Is chocolate good for your heart?

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 8, 2026

By Peggy Sue McRae

Journal contributor

Chocolate has been on my mind lately, and not just because I like to celebrate Easter by indulging in a few chocolate eggs. I just had my one-year-later post-heart-surgery check-up. In between getting an echocardiogram of my heart and the next week, when I met with the medical professional who could interpret my echocardiogram, I was a bit spooked by the words “moderate stenosis” in the echocardiogram data regarding my artery. Stenosis (stiffness) of my artery was, after all, what got me into trouble and off on the wild adventure of having a prosthetic valve implanted in my heart.

Thankfully, the woman who, one week later, read my echocardiogram and interpreted it for me pronounced, “Your echocardiogram looks great.” Phew! Meanwhile, I’d been online looking up natural remedies, among them ceremonial cacao, complete with cartoons of cacao beans inside arteries with brushes and brooms cleaning things up. As most of you have no doubt experienced, once you look up a product on the internet, you are consequently subjected to a bombardment of similar product ads. Cacao is popular, and there are a plethora of luscious ads online claiming everything from strengthening your heart and achieving healthy blood pressure to spiritual euphoria and revived intuition.

I am deeply grateful to modern medicine for what health and longevity I enjoy, but I also believe in using all the tools in the toolbox. Having spent most of my adult life without any health insurance, my base-level response to health challenges came to be a reliance on home remedies and prayer. As grateful as I am for the health insurance and medical care I now receive, due to my background, ceremonial cacao had an obvious appeal.

Let me state clearly, I am no expert. Everything I know about ceremonial cacao I have gleaned from poking around on the internet. That said, there is a fascinating wealth of material to explore.

If you are looking for a form of chocolate to benefit your heart health, it is not likely to be found in most commercial chocolate. Flavanols in chocolate are what you want for heart health. Flavanols are plant compounds that act on the inner lining of blood vessels. They improve circulation and blood pressure, allowing the heart to function with less strain. Unfortunately, most processing techniques used in modern chocolate production remove flavanols and other beneficial properties while adding sugar. If you want a heart-healthy form of chocolate, look for minimally processed high flavanol content cacao, often referred to as ceremonial cacao.

As for the ceremonial part of ceremonial cacao, cacao was sacred to both the Mayans and the Aztecs, who revered it as a sacred plant for use in both medicine and in sacred rituals. According to some indigenous elders, ceremony is the way to put our lives into order and, in turn, bring order to the cosmos. For the modern cacao drinker, mindfully preparing and drinking the sacred beverage with gratitude, intention and reciprocity may not only improve our physical heart health but may open our hearts to the blessings and responsibilities of living on this remarkably generous and forgiving planet.