Love Chocolate? Make Sure It's Dark
As a confirmed chocolate fan, it’s a pleasure to talk about one of my all time favorite foods. I have been doing independent research for years, of course!
Overall, research continues to show new benefits, and to make one key stipulation – make it dark chocolate, not milk chocolate or white chocolate.
From there the opportunities are wide open. You can stir dark chocolate cocoa powder into your coffee, yogurt and smoothies, or whip up a tempting array of dark chocolate cookies, pastries and muffins. Best news of all, this is now a guilt free pleasure IF you watch the quantities consumed and the calories in the other ingredients used.
Check out all of the health benefits.
Lifehack has listed the following health benefits of dark chocolate: lowers heart attack and stroke risk, helps improve memory as you age, could help improve your math, boosts your mood, may help with cholesterol levels, one square a day makes your stronger for workouts, may help lower blood pressure, reduce food cravings and improve circulation.
Why it needs to be dark instead of white chocolate.
WebMD posted research from Professor Mee Young Hong at San Diego State University. She compared white and dark chocolate. Dark chocolate was the clear winner in lowering blood sugar levels, improving LDL, “bad” cholesterol, and improving HDL, “good” cholesterol readings. Compared to people who ate white chocolate, those who ate dark chocolate improved their cholesterol numbers by about 20 percent.
So my suggestion is to try several great dark chocolate recipes. More research, of course! As long as you scan recipes and labels for calories per serving, note calories of other ingredients included, and count how much you are eating, you can keep feeling smug and healthier!
Dark Chocolate Edged Apricots.
This is my absolute favorite for feeling virtuous and scoring an instant chocolate hit. You get all of the fiber and nutrients of apricots and all of the joy of dark chocolate. And if you just dip the edges into the chocolate you get the taste with less calories.
Ingredients:
Bag of dried apricots.
Dark chocolate sauce, or use dark chocolate cocoa to make your own.
Assembly:
Heat sauce and then dip just the edges of the individual apricots into the sauce (to keep the calories down). Place apricots on wax paper and put in the fridge for later. Chill until firm and serve a dessert or wonderful snacks.
We can be sure there will be more dark chocolate research to follow, independent and collective. I plan to follow it all and do what I can to help the research.