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A new study may offer welcome news to both cocoa and green tea drinkers: Compounds in high-flavanol cocoa as well as in green tea offer protection to the body after a person eats fatty foods when stressed.
“We know that even just one isolated episode of mental stress can impact the elasticity of blood vessels, which can last for up to 90 minutes,” Catarina Rendeiro, assistant professor in nutritional sciences at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., said via email to Fox News Digital. She is the lead author of the study.
“We showed previously that the combination of stress and fatty foods prolongs the negative impact of stress in the blood vessels,” she said.
Her latest study, however, shows that drinking certain beverages can combat the negative effects.
“If you combine the fatty food with a drink rich in flavanols, it prevents the effect of stress and fat combined,” she said — which “can be used as a strategy to mitigate some of the impact of poorer food choices on blood vessels.”
To test this theory, Rendeiro and her colleagues fed a group of healthy adults a breakfast of “two butter croissants” with 10 grams of salted butter, 1.5 slices of cheddar cheese and 250 milliliters of whole milk. Rosalind Baynham, another author on the study, shared those details in a news release published by the University of Birmingham.
