Health Food Hoaxes: Is Chocolate Really Good for You?

Is Chocolate really good for you? I think this is one of the biggest health food hoaxes out there. First of all we shouldn’t confuse chocolate with cocoa. Pure cocoa is what’s good for you, not chocolate. Chocolate is a sweet, tasty concoction that is made from the cocoa bean.

The amount of cocoa in a chocolate candy bar is very scant, which if you look at the list of ingredients in a popular candy bar the first ingredient is usually sugar and then wheat flour and then hydrogenated oil! Cocoa powder comes in somewhere between sixth and tenth place in the ingredients list.

Hydrogenated oil is in almost all popular candy bars. Hydrogenated oil is refined (cooked) oil and it cakes up in your veins and causes high cholesterol, high blood pressure and disease. It is one of the worse foods you can eat. It is found in many of your processed snack foods.

Since the amount of cocoa in a candy bar is so scant you would have to eat quite a lot of chocolate candy bars to receive any antioxidant effect from the cocoa. But by then imagine what all of those other ingredients are doing to your body? When the ingredients sugar, cocoa butter, hydrogenated oil, and milk are added with some cocoa it is then called chocolate.

Eating a chocolate candy bar now and again certainly won’t hurt you if you already eat a healthy daily diet. But I wouldn’t start gorging out on candy bars every day just because there are rumors circulating that chocolate is good for you.

If you have a craving for chocolate it is always best for your health to eat the chocolate bars that have the most percentage of cocoa in them. You can now find them in most grocery stores. The nutritional value of pure organic cocoa shows to have high levels of antioxidants, which are the flavonoids found in the nonfat portions of the cocoa bean.

This is interesting since the ingredient that does come in first before cocoa is cocoa butter, which comes from the fatty part of the cocoa bean. So there is more cocoa butter from the fatty part of the bean in a chocolate bar than cocoa found in the non-fat portion of the cocoa bean. Interesting indeed.

Pure cocoa powder that comes from the cocoa plant carries a generous amount of minerals such as magnesium, calcium, iron, zinc, copper, potassium, and manganese. But chocolate candy bars have only scant amounts of these minerals because chocolate is only a concoction made from small amounts of cocoa.

It would be far better for your health to drink a cup of hot cocoa, sweetened with a little raw honey, than to eat a candy bar. Bottom line: Don’t fall for the “chocolate is good for you” advertisements. Buy some cocoa powder where the ingredient lists only “cocoa powder” and have a cup of hot cocoa with raw honey.