A lot of people including myself loooovvveee to eat chocolate! Chocolate can come in so many different varieties. You have dark chocolate, you have white chocolate, you have the classic chocolate, , you have chocolate with nuts, chocolate with fruits, triple chocolate, double chocolate, just so much chocolate! Did you ever think about if certain chocolate can actually be good for you. That if you eat it, you don’t have to feel as guilty after?

Well the one chocolate that is said to actually be good for you is…………DARK CHOCOLATE!!!

Dark chocolate and almost every other chocolate contains cacao. Cacao is a seed or bean  that comes from a cacao tree. These trees are usually in south America. Cacao is the basis of chocolate. Even though on its own, it has a very bitter flavor to it, the chocolate that we know and love today would not be able to be made without it.  So whats in dark chocolate that makes it good for you? One difference between dark chocolate and other chocolates is the high amount of Cacao it has inside of it. That’s why it is not as sweet as chocolates such as milk chocolate, and white chocolate. Those chocolates contain more milk, sugar, and butter, the unhealthy stuff.

So what else is important about this cacao bean?  The cacao bean contains a thing called flavonoids. I talked about these in recent posts before, but flavonoids are antioxidants. Antioxidants are pretty much nutrients for the body, that help fight against things that can weaken the body. What can eating dark chocolate do for the body? It is said that dark chocolate can give the body good cardiovascular benefits. According to “Womans Health mag” “there was a Swedish study done with with over 31,000 women and the results showed that out of the the woman who ate one to two servings of chocolate each week cut their risk for heart disease by a third”. (womanshealthmag). There also was another study done in Germany  where it “showed that eating a square of dark chocolate a day lowered blood pressure and the risk of a heart attack and stroke by 39″. (Womanshealthmag). Now with these studies these conclusions could be reasoned out by chance. Also I think there could possibly be something else that is helping lower the levels in these studies. Maybe the dark chocolate is working with other parts of the body to make these things possible. I did read an article about gut bacteria that talks about the gut bacteria and the dark chocolate work together in helping out the body. Apparently” the gut bacteria breaks down the components in the dark chocolate and turns them into anti- inflammatory compounds.” (mercola.com). These compounds are good for a persons heart.

So dark chocolate seems like pretty beneficial chocolate. Some of things dark chocolate is good for is that it is said that dark chocolate can lower blood pressure, improve blood flow, its a lower  calorie snack, and help a person lose weight because its more filling,   and it can possibly help with brain function. For some of these facts about dark chocolate they have not been fully proven. I think it would be a pretty cool experiment to try and find out what dark chocolate can really do. I think an experiment like this could be not as difficult. There is always that possibility that the dark chocolate can affect each person differently, and it would be pretty interesting to see what happens. I think people would actually love to be in these experiments because, if I was asked to eat a certain amount of chocolate of course i would!  I personally love dark chocolate, and its pretty cool to see what it can do for me.

Here are tasty ways and forms that dark chocolate comes in! 🙂

http://authoritynutrition.com/7-health-benefits-dark-chocolate/

http://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/benefits-of-chocolate?page=4

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/03/31/dark-chocolate-health-benefits.aspx

http://www.livestrong.com/article/522112-health-benefits-of-raw-cacao-nibs/

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/07/antioxidants-in-a-nutshell/