Healthy Candy, For Real

A candy bar that’s good for your heart? No way!

The secret ingredient is a form of chocolate that contains high levels of flavonols, heart-healthy compounds similar to those found in green tea and red wine. They’re usually destroyed during processing, but the Mars company launched a top-secret project to alter the way chocolate is made and keep the flavonols intact. Then they wrapped the chocolate around a crispy bar made from rice and oats for an 80-calorie treat called CocoaVia.

In a small, placebo-controlled trial, the recipe seemed to work. Subjects who ate two of the bars a day saw their bad cholesterol levels drop by an average of 6 percent—a small but significant change.

The bars are available only from cocoavia.com. We hope they’ll turn up in stores soon.

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