Crazy food fact: Eat chocolate at the right time and you’ll burn fat

• Eating chocolate for breakfast can help your body burn more fat, lower blood sugar levels
• The fat-burning qualities is linked to catering your sweet tooth earlier in the day
• Even when consumed before bed, it can impact sleep and exercise the next day

Eating chocolate for breakfast just satisfy your sweet tooth — nor does it mean you’ll be packing on weight.

It actually does the opposite.

New research has found that eating chocolate in the morning can lead to surprising health benefits, including helping your body burn more fat and lowering blood sugar.

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston published a paper in The FASEB Journal where they studied 19 postmenopausal women who were told to consume 100 grams of milk chocolate either within one hour of getting out of bed or within one hour of going to bed. Researchers compared those women’s weight gain and other measurements to those of women who ate no chocolate.

The results? It could be time to swap out eggs for chocolate in the mornings.

The benefits of eating chocolate for breakfast

Morning or nighttime chocolate didn’t lead to weight gain, and that researchers found that it could even influence hunger and appetite, microbiota composition, and sleep. It also reduced blood glucose levels.

But only morning chocolate consumption was linked to increased fat burn, which researchers said was likely due to “decreased hunger and desire for sweets” throughout the day.

When chocolate was consumed in the evening, it got the body ready to change its metabolism the next morning to favor carbohydrate oxidation. That could help people who typically start their mornings with high intensity exercises or longer exercises.

“Our findings highlight that not only what but also when we eat can impact physiological mechanisms involved in the regulation of body weight,” said Frank A. J. L. Scheer, a neuroscientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Chocolate has other benefits — in moderation

There are several other reasons why you should consider eating some of the dark, savory treats during the day.

A University College London study found that dark chocolate may positively improve moods and relieve symptoms of depression. Chocolate has a number of psychoactive ingredients that can produce a feeling of euphoria, similar to cannabinoids, which are found in marijuana. Chocolate also contains phenylethylamine, which regulates people’s moods.

Like everything, though, chocolate is best in moderation. Recent research from Oxford University found that consuming too many sweets like sugary drinks or chocolate can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, while confections can increase the risk of death in middle age.