LONGEVITY MAY TURN OUT TO BE CHOCOLATE-COATED PHENOMENON.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I used to believe in ``Pyramid Power'' - I'm talking the Food and Drug Administration's Food Pyramid, here - as the one true path to a healthy body. But now comes a recent scientific study which says chocolate can prevent heart attacks.

Let me repeat that: A new study shows that chocolate can lower your risk of heart attacks. Is it my imagination or is science making our lives better every day?

The broad bottom of the traditional food pyramid is bread and grains, which are supposed to make up most of your diet. The sloping middle is divided between ``dairy'' and ``meats,'' and then at the pointy top you are allotted a tiny portion of ``sweets'' each day - fresh fruit only, of course. Hershey bars and Hostess cupcakes do not exist in the food-pyramid universe, nor does German chocolate cake. Except, it turns out, the pyramid works a lot better sort of lying on its side.

And covered with fudge.

According to the Aug. 27 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, eating three ounces of dark chocolate a day lowered the blood pressure of 13 hypertensive Germans from an average of 153 over 84 to an amazing 148 over 84.

OK, dropping five points of systolic pressure doesn't make you healthy, but then they only ate three ounces a day. Heck, that's like five spoonfuls of Count Chocula. Our kids eat more chocolate than that for breakfast! I recently began my own experiment to see how low my blood pressure would fall if I ate three pounds of dark chocolate a day, and I'm hoping to resume that work as soon as I recover from my little diabetic coma.

The theory is that dark chocolate contains polyphenols, a family of molecules which discourage your body from making endotherlin-1. That protein causes the formation of ``bad'' cholesterol, which oxidizes in your blood and clogs up your arteries like rust in an old water pipe. French studies found polyphenols in red wines, particularly cabernet sauvignon. Japanese studies found polyphenols in Omega3 fish oils, and the English located them in dark beers.

Following this pattern, you might expect American researchers to be looking for polyphenols in pizza and potato chips, but so far they've only found them in red grape and apple juices, which seem pretty foolish places to look for life-saving chemicals because if you drink a lot of apple juice the odds are you are already healthy. It's the people grazing on french fries who need the polyphenols. That's where they ought to be looking for them!

I can't tell you what consternation these discoveries of good-for-you stuff in sin foods has produced amongst the Food Police, those dietitians who simply can't accept the idea that chocolate and bacon taste good because they're good for you.

OK, maybe that's not entirely true, but it's been known for decades that a glass or two of wine a day will lower your blood pressure and make you more civilized. Yet the Food Police kept that a secret for 30 years. I guess better you should die of a heart attack than you should start speaking French.

I admit that initially the life-saving qualities of chocolate sounded too good to be true and seemed to confirm an earlier theory of mine that eventually there will be conclusive proof that everything on this planet is good for you and is killing you at the same time. I call this the ``Muston's We're All Going To Die, So Live With It'' theory. But then I began to wonder, could this be the secret as to why women live longer than men? Because at least once a month the average American woman eats 10 to 20 pounds of chocolate. Or could this be a more dangerous pattern? Could Americans actually be gorging themselves on the dreaded ``news cycle diet?''

The theory behind this diet is that, if dog bites man, that's not news. But if man bites dog, somebody will do a study on how much cholesterol there is in dog meat, and that will be news. And, if enough people bite enough dogs, PETA will demonstrate against it, and there will be a cable network devoted to canine culinary practices, and all of those things will be news. And once dogs are on the fast-food menu, a dog biting a man becomes news, too.

In other words, a news headline is not science. Often, it's not even common sense.