Intervention, assignment to group, and blinding
Participants were asked to consume 3 × 1 g oil capsules and 33 g of chocolate drops of either test or control products daily with the main meal of the day. The test capsules provided 1.1 g DHA and 0.4 g EPA per day in triglyceride form. The control capsules contained a blend of 80% palm oil and 20% corn oil to deliver a fatty acid composition typical of a UK or Australian diet. Both the test and control capsules contained 1% lemon oil, to maintain study blinding, and 1% mixed tocopherols for stability of the study oils. The test chocolate provided 508 mg of total flavan-3-ols ranging from monomers to decamers (ie, degrees of polymerization from 1 to 10) (Assignment to the test or control groups was conducted using a randomization algorithm (Covariate Adaptive Randomization software), with groups stratified for 