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Quoted from Nutrition Week Update 03.19.07, an e-mail that the Health Department receives internally and that my wife forwarded to me.
HARVARD STUDY TOUTS COCOA COMPOUND
A new Harvard Medical School study suggests that the health benefits of epicatechin, a compound found in cocoa, are so striking that it may rival penicillin and anesthesia in terms of importance to public health.
The article appears in the current Chemical & Industry, according to a March 11 release. Norman Hollenberg, professor of medicine at Harvard, said epicatechin is so important that it should be considered a vitamin. Hollenberg has spent years studying the benefits of cocoa drinking on the Kuna people in Panama, the release said. He found that the risk of four of the five most common killer diseases—stroke, heart failure, cancer, and diabetes—is reduced to less than 10% in the Kuna. They each drink up to 40 cups of cocoa per week.
“If these observations predict the future, then we can say without blushing that they are among the most important observations in the history of medicine,” Hollenberg said in the release. “We all agree that penicillin and anesthesia are enormously important. But [if] epicatechin could potentially get rid of four of the five most common diseases in the western world, how important does that make epicatechin?”
[ 03-19-2007, 10:58 PM: Message edited by: Larry_OHF ]
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