“Isn’t all chocolate good for you?”, is what I hear from many chocolate lovers.

Yet that must not be true, since so many chocoholics lament having to give up their favorite treats due to health concerns like diabetes and heart disease.

What makes dark chocolate healthy?

Cacao is one of the highest antioxidant foods we know about, which has made dark chooolate, and compounds found in cacao the subject of 100’s of studies on everything from cardiovascular health and brain function, to liver support, vision and cellular energy production. Overall, there are more than 300 compounds in cacao that are beneficial to the human body.

How to choose good healthy dark chocolate

If it’s true that hundreds of studies exist demonstrating the benefits of cacao, how do you choose a good dark chocolate? If you are wanting to take advantage of the chocolate’s health benefits, it turns out that all chocolate is not created equal.  Conventional chocolate has been fermented, roasted and alkalized to reduce cacao’s bitter taste. Unfortunately, this also destroys 60-90% of the antioxidant value of the cacao. Most commercially available chocolate has added waxes, fillers, bad fats, refined sugar and added caffiene. Common practice in the industry turn once healthy cacao into candy that can clog your arteries and spike your blood sugar!

The powerful nutrition and antioxidants available in the original cacao bean are degraded to such an extent you may need to eat a whole bag of chocolates to get the nutrition in a few cacao beans.

To recieve the maximum benefits of cacao, without the side effects of modern production, it is best to consume raw or cold pressed cacao. Dark chocoalte made with cold pressed cacao can have 6 to 10 times the antioxidants of conventionally processed dark chocolate. Quercetin, for example, is destroyed during processessing to such an extent that it was originally not recognized to be present in cacao at all.

Believe it or not, a delicious cold pressed dark chocolate, packed with documented therapeutic levels of antioxidants has been created by a woman who was diabetic and found out how good raw cacao was for diabetes. Learn more about high antioxidant Beyond Healthy Chocolate

The Healthy Chocolate is one of my favorite functional foods for several reasons:

• The broad spectrum antioxidants benefit so many different areas of health, with one delicious product
• It is a delicious healthy replacement for something people eat anyway
• The flavonols (particularly the catechins and epicatechins) can help the body detox without a healing crisis

If you would like to schedule a complimentary Health & Longevity Session to explore how the Healthy Chocolate and/or other health and wellness tools could enhance your quality of life, contact Robin D Lee, Health &and Longevity Coach.

To order high antioxidant Healthy Chocolate, visit www.GiftofHealthyChocolate.com

Are there heavy metals in dark chocolate?

The presence of lead and other heavy metals in chocolate occurs when heavy metals are present in the soil, naturally or because of industrial or environmental contamination. When I started working with the Healthy Chcoolate, I learned that the cacao for this particular chocolate was harvested from areas on the Ivory Coast where they never used leaded gasoline, so there is no lead in the soil.

If you want to investigate whether your favorite dark chocolate contains heavy metals, AsYouSow.org has been documenting the lead and cadmium content of chocolates sold in California. I was amazed to see how many high quality and organic dark chocolate bars have high levels of those metals.

Conclusion

Dark chocolate has the potential to be a functional food that can help the body maintain health on many different fronts, and even reverse the signs of aging. When choosing dark chocolate for your health make sure it’s cold processed, to retain maximum antioxidants and flavonols. Also make sure the healthy fats have not been replaced by unhealthy fats, waxes and fillers.