3 Reasons Chocolate is Everything You Need in Your Life
By Amber Lowry, Dolce Diet Intern
Love chocolate? Of course you do. What you probably don’t love is the added sugar and other potential additives found in most conventional chocolates. And being the healthy-minded individual that you are (go you!), you’ve forsaken your love of most chocolate and packed it up into your “doesn’t align with my health goals anymore” box. And yes, we’ve all heard the “dark chocolate is healthy” shtick, but there’s more to the story that you probably haven’t heard.
At the root of chocolate is the cacao tree, or Theobroma Cacao, a term coined by the ancient Greeks meaning “food of the gods.” The beans from this tree are used to make all kinds of chocolate goodies both healthy and conventional. Our collective, undying love of chocolate stems back to ancient peoples like the Greeks and the Aztecs. Back in the 1500s during his overthrowing of the Aztec empire, Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes regarded chocolate as “the divine drink which builds up resistance and fights fatigue” and that a “cup of this precious drink permits man to walk for a whole day without food.”
Moving forward in history to the 1800s, Thomas Jefferson went as far as to proclaim that “the superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain.” So basically, without having the science we have today, great minds of the past have known that there is something to chocolate that cannot be ignored for human health and vitality. Here are just three reasons (trust me, there are a lot more) why chocolate isn’t the nutrition villain modern processing and marketing has made it out to be.
Antioxidants
As a society, we are overloaded with oxidative stress, which causes chronic inflammation. This chronic inflammation can be considered a large component of modern health conditions including heart disease, cancer and leaky gut. Antioxidants protect against oxidative stress. Chocolate scores as one of the highest foods on the ORAC scale (oxygen radical absorbance capacity), which is a scale that measures the power of the antioxidant properties of specific foods. Chocolate (cacao) has rates comparable to those of popular antioxidant sweethearts like goji berries and acai berries. According to a meta-analysis published in The British Medical Journal, the antioxidants in cacao are so powerful that they can reduce heart disease risk by 37 percent and stroke by 29 percent.
Performance
Research published in the Journal of Physiology showed that a certain flavonal in cacao known as epicatechin improves mitochondrial function in mice. The same may prove true for humans. Considering that mitochondria are the “energy powerhouse” of the cell, improved mitochondrial functioning equates to more energy, better performance and increased longevity. The study previously mentioned showed that epicatechins are such influential mitochondrial boosters that they increased exercise performance markers by 50 percent compared to the control group. Trying to “rep out?” Turns out muscle fatigue resistance was shown to be increased by 30 percent. If you are trying to increase performance output, high quality dark chocolate is one way to kick those “gainz” (with a Z, of course) into high performance!
Cholesterol
Everyone knows someone with “high” cholesterol. Good news: cacao helps facilitate a beneficial cholesterol profile. The decreased risk of heart disease and stroke mentioned in the first reason is most likely due to the fact that cacao has the ability to lower LDL cholesterol oxidation. While LDL cholesterol is not inherently bad, when a specific type of LDL cholesterol particle is oxidized, it becomes a major contributing factor to heart disease and episodes of stroke. Besides lowering LDL cholesterol oxidation, cacao can also raise your HDL (your “good” cholesterol)!
Your chocolate cravings aren’t just signs of a sweet tooth or willpower weakness. Being healthy is about listening to your body in the most educated way possible, and your body knows what it needs. It just needs you to understand its unique biological language. Remember, we aren’t talking about milk chocolate and chocolate sweetened with sugar. We are dealing with dark chocolate and real cacao. Interestingly, the research shows that milk chocolate provides none of the same beneficial properties of dark chocolate. Stick to the real stuff and get ready, cause The Dolce Diet team is going to be changing the chocolate game very soon!
Amber is a recent graduate of Montclair State University’s Communication and Media Arts program. She has contributed various articles to Whole Foods Magazine as well as Fox News Latino. Passionate about both health and social issues, Amber is currently the co-host of a podcast that aims to educate folks on how to apply ancestral health practices in the modern world. She takes a moderate stance in most areas of life and believes that health is an extremely personal journey that relies on open-mindedness and self-awareness. Her aspirations include earning a master’s degree within the realm of health communication and becoming a French Bulldog mom.
