Chocolate for Your Health
By Stephanie Unger
If you needed another reason to break out a chocolate bar, here it is: studies show that dark chocolate has a surprising number of health benefits for such a sweet treat. But how can this famous dessert hide so many health benefits in it’s rich and sumptuous interior? Well, it has a lot to do with where chocolate comes from.
Chocolate is made from cacao beans, which a chock full of a plant nutrient called flavonoids. Flavanoids are a type of antioxidant found in all sorts of fruits and vegetables, but cacao has a particularly high number of them. Antioxidants help your body protect itself against the damage caused by normal cellular processes and environmental factors, like UV rays or cigarette smoke. Flavanols are the main type of antioxidant in cacao. Flavanols are thought to help lower blood pressure and improve blood flow. Unfortunately, cacao is not nearly as delicious in its raw, antioxidant rich, form as it is when it is processed into chocolate. So does chocolate still retain all of the health benefits of cacao? Not quite.
The more chocolate is processed, the more antioxidants it loses, which means it has fewer health benefits. Processing cacao into chocolate also means adding a lot of sugars, milks and fats, especially if you are making milk chocolate. To get the most health benefits out of your chocolate, you should try to find chocolate that has the least amount of processing. This usually means dark chocolate, but not always. Some of the higher quality semi-sweet and milk chocolates can still be high in antioxidants, even if they are also higher in fat as well.
The health benefits of chocolate are not limited to the antioxidants that keep your insides from rusting either. New studies have shown that the chemicals in chocolate can prevent migraines, relax arteries and increase blood flow to the heart and brain, help regulate blood sugar, and even increase the amount of LDL cholesterol, also known as ‘good’ cholesterol, in your body.
So, here’s to chocolate. Do yourself a favor and eat chocolate for your health.
