Dark chocolate wonders in western culture

Samantha Osaduke
Staff Writer
Chocolate is a guilty pleasure for all of us.
As children we were captivated by Roald Dahl’s Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and celebrated holidays – Valentine’s Day and Halloween – dedicated to eating chocolate treats. Chocolate has become embedded into North American culture.
And the good news is that some chocolate isn’t that bad for us. Research done in 2007 on dark chocolate found significant health benefits.

Researchers from the University Hospital in Cologne, Germany, found that a 6.3-gram serving of dark chocolate could lower blood pressure. The  benefit lies in dark chocolate’s flavonoids, the natural compounds in the cocoa bean. The flavonoids reduce blood pressure by producing nitric oxide, which causes the blood vessels to widen and relax.
Dark chocolate is one of the top foods for flavonoid content, along with bran, red wine, grapefruit and strawberries. According to researchers, the reduction was small, but when it came to how effective it really was in the population as a whole, that small piece of dark chocolate could lower the number of deaths from heart disease and stroke.
Milk chocolate – which has been diluted with milk – has the second most flavonoids followed by white chocolate, which contains none.
But it’s not just the effect dark chocolate has on our heart that makes it healthy; other studies have shown dark chocolate is also crucial to our mental health. Chocolate lovers who consume more chocolate experience better moods and are more likely to have feelings of happiness found a 2007 study from the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Though the finding is still under debate, phenylethylamine, a compound that makes up dark chocolate, has shown to help attention span and brain functions in people, which may be the reason people feel a lot better.
Before you start eating dark chocolate though, you need to make sure what you’re buying is really dark chocolate. Dark chocolate should contain at least 70 percent cocoa solids. Try to select chocolate bars that list cocoa solids or cocoa mass first, not sugar. The more cocoa in the dark chocolate, the higher antioxidant flavonoid there is in the product.
Even if you’re still in doubt about the health benefits of dark chocolate, when it comes down to it, dark chocolate is always the better choice among the three types. The dark sweet treat will always have less calories and sugar than milk or white chocolate and for some, it just tastes better.