Good news for to-be-moms! Eating chocolate can protect your unborn baby, for a study has found that it helps prevent pregnancy-induced hypertension known as pre-eclampsia.

A team of researchers at Yale University has found that pregnant women who eat chocolate at least five times a week are 40 per cent less likely to develop pre-eclampsia than those who consume it less than once a week. 

According to them, the chemical theobromine — which occurs naturally in chocolate, particularly in dark varieties — could be responsible for the protection. In their study, the researchers looked at 2,291 pregnant women and tested the levels of theobromine in their infants’ umbilical-cord blood.

The study found that those women who consumed the most chocolate and those whose babies had the highest concentration of theobromine, were the less likely to develop pre-eclampsia than who who did not have chocolate.

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