Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Chocolate as Health Food

Ok, I'll admit that I actually believe the perfect health food is cheesecake, especially if you glop some strawberries on it. I maintain that it's the perfect balance of high quality protein and good carbs. The graham cracker crust provides fiber and strawberries give you Vitamin C and they are an anti-oxidant.

So, that might be pushing it a bit.

But all kidding aside, I've seen in Prevention Magazine and various other sources that dark, semi-sweet chocolate - the kind adults like - really does have as many anti-oxidants as green tea or red wine. Nutritionists are claiming it's good for the heart.

Well, I was walking down the candy aisle at CVS during my lunch hour and lo and behold, there's now a whole section of dark chocolate. All of their labels announce the percentage of cocoa they contain. Ghiradelli has 65%. One of them has a full 85%. I guess it's the cocoa that makes them so healthy. I bought the CocoaVia, which is the chocolate that Prevention had mentioned. It's a dark, bittersweet candy that has the added advantage of having 25% of the daily minimum requirement for calcium, and it's only 100 calories.

So, now when I have my glass of red wine with dinner and top it off with a candy bar for desert, I can feel very virtuous.

2 comments:

Catzmaw said...

So THAT's how it's supposed to feel, like virtue ...

Truth be told I love a bit of dark chocolate each day. It's like methadone treatment for a heroin addict. It's what I eat to try to keep myself from going after even more milk chocolate. Great stuff, especially when taken before or after a little red wine.

Karen Duncan said...

And I forgot to mention both chocolate and cheese cake are excellent sources of calcium :)