Is Dark Chocolate Actually good for you?
We’ve all bee preview to the idea that dark chocolate is not only better for you than milk chocolate, but we’ve heard that dark chocolate is actually good for you, whether it be your heart, your cholesterol your respiratory system and more. Well I have good and bad news on the topic of dark chocolate and how good it is for you. According to medical news chocolate has strong ties and correlation with life threatening conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, too much calorie intake, and more. These conditions are actually life threatening and would really throw some people off from eating chocolate.
There are, however potential health benefits to eating chocolate. Chocolate can help lower cholesterol, it provides great antioxidants, prevent cognitive decline, and is actually good for your heart. Chocolate and dark chocolate specifically has recently been credited with a vast number of health benefits. One of these huge benefits is the chance that chocolate actually helps with the walking ability for peripheral artery disease. Peripheral artery disease, or PAD is a form of heart disease that restricts blood flow to the arms and the legs, therefore leaving them unusable. There are some cocoa extracts that can even help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Chocolate really has a large number of health benefits, and if you brush your teeth and maintain a healthy diet otherwise, chocolate is definitely not the last diet cheat that you should be thinking about. Please enjoy this video on the benefits of chocolate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-3yXokTuEw&feature=youtu.be
I strongly agree with your opinion that Chocolate really has a large number of health benefits. Not just the antioxidant capacity of Polyphenols in chocolate, the chocolate itself makes the person who has it happy. It regulates the mood, and the blood pressure, which is one of the surprising benefit of the chocolate.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0963996900000697
I like how you explored both sides of the chocolate debate. (Unfortunately the cons don’t matter to me bc i love chocolate so much.) 😉 but i never knew that chocolate could actually be that helpful to our bodies. Thanks for the post
I think with many foods that in moderation it is okay but too much of it can lead to unhealthy things. This is just like dark chocolate. It can have health benefits but it still contains sugar and when too much is eaten at once it can be harmful to the body. People need to know too that it is dark chocolate that is healthy and not make it an excuse that they are eating chocolate because it is healthy
After reading this article its obvious that there are pros and cons to eating chocolate. I personally am not a huge fan of dark chocolate but if it helps fight high cholesterol, I’m probably more likely to chose dark over a different kind. Living hear Hershey (home of Hershey Chocolate), I have come to realize that people will always eat chocolate so they might as well eat the one with a few more health benefits! Here’s a Dr. Oz article about chocolate!
http://www.doctoroz.com/article/good-chocolate-bad-chocolate-and-how-tell-difference
I think that there are both pros and cons to eating chocolate, but being someone who is very interested in nutrition I think that chocolate is best eaten in moderation like any other food. From your article and based on some research I have done in the past on the chocolate, out of all the different types of chocolates there are dark chocolate definitely has the most benefits.
I actually wrote a post on healthy foods to eat in the last blogging period where chocolate was included. There was a study posted in the Journal of Psychopharmacology where chocolate foods can increase the amount of serotonin being produced in the brain, but the problem with it was that it only catered to a certain age group, but from reading this and other sources I feel it applies to people of all ages, excluding those with certain health problems.
Interesting how many things labeled “unhealthy” have surprisingly positive health benefits. I have read this article before, and I have dark chocolate a couple of times per week. I happened to love chocolate, and the medical benefits are another reason to enjoy it. Mensfitness details a variety of other health benefits, including lowering body mass index! This, of course, means small ingestions of dark chocolate relatively frequently.
http://www.mensfitness.com/nutrition/what-to-eat/7-health-benefits-dark-chocolate