Why You Should Eat Dark Chocolate

Many people treat chocolate as a junk food, saying that it’s bad for you. However, this is not true. While it is definitely not recommended that you eat pounds and pounds, a little bit of chocolate can actually improve your health.

Recent research have also shown that chocolate is full of flavonoids, which are naturally occurring compounds found in cacao trees, red wine, fruits, vegetables, and tea.  These flavonoids may be beneficial to your cardiovascular health, which includes your heart and blood vessels, and can even act antioxidants. Antioxidants protect your tissues from destructive oxidation. The flavonoids found in chocolate can help prevent you from heart disease, blood inflammation and diabetes.Control coughs, and improve blood flow are both benefits from flavonoids found in chocolate. Some even say chocolate can help you in mental math!

While any type of chocolate has flavonoids and the 300 natural chemicals that make chocolate chocolate, not all are made equal. Dark chocolate is best for your health, because it has no milk and contains more cacao. In fact, it takes 12 cacao beans to make one ounce of dark chocolate and only 4 to make one ounce of milk chocolate. This means that dark chocolate contains more flavonoids and antioxidants. The milk in milk chocolate also causes the chocolate to have more unhealthy fat, and the only benefit of eating milk over dark chocolate is that milk chocolate has calcium.

If you are still not convinced that eating dark chocolate is good for you, consider this: chocolate can help you live longer. Jeanne Louise Calment lived to the age of 122, which is the oldest anyone has ever lived. Her secret to success? She ate two and a half pounds of dark chocolate a week. Harvard researchers have found that eating chocolate actually adds two years to your life expectancy.

So, if dark chocolate is good for you, how much are you should actually supposed to eat? Definitely not a whole Hershey King Size bar. With the fat and calories,  3 is said to be the healthiest number of ounces, and to really get a lot of nutrients, try to buy dark chocolate with 65% cacao or higher.

For more information, check out: http://archive.fieldmuseum.org/chocolate/eating.html and http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/28/11-reasons-chocolate-is-good-for-your-health.html