“The dark side of chocolate is a healthy one!” says a new study from the Netherlands.

Dark chocolate, now we’re not talking those milky, high fructose laden Easter eggs, this is 70 grams of 65% – 99% real dark chocolate, when eaten daily, will help restore flexibility to your arteries and prevent white blood cells from sticking to the walls of your blood vessels.

Both arterial stiffness and white blood cell adhesion are known factors that play a significant role in atherosclerosis, which is a disease in which plaque builds up inside your arteries leading to serious health problems like heart attack and stroke.

Plaque is made up of fat, cholesterol, calcium, and other substances found in the blood. Over time, plaque hardens and narrows your arteries. This limits the flow of oxygen-rich blood to your organs and other parts of your body.

Dark chocolate to the rescue!

Now isn’t the best health news we’ve received since finding out avocados fell in the ‘good fats’ category?!

For this study, they took 44 overweight middle-aged men and made them consume 70 grams of dark chocolate per day over two periods of four weeks.  Some of the participants received chocolate that was flavanol enhanced and the rest ate regularly produced dark chocolate with a similar cocoa mass content. They performed a variety of measurements that are important indicators of vascular health and found that both types of chocolate had the same significant benefits.

“The effect that dark chocolate has on our bodies is encouraging not only because it allows us to indulge with less guilt, but also because it could lead the way to therapies that do the same thing as dark chocolate but with better and more consistent results,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. “Until the ‘dark chocolate drug’ is developed, however, we’ll just have to make do with what nature has given us!”