"High flavanol" is not a dose. If you are going to drink cacao for the flavanols, you should know the two numbers the research is actually built on, and what they look like in a real cup.
The two benchmarks
200 mg per day: the authorized claim
The European Food Safety Authority reviewed the human trials and authorized a specific claim: cocoa flavanols "help maintain endothelium-dependent vasodilation, which contributes to normal blood flow." The condition of use is 200 mg of cocoa flavanols per day. EFSA noted that could come from about 2.5 g of high-flavanol cocoa powder or 10 g of high-flavanol dark chocolate. That is one of very few food-compound claims to survive EFSA's review process, which rejects most of what it sees.
500 mg per day: the COSMOS dose
COSMOS is the largest cocoa flavanol trial ever run: 21,442 US adults (women 65 and older, men 60 and older), randomized to a cocoa extract capsule delivering 500 mg of cocoa flavanols per day (including 80 mg epicatechin) or placebo, followed for a median of 3.6 years.
The results, published in 2022, deserve an honest reading. The primary endpoint, total cardiovascular events, was lower in the cocoa group (410 events versus 456) but the difference was not statistically significant. Among the secondary endpoints, cardiovascular death was 27% lower in the cocoa group, and the effect was stronger in people who actually took their capsules consistently. The authors called this "suggestive evidence," which is the right phrase. It is the best data that exists, and it is not a slam dunk.
We use 500 mg as our serving because it is the most studied dose, not because more is automatically better. There is no evidence that 1,000 or 2,000 mg does anything extra, and some concentrated extracts get you there with a lot of caffeine along for the ride.
What 500 mg looks like in food
Using the Miller 2008 averages for flavanols per gram of cocoa powder:
| Source | Flavanols per gram | Amount needed for 500 mg |
|---|---|---|
| Natural (un-Dutched) cocoa powder | about 34.6 mg | about 14 g, roughly 3 level tablespoons |
| Lightly Dutched cocoa | about 13.8 mg | about 36 g, roughly 7 tablespoons |
| Heavily Dutched cocoa | about 3.9 mg | about 128 g, roughly 26 tablespoons |
| Actual Superfoods High-Flavanol Cacao | label-stated 500 mg per serving | one serving |
Dark chocolate is the wild card. Flavanol content in bars ranges by more than an order of magnitude depending on bean, roast, and whether the cocoa was Dutched, and almost no bar prints a number. If you are relying on a bar for your 500 mg, you are guessing.
Timing, frequency, and other practical questions
- Daily beats occasional. The trials that show anything used daily intake for weeks to years. Flavanols are metabolized within hours, so a big dose on Sunday does not carry you through Wednesday.
- Morning or evening does not seem to matter for flavanols. It matters for caffeine and theobromine, which is why we make a separate nighttime cacao built around magnesium, glycine, and L-theanine rather than around the flavanol dose.
- With food or without? Milk was once thought to blunt absorption; later studies did not confirm a meaningful effect. Drink it the way you will actually keep drinking it.
- Splitting the dose (250 mg twice a day) is reasonable but not shown to be better. One cup is simpler and people stick with simpler.
The one rule
Buy from a number, not an adjective. If a brand will not tell you how many milligrams of cocoa flavanols are in a serving, it is not a high-flavanol product, no matter what the front of the bag says. Ours prints 500 mg on the tin, the reasoning is on The Science, and the heavy metal testing that should go with any daily cacao habit is on the lab results page.
Sources
- EFSA Panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies. Scientific Opinions on cocoa flavanols and endothelium-dependent vasodilation, EFSA Journal 2012 and 2014.
- Sesso HD, Manson JE, Aragaki AK, et al. "Effect of cocoa flavanol supplementation for the prevention of cardiovascular disease events: the COSMOS randomized clinical trial." Am J Clin Nutr 2022;115(6):1490-1500.
- Miller KB et al. "Impact of Alkalization on the Antioxidant and Flavanol Content of Commercial Cocoa Powders." J Agric Food Chem 2008.