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Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Health: Dark Chocolate Lessens Hardening of the ArteriesThere have been articles about this report floating around for the past few days, so I’m assuming most folks have heard that a new Swiss study has found that a little dark chocolate a day could help slow hardening of the arteries. They performed their small-scale experiment on a group of twenty male smokers. For the control group they consumed 1.5 ounces of white chocolate and the other group ate 1.5 ounces of dark chocolate a day. Then they took a look at their blood flow and determined that the dark chocolate eaters had better blood flow. The article in Forbes magazine details some other reports as well that back this up. However, the article goes on to point out that dark chocolate is notoriously high in calories and fat. As a demonstration they say:
Okay, any idiot who eats candy knows that a dark chocolate Mounds (redundancy, hello?) is not really a chocolate bar, it’s a coconut bar covered in chocolate. The saturated fat in a Mounds bar comes from the coconut just as much the chocolate. Plus, why eat a Mounds bar for the dark chocolate benefit ... you should be eating one of Hershey’s new Extra Dark Chocolate. And while they’re at it they could mention that it contains 3 grams of protein, 4 grams of fiber, 20% of your RDA of iron and the fat is monosaturated. But really, there are lots of better ways to get your antioxidant boost from dark chocolate and one of them is using cocoa instead of chocolate. The antioxidant compounds are found in the cocoa solids (the control group used white chocolate, so they know it’s not the cocoa butter that’s having the positive effect), so adding cocoa to your sauces or stews might be a good start. Or a little pudding made with skim milk. I think the next step, however, might be to find out if the same holds true in healthy non-smokers. 
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Meticulously photographed and documented reviews of candy from around the world. And the occasional other sweet adventures. Open your mouth, expand your mind.
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Comment by
Tricia on 12/21/05 at 6:24 am #
Commenting is not available in this channel entry.I was listening to an NPR podcast yesterday (a recent “story of the day”, perhaps?) about how Mars is working to increase flavonoids (sp??) in their chocolate. They had a nutritionist on who was saying “Chocolate is high in calories, and Americans are overweight, so IF flavonoids really are good for you [jury still out], we should be taking pills not eating chocolate.” I wondered if this was the first time a nutritionist was on record as saying “take a pill rather than getting it from food” (because they seem to promote ‘whole food’ sources for all other important vitamins and minerals!). But I also thought “so don’t ADD it to your consumption, replace something else” - like, perhaps, some of the milk chocolate we consume, or the gallons of soda a typical American drinks….
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