By Hilary E. MacGregor, LA Times Staff Writer

After working below the radar on a cocoa farm deep in Brazil, and toiling for years over test tubes in food labs, scientists say they have developed a top-secret formula for an undisciplined candy lover's dream: a healthful chocolate bar.

Eating a couple of tiny slabs a day of this dark chocolate could lower cholesterol, relax your blood vessels and help ward off heart disease, they say.

Loaded with potent chemicals such as cocoa flavanols, plant sterols and soy — and stamped with an icon that reads, "promotes a healthy heart" — the CocoaVia line of chocolates has been available in select locations such as some Target, Walgreen's and Wild Oats stores since October 2005. Now they're going national. By April they'll be in mainstream grocery stores.

Don't look for these bars in the candy section: Possibly the first chocolates explicitly marketed as health foods, they will be over in the health aisle.

Mars Inc., which makes CocoaVia, says this is only the beginning. "There is a next generation of products in the pipeline," said Harold Schmitz, chief scientist for Mars, speaking from one of its chocolate factories in Elizabethtown, Pa., where he had just lunched on a CocoaVia bar plucked off the production line.

"We are investigating dozens and dozens of product formats," he added. "We are considering all possibilities."

But some nutritionists roll their eyes at the notion that eating chocolate — even if it is made with a special patented recipe and supplemented with healthful ingredients — is the best way to promote cardiovascular health.

"If someone is addicted to chocolate, this may be a better choice than other chocolate bars," said Mark Kantor, associate professor of nutrition at the University of Maryland.

"But to think that you are going to lower blood cholesterol levels, or chance of heart disease, by eating two of these a day — that is just wishful thinking."

CocoaVia chocolate bars are made from a patented powder known as Cocoapro cocoa. Cocoa in its raw state is one of the best known sources of plant flavanols: a naturally occurring compound in plants found to a lesser extent in red wine, green tea and certain vegetables.

Cocoapro, Schmitz says, is a flavanol powerhouse, manufactured to be of consistently high quality, often containing many times more than other, run-of-the-mill cocoas.

A growing body of evidence suggests that these flavanols found in cocoa are good for you.

In the early '90s, Harvard University professor Dr. Norman Hollenberg (who later collaborated with Mars on cocoa research) found that a population of island-dwelling Kuna Indians of Panama, who consume three to four cups of cocoa a day, had lower blood pressure, less hypertension and fewer cardiovascular diseases than their relatives who moved to the mainland and dropped their cocoa consumption.

And just last week, Dutch researchers reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine that older men who consumed a lot of cocoa had a 50% lower risk of dying from any disease than those who ate none over the course of the 15-year study.

A review of 136 scientific articles on chocolate and its ingredients published between 1996 and 2005 found that eating small amounts of dark chocolate reduces the risk of dying of heart disease by about 19%, according to an analysis that appeared January in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism.

One hundred milligrams of flavanols daily appear to have beneficial effects, such as lowering blood pressure and improving insulin sensitivity, said Eric Ding, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Public Health who conducted the analysis.

"In the short term, there is a large body of evidence that supports the beneficial effects of chocolate and flavanols," he said.

But, he added, "no one has done any long-term, randomized trials" — carefully controlled experiments in which people are given flavanol-rich chocolate, or not, and had their heart health tracked over years.

No food company is ever likely to perform such a pricey and time-intensive study on chocolate, scientists say.

CocoaVia bars cost a little more than a dollar each — slightly more if purchased online — and are a little larger than a single Twix bar. They contain between 90 and 100 calories (depending on whether you opt for the original chocolate bar or the one with the soy crisps) and no trans fats.

For information on L'Artisan du Chocolat, e-mail info@lartisanduchocolat.com.

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l.a. times ~ food