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It's almost comical when you start to think about all the ways chocolate is portrayed to the general public. Cakes with names like "death by chocolate" or "devil's food" seem to promote this idea that chocolate is sinful and bad for you. But if you were to really dive into what happens to your body when you eat chocolate, surprisingly, chocolate isn't all that bad.
According to numerous nutritionists and health experts, and a myriad of studies, chocolate can actually do a lot for your body's health. That's because cacao—the plant from which chocolate derives—can provide a significant amount of health benefits and improve your life. This means the darker the chocolate the better—because there's more of the natural cacao in that bar. That's probably why you hear health experts telling you to eat dark chocolate over milk chocolate because you can reap the most reward from that natural cacao!
Here are the specific health benefits you can get when you eat chocolate on a regular basis. In the meantime, if you want to add chocolate to your diet, do so in moderation. Most commercial chocolate has ingredients that add fat, sugar and calories. And too much can contribute to weight gain, a risk factor for high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. On the other hand, cocoa itself, unlike chocolate, is low in sugar and fat while offering potential health benefits.
If you enjoy chocolate flavor, add plain cocoa to your low-fat milk or morning oats. Katherine Zeratsky, R. Mayo Clinic does not endorse companies or products. Advertising revenue supports our not-for-profit mission. Any use of this site constitutes your agreement to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy linked below.
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Someone would need to consume about 12 standard g bars of dark chocolate or about 50 of milk chocolate per day to get that much. She points out that most studies on chocolate and health get industry funding, but journalists generally fail to highlight this. Research has repeatedly shown that when food companies are paying, they are more likely to get helpful results.
US researchers who reviewed studies about soft drinks, juice and milk, for example, found that those receiving industry money were six times more likely to produce favourable or neutral findings than those that did not. Two of the aforementioned studies — those on blood pressure and markers of cardiovascular health — are meta-analyses, meaning they pool the results of previously published research.
The problem is that science journals, like the popular media, are more likely to publish findings that suggest chocolate is healthy than those that conclude it has no effect, which skews meta-analyses. Most people have positive expectations about chocolate because they like it.
They are therefore primed, through the conditioning effect — famously described by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov — to respond positively.
They may, for example, become more relaxed, boosting levels of endorphins and neurotransmitters, and triggering short-term physiological benefits. Many of the studies that involve people being given chocolate and tracking their health over time are short and have small numbers of participants. This adds to the difficulties nutritional scientists have in separating out the effects of consuming one food or nutrient from the rest of their diet and other variables and interactions within the body.
So when and why did chocolate companies become so keen on using science as a marketing tool? The answer depends on whom you ask. During the s, scientists became interested in the French paradox — the now discredited observation that heart disease rates were low in France despite a national diet high in saturated fats.
One proposed explanation was relatively high consumption of flavanols, a group of compounds found in red wine, tea and cocoa which, at high doses, had been linked to the prevention of cellular damage. We're taught from a young age that chocolate should be eaten in moderation and that it's bad for our health. But is it really? Can you eat chocolate and still be healthy? The simple answer is that a lot of chocolate is laden with hydrogenated fats, sugar and other chemicals that are definitely bad for our health.
The difference between eating a bar of regular milk chocolate and something a little more expensive with less ingredients more cacao can be significant. And if you can step away from generic chocolate and retrain your palate to something a little less sweet, you can still get your chocolate hit. A study at Aberdeen University looked at the eating habits of more than 20, people.
Of course, like any research, the research also pointed out that eating chocolate doesn't make make you healthier. It was an observational study.
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