Chocoholics around the world celebrated when it was revealed their favourite dark brown treat was actually good for you because of its high levels of antioxidants.

New scientific findings from across the globe will have them believing they've died and gone to chocolate heaven!

So potent are chocolate's health benefits that doctors are now actually starting to prescribe it when treating health conditions, including persistent coughing, the UK's Daily Mail reported.

Researchers from Imperial College London, Royal Brompton Hospital, St Bartholomew's Hospital and Chinoin Co Ltd, Budapest, found that theobromine (found in cocoa) was a third more effective in stopping coughing when compared to codeine. The research team, which published their findings in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal, reported that theobromine was considered the most effective cough treatment.

A Ghanaian researcher has credited drinking two to five cups a day of unsweetened cocoa with helping to prevent malaria. Professor Frederick Kwaku Addai, from the University of Ghana Medical School, reported that prior to 2004 he suffered at least one bout of malaria a day. Since 2004 he, and members of his family, had started drinking natural cocoa — with 12 to 15 percent cocoa butter — with hot water every day.

In a paper published in the Medical Hypotheses journal, Professor Addai wrote that since he and his family started drinking two to five cups a day of this mixture, there had not been a single case of malaria between them.

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Professor Addai suggested five possible "mechanisms" underpinning cocoa's anecdotal antimalarial effects, including an increased level of antioxidants in the blood plasma and "antimalarial activity of cocoa flavanoids and their derivatives".

Fighting annoying coughs and malaria isn't where chocolate's health benefits end. A laser eye surgeon in the UK, the Daily Mail reported, is advising patients to eat "as much chocolate as they can" 30 minutes before undergoing treatment.

"Patients who eat chocolate prior to laser surgery are less jittery, more alert and more cooperative than those who receive sedatives," Professor Dan Reinstein, of the London Vision Clinic, told the Daily Mail.

"For example, with a relaxed, attentive patient I can perform a routine procedure in less than three minutes. But the same procedure can occasionally take much longer if the patient is tense and worked-up."

The good news for chocolate lovers is that — aside from being delicious — chocolate seems to have so many health benefits that it would actually be bad for your health not to eat some, immediately, if not sooner.