 months. Hospitalizations and mortality were recorded with national registries for a period of eight years.

Compared to those who never ate chocolate, men and women who ate less than once a month and twice or more per week were at a 27 and 56 percent reduced risk of dying from cardiac mortality respectively.

Other sweets were not associated with reduced risk of premature death.

The study did not consider those who died from the first acute heart attack nor other types of cardiovascular disease, according to the study report.

A health observer who did not want to be named suggested that the study results did not give a whole picture of the effect of chocolate on death risk and the possible benefits may not apply to other groups of heart patients. Also the study itself did not establish a causal relation between eating chocolate and reduced mortality.

The researchers acknowledged that "confirmation of this strong inverse relationship from other observational studies or large-scale, long-term, controlled randomized trials is needed."

By David Liu