Indulgence or Therapy?

A square of dark chocolate implies many things in today’s popular consciousness.

Some words that come to mind:

• Indulgence
• Sensuality
• Ecstasy
• Luxury
• Hedonism
• Pleasure

And yet, recent studies show that people who regularly consume a modest quantity of dark chocolate are healthier for it! Perhaps this idea goes against the very mentality that attracts many of us to splurge on a bar of chocolate. Perhaps if the secret got out that dark chocolate was indeed “health food” of a sort, we would no longer feel the indulgent allure that compels us to savor each taste of dark chocolate. I doubt it.

Antioxidants Galore

In fact, it is no surprise that dark chocolate has shown to control blood pressure and provide other cardiovascular benefits for people with heart conditions. After all, we are not talking about run-of-the-mill candy bars chock-full of artificially processed flavors and preservatives. A typical bar of dark chocolate is pure and a bar of gourmet chocolate is purer still, allowing the brilliance of the raw materials to shine through. A dark chocolate bar normally consists of more than 65% pure cocoa, and the remainder natural sugar often with a hint of vanilla.

Raw cocoa contains a concentration of flavonoid antioxidants much higher than other foods widely known for their antioxidant content:
• 8x more than blueberries
• 15x more than spinach
• 21x more than broccoli

Why do we care about these so-called “flavanoid antioxidants”? These antioxidants rid our bodies of destructive molecules known as “free radicals” which can be responsible for creating or exacerbating heart conditions and other ailments.

Proof in the Pudding

An 8-year longitudinal study in Sweden, the first of its kind, recently concluded that patients with existing heart conditions who ate more dark chocolate lived longer.

The New York Times reported in this article:

The patients had a health examination three months after their discharge from the hospital, and researchers followed them for the next eight years using Swedish national registries of hospitalizations and deaths. After controlling for age, sex, obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, education and other factors, they found that the more chocolate people consumed, the more likely they were to survive.

Compared with people who ate none, those who had chocolate less than once a month had a 27 percent reduction in their risk for cardiac death, those who ate it up to once a week had a 44 percent reduction and those who indulged twice or more a week had a 66 percent reduced risk of dying from a subsequent heart event. The beneficial effect remained after controlling for intake of other kinds of sweets.

All of the detailed results of the study were published in The Journal of Internal Medicine in September 2009.

Indeed, current research in the private and public sector aims to create drugs from cocoa-based flavanol. There is more research needed in this field to isolate additional variables and analyze a full cross-section of population groups. Nonetheless, this news should give us some confidence that we can indulge in moderate (and frequent!) consumption of dark chocolate and, in doing so, improve our health.

What about milk chocolate?

A warning to chocolate eaters: it appears that milk chocolate simply does not provide similar health benefits. There are two reasons for this. First, an Italian study published in Nature in 2005 found that milk likely “interferes with the absorption of antioxidants from chocolate…and may therefore negate the potential health benefits that can be derived from eating moderate amounts of dark chocolate.” Secondly, even if our body could partially absorb the present antioxidants, the cocoa content is so low in milk chocolate (often 20%-30%) that the health benefits would be outweighed by the excess fats, sugars and other additives present in milk chocolate. Conclusion: the purer the chocolate, the healthier. At Xoco, this gives us even more motivation to educate consumers to appreciate the intricate flavors of gourmet chocolate, produced by the genetics of the raw cocoa bean and teased out by the artisan chocolate maker.