HEALTHY FOOD: DARK CHOCOLATE

A source of: Polyphenols

FOR THOSE WHO ENJOY IT, TRY TO EAT: about 100 calories of dark chocolate daily, adjusting your calorie intake and exercise appropriatel. This is a healthy food during winter.

As you slog through the winter doldrums, here’s the health update that could carry you through until spring: Dark chocolate is a SuperFood. For many of us, this is a dream come true. The interesting thing is that many people have told that once they think of chocolate as a food that’s beneficial to health, even though they still love and enjoy it, because it’s no longer “forbidden,” they’re somehow less tempted to gorge on it.
       This news doesn’t mean that you should toss out the oatmeal and fill your cabinets with chocolate. Pause for a moment and let the HealthStyle choco-late watchwords sink in:

• Keep your daily dark chocolate intake to about 100 calories per day.
• Eat only dark chocolate

    First, and most important, is the amount of chocolate: You can’t eat as much as you want. It’s high in calories and eating too much of it can sabo-tage your other Healthy Lifestyle achievements. If you eat excessive amounts of chocolate, you can gain weight. Depending on your weight and activity level, chocolate should be a small treat, a little healthy indulgence that will have to be accounted for in your overall calorie intake/activity equation.

    When you do indulge in chocolate and you’re looking for a health benefit, dark chocolate. Milk chocolate or white chocolate (the latter isn’t even real chocolate) won’t do. While both contain some of the beneficial polyphenols (though in lower amounts than dark chocolate), preliminary data sug-est that the presence of milk in the chocolate somehow mitigates the effectiveness of the polyphenols.
     Here, in a nutshell, is the good news: Dark chocolate seems to contribute to lowering blood pressure, increasing blood flow, and ultimately contribut-ing to a healthy heart.

Polyphenols: The SuperNutrients

One of the most abundant phytonutrients in the human diet, their total daily dietary intake can easily exceed 1 gram per day, which is much higher than that of all other classes of phytonutrients and known dietary antioxidants.
     To give it some perspective, this is about ten times higher than the majority of our vitamin C intake and about one hundred times higher than our dietary intake of vitamin E and carotenoids. Polyphenols act as anti-oxidants, anti-inflammatories, antimutagens, antimicrobials, antivirals, and antifungals. They help protect our DNA and inhibit the growth of unwanted blood ves-sels. They decrease LDL-C oxidation, elevate HDLs, promote blood vessel dilation, decrease blood pressure, have beneficial effects on capillary permeability and fragility, work in synergy with vitamins C and E, lower the risk for cardiovascular disease, and lower the risk for some cancers. They also seem to play a role in turning on “good” genes and turning off “bad” ones.

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