A vitamin in cocoa?

Another study that says cocoa is good for you, but this time because of the prescence of epicatechin. Epicatechin is also found in teas, wine, chocolate and some fruit and vegetables.

Here's the scoop: "Hollenberg has spent years studying the benefits of cocoa drinking on the Kuna people in Panama. He found that the risk of 4 of the 5 most common killer diseases: stroke, heart failure, cancer and diabetes, is reduced to less then 10% in the Kuna. They can drink up to 40 cups of cocoa a week. Natural cocoa has high levels of epicatechin.
'If these observations predict the future, then we can say without blushing that they are among the most important observations in the history of medicine,' Hollenberg says. 'We all agree that penicillin and anaesthesia are enormously important. But epicatechin could potentially get rid of 4 of the 5 most common diseases in the western world, how important does that make epicatechin?... "

Sounds like a wonderful pipe dream, but...
...now all we need to do is a double blind study out here where people get to drink cocoa with or without epicatechin for a while, and see if the 'with epicatechin' group gets any healthier. :-)
Or, if we decided to adopt the lifestyle of the Kuna of Panama, we might be a lot healthier too.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070311202024.htm