Why You Shouldn't Feel Bad About Fueling Rides with Chocolate
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Chocolate: It’s seemingly everywhere during the holidays. Stacked high on party trays, bursting from gift boxes, counting down the days from inside a cardboard Advent calendar—it’s impossible to avoid ingesting at least a family-size bar of the stuff.
And why would you want to?
Study after study has shown that chocolate—at least cocoa-rich dark chocolate—may help your performance on the bike. And while you probably shouldn’t power through an entire box of gourmet truffles on your own, as long as you’re already planning to enjoy chocolate this holiday season, it’s worth having a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of science-based excuses in your pocket to justify the indulgence.
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For example, this new study from the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition shows that dark chocolate consumption over a 14-day period increased VO2 Max by 6 percent compared to base line values, and slightly more than increases from white chocolate consumption over the same period. While the study was highly limited, there’s evidence here to suggest cocoa consumption could contribute to gas exchange threshold and two-minute time trial performance.
Sound too good to be true? Some chocolate-related science is. Last year, journalist John Bohannon produced a fake study extolling the weight-loss benefits of chocolates, to see how many media outlets would fall for manipulated science: Plenty did. While the study published in JISSN also drew from a limited sample size (which helped set the stage for misleading data in Bohannon's study), the journal has a sound peer-review process. Moreover, there are already well-documented links between plant-based nutrients in cocoa-rich dark chocolate called flavanols and a host of health benefits—decreased blood pressure, reduced fatigue, and even delayed memory loss, to name a few.
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What else on the dessert table can make the same claims?
So, this holiday season, use your time off to ride well, eat well, and reap a benefit or two from flavanols. And don’t feel bad about mainlining a reasonable serving of dark chocolate.
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