Drinking hot chocolate every day could be quietly activating one of the body’s most powerful repair systems, according to a world-renowned doctor.
In an eye-opening video, physician and scientist Dr William Li revealed that two cups of hot chocolate made with dark chocolate daily produced extraordinary results in people already living with heart disease.
‘People in their 60s who have heart disease, giving [them] two cups of hot chocolate made with dark chocolate, every day for a month, they were able to double, or even more than double, their stem cells in their bloodstream,’ Dr Li said.
The US doctor explained that the same study showed dark chocolate didn’t just boost stem cells, it actually improved the flexibility and function of blood vessels that had already hardened with age.
‘In this chocolate study, they were able to find that dark chocolate was able to recover, reverse, [and] improve damaged flow-mediated dilation,’ he said.
‘Vascular resiliency, blood vessel resiliency, in 60-year-old people who already had hardened arteries – you can actually get back.’
For Dr Li, the findings challenge the long-held belief that chronic diseases are irreversible once they’ve set in.
‘If you don’t do anything about it, you’re going to get a chronic disease. But you could actually recover, and you can reverse chronic diseases,’ he said.
According to world-renowned physician and scientist Dr William Li (pictured), drinking hot chocolate every day could be quietly activating one of the body’s most powerful repair systems
At the centre of the discovery is cacao, which is the raw, plant-based ingredient found in dark chocolate.
‘The higher the percentage of cacao, the more plant-based material you’ve got in there,’ he explained, noting high percentages of 80, 85 and even 100 per cent are best.
The plant material is packed with polyphenols, including powerful compounds called proanthocyanidins, and those compounds appear to act like a beacon for stem cells.
‘When we eat dark chocolate, the plant-based cacao, the polyphenols in it actually mobilise stem cells like bees coming out of a hive.’
According to Dr Li, once released into the bloodstream, those stem cells travel only to areas that help repair and regenerate tissue.
‘This is being healed from the inside out. It happens every day, we just don’t hear about it.’
However, he said the findings raise some serious questions about the booming stem-cell injection industry that he doesn’t think is necessary.
‘Our body has already done it for us,’ he explained, adding that we have around 70 million stem cells already in our body.
The US-based doctor revealed that two cups of hot chocolate made with dark chocolate every day produced extraordinary results in people already living with heart disease
Dark chocolate contains powerful compounds called proanthocyanidins, which Dr William Li says can ‘mobilise stem cells like bees coming out of a hive’, sending them into the bloodstream to help repair and regenerate damaged tissue
‘You don’t really need to inject anything – you can just call them out yourself. And the way you do that is by eating food.’
And one of the most ‘crowd-pleasing’ foods, he added, is dark chocolate.
Importantly, Dr Li stressed that this isn’t about sugary drinking chocolate or sweetened café drinks.
The benefits were seen with hot chocolate made from dark chocolate or cocoa powder, with a high cacao content and minimal sugar.
For Dr Li, the chocolate research sits within a much bigger idea: that the body is far more capable of repair than we give it credit for, including ‘reversing cardiovascular disease, dementia in some ways and cancer’.
Rather than focusing on so-called superfoods or miracle supplements, Dr Li says the real power lies in what food activates inside the body.
‘There’s no such thing as a superfood,’ he said.
‘It’s the stuff inside foods [like] the bioactives, the polyphenols, the dietary fibre and how our body responds to what we put inside it.’
