Naturopathic Source

There has been some talk/news lately about how good chocolate is for you and how it is full of antioxidants. There are some companies that have been marketing their "therapeutic"chocolate bars as a health food. Here's the real deal on chocolate.

Raw cacao beans and nibs do have a good quantity of antioxidants. Once you add milk to it, to make milk chocolate, those antioxidants get bound up and are no longer active. (The same, by the way, is true for green tea: you lose the antioxidants when you add milk.) So milk chocolate is just tasty, but not good for your health.

If chocolate is eaten in any appreciable quantity, the caffeine content does a lot of people more bad than good. Caffeine increases hormones that promote anxiety and daily caffeine intake actually increases your stress perception. That is, you will perceive events throughout your day as being more stressful than they really are. Only those with strong, calm constitutions should have caffeine on any kind of regular basis. If you tend to be wound up and high stress (the majority of society here in North America), you'll only be served by staying away from caffeine.

The sugar content in most chocolate products far outweighs any benefits. I think this one is fairly self-explanatory...

Chocolate contains magnesium and a magnesium deficiency is probably why some people crave it and why many women crave it premenstrually, when the need for magnesium increases. Interestingly enough, magnesium is also depleted by sugar. So "chocoholics" often crave chocolate for the magnesium and then, as the metabolism of that chocolate further depletes magnesium, they crave it more. Try eating a lot of green leafy vegetables at your meals as they also contain a lot of magnesium. Magnesium can also be found in supplement form, but it's a bit tricky in my opinion. Magnesium is a very safe supplement and there are no serious concerns, but I do have one concern. In terms of Traditional Chinese Medicine (bear with me here, Chinese Medicine is a very different way of looking at things, but very accurate and insightful), magnesium is "cold". Many people today, especially women (for a variety of reasons) do not have enough heat in their digestive systems and unfortunately it's a more complicated than just eating spicy foods. So if someone`s digestive system is not warm enough and possibly already has cold in it, when you add a cold supplement you risk furthering this deficiency. What does this mean in plain english: the possibility of more digestive weakness, gas, bloating, heartburn, constipation, diarrhea (or alternating constipation and diarrhea), cold body temperature and slower metabolism, to name a few. And once you put more cold into your system, it`s not that easy to undo. For many people, low dose magnesium (50-100mg) should be okay, but check with your doctor first, to make sure you are not on any conflicting medication.

Even bitter chocolate, which is roasted and processed at high temperatures, has lost 7/8 of it`s antioxidants (ie. most of them).

Is there any chocolate you can use? Yes. Use raw cacao beans, nibs or powder. They will be bitter, though. For a treat you can mix with some agave syrup (a natural sweetener that is low on the glycemic index) and make a chocolate syrup. You can also mix it with some coconut oil (I will be posting soon about coconut oil) and agave syrup to make a frosting.

Raw cacao is available at most health food stores and through many websites online. As I was writing this post, I came across this one: www.wildernessfamilynaturals.com

TC