A Hershey's funded study says chocolates do not stand in the way of weight loss but an outside researcher has pointed out its limitations.
For chocolate lovers trying to drop a few pounds, new research suggests that it is still possible to lose weight while indulging your sweet tooth every day.
Overweight and obese women who added a bit of chocolate or other sweets on top of a healthydiet plan lost about 5 kg over four months, on average.
The study was funded by Hershey's, which provided its own candy for snacks, and two of thestudy authors are company employees.
"Women think about going on a diet and think they have to deprive themselves of their favoritefoods, but really that's not the case if you incorporate them in a portion-controlled way," saysKathryn Piehowski, who conducted the research while at Pennsylvania State University inUniversity Park.
An outside researcher cautions that the study had no "control" group of women who didn't eat asweet snack, so it is impossible to know how much weight those who abstained from sweets, orate other snacks, would have lost.
"Chocolate ... is a highly-desired food," says Debra Keast, from Food and Nutrition DatabaseResearch, Inc in Okemos, Michigan. But, she adds, "I really don't think that it would be aseffective as some other type of snack" for weight loss.
Snacks that also pack some fiber and protein, she says, would probably help women stay fulluntil their next meal better than candy. For the new study, Piehowski and her colleaguestracked the weight loss of 33 overweight and obese women on a reduced-calorie diet.
Overweight is defined by having a body mass index (BMI) - a measure of weight in relation toheight - between 25 and 29.9; obese is a BMI above 30. A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 isconsidered normal.
All of the women in the study were premenopausal, with BMIs between 25 and 43. All attendedweekly nutrition sessions and were given a diet plan based on food exchanges and portion sizethat aimed for 1,500 to 1,800 calories per day.
Half of them were also given small dark chocolate snacks to eat twice a day (totaling 90 calorieseach day) and sugar-free cocoa for breakfast. The other women ate fruit-flavored licoricesnacks and had a sugar-free non-cocoa drink in the morning.
Twenty-six women completed the study, 13 in each group. After just over four months, womenin both groups had lost an average of 5 kg.
The researchers say that shows that women don't have to totally remove chocolate and othersweet snacks from their diets to see weight-loss success. And the small snacks may reducecravings for more sweets, they add - cravings that have been the downfall of many strict diets.
"As soon as someone tells you can't have something, what do you want? You want that thing,"says Piehowski, now at Nestle Health Science.
A diet with sweet snacks "may provide an effective weight-loss strategy for women who strugglewith other more restrictive diet plans", the authors write in the Journal of the American DieteticAssociation.
"I think allowing snacks and allowing sweets and a reward for exercising or a reward for stickingto your healthy foods is good," says Keast, who was not involved in the new study.
"But I think there are probably other foods that might be more satiating to eat between meals, ifthe objective is to hold you over to the next meal so you're not feeling so hungry that you haveto gorge when you actually sit down to eat."
She highlights nuts and low-fat yogurt as two of those ideal snacks, but does not denouncedark chocolate and its potential health benefits. For any weight-loss diet - chocolate-enhancedor not - "you need to eat small amounts frequently and not be on a restrictive diet where you'restarving yourself", Keast says.
