Unless you are pregnant or obese you should not feel that guilty about eating chocolate. You can sneak it into your daily diet because studies are showing that it is actually excellent for your overall heath. After years of being maligned it is finally getting a rep as a health food.
This is because container has known chocolate over three hundred active chemical agents. These agents are all beneficial for health.
Believe it or not eating chocolate can be good for your teeth because they have antibacterial agents that fight tooth decay in them. This is truer of pure chocolate. The high sugar content of milk chocolate can actually cause tooth decay.
The smell of chocolate is also beneficial. It can relax you, which is good for PMS. That is also why it can calm down a hyperactive kid, but ONLY if there is not too much sugar in it. I like chocolate milk for calming kids down. Chocolate also contains phenyl ethylamine, which is a mild mood elevator
Scientists have also found that the cocoa butter in chocolate contains oleic acid, a mono-unsaturated fat that lowers bad cholesterol and may raise good cholesterol.
You can also try drinking a cup of hot chocolate before you eat. This helps diminish your need for calories. This is a trick I used to lose my post pregnancy weight. Make sure that the milk is low fat as in skim or 1% or you could gain weight despite your good intentions.
Weirdly, chocolate can also prevent heart attacks. The flavanoids in chocolate keep blood vessels elastic. It also increase antioxidant levels in the blood. Men who eat chocolate, for instance, live a year longer then men who don't.
Why do you crave it when you are feeling depressed? The carbohydrates in chocolate raise serotonin levels in the brain, resulting in a sense of over-all well-being.
It's full of antioxidants. They help fight the free radicals which can attack DNA and cause long term serious damage to body. This means that eating chocolate makes cancer and heart attacks less likely. So the more antioxidants that you and your family eat the longer you are likely to live and chocolate is the absolutely richest source of them. The darker the chocolate the better it is for you and the richer it is in antioxidants. In fact the darker any type of food is, especially the fruits, the more likely it is to contain antioxidants.
Dark chocolate also contains catchetins which are what is in tea. Catchetins keep the immune system healthy. Chocolate is alos a good source of magnesium and copper, both of which help the brain as well as help a person maintain a regular heart rate.