Sweet news! A chocolate a day could be good for your heart

Chocoholics can rejoice tonight with a new study showing the sweet treat could be good for your heart.

Eating a small amount of chocolate every week or so may decrease the risk of a common and serious type of irregular heartbeat, according to a new Danish study.

Researchers have found that people who eat chocolate one to three times a month are about 10 per cent less likely to be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation than those who ate the sweet treat less than once a month.

"As part of a healthy diet, moderate intake of chocolate is a healthy snack choice," said researcher Elizabeth Mostofsky of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

The study cannot say for certain that it was the chocolate that prevented atrial fibrillation.

But the researchers have found that eating cocoa and cocoa-containing foods may help heart health due to their high flavonol content.

Flavonols are compounds believed to have anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.

Past studies have that found eating chocolate - especially dark chocolate, which has more flavonols - decreases the risk of certain conditions like heart attacks and heart failure.

For the new analysis researchers used data collected from a long-term study of more than 55,000 Danish men and women aged between 50 and 64 years old.

For women, the biggest risk reduction was tied to eating one serve of chocolate per week. For men the biggest reduction came from eating two to six servings per week.

"I think our message here is that moderate chocolate intake as part of a healthy diet is an option," Mostofsky told Reuters Health.