Then, every day for 2 weeks, they gave two 50-gram snacks of either the modified or the unmodified chocolate to 10 male volunteers. After waiting another 2 weeks, they repeated the experiment, this time giving each man the other chocolate. During the weeks they ate the calcium-fortified confection, the men excreted roughly twice as much fat as in weeks when they downed regular dark chocolate, note Yasaman Shahkhalili and her colleagues in the February American Journal of Clinical Nutrition . Virtually all of the extra fat was of saturated types characteristic of cocoa butter. Because of the fats' excretion and the slight reduction in the candy's sugar, the modified candy provided 9 percent fewer calories than the unaltered chocolate did.
Manufacturers make soaps by combining calcium and fats.
In the new study, she says, the gut similarly combined ingredients of the modified chocolate to form a soap that washed out in the feces. Indeed, Denke notes that, unlike the fatty molecules in a burger, the type and structure of chocolate's fat make it ideal for this transformation. Alas, dark-chocolate aficionados, Nestl has announced no plans to calcium fortify its chocolate morsels. Hurst, W.J., et al . American Journal of Clinical Nutrition .