New research suggest eating chocolate in the morning may help burn fat - News + Articles

Jun 25, 2021

Turns out you can have Tim Tams for breakfast.

Don’t wait for dessert. It turns out eating chocolate first thing in the morning can have some surprising health benefits.

A new study from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts has found that eating a “concentrated amount” of chocolate in the morning could actually help you burn fat and decrease blood sugar levels.

Ottolenghi world's best chocolate cake — Chocolate cake for breakfast? Don’t mind if we do.

The study was conducted by Harvard Medical School Professor of Medicine Dr Frank A. J. L. Scheer and Dr Marta Garaulet in association with the University of Murcia in Spain. It has since been published in The FASEB Journal.

The study involved a randomised, controlled, and cross-over trial of 19 post-menopausal women who consumed either 100g of chocolate in the morning (within one hour after waking time) or at night (within one hour before bedtime). They compared weight gain and many other measures to no chocolate intake.

The results found that morning chocolate intake did not lead to weight gain, and may actually help burn fat and reduce blood glucose levels.

“Our volunteers did not gain weight despite increasing caloric intake,” Dr Garaulet said. “Our results show that chocolate reduced ad libitum energy intake, consistent with the observed reduction in hunger, appetite and the desire for sweets shown in previous studies.”

In other words, consuming high amounts of chocolate in the morning may mean you do not feel the need to eat chocolate or other sweets throughout the day.

The study also found that eating chocolate in the morning or in the evening can influence hunger and appetite, microbiota composition, sleep and more.

“Our findings highlight that not only ‘what’ but also ‘when’ we eat can impact physiological mechanisms involved in the regulation of body weight,” Dr Scheer said.

It’s not the first time that chocolate has been shown to have surpring health benefits. A 2012 study from researchers at the University of California-San Diego that involved more than 1,000 volunteers compared chocolate consumption with body mass index and found that those who consumed chocolate the most frequently had a lower BMI on average than those who consumed it the least.