Ways chocolate is good for your mind and body, especially if it’s dark and has nuts, and why you shouldn’t eliminate it from your diet
- Chocolate is a feel-good food, perhaps because of what’s in it but most probably because it brings back memories of good times growing up, a doctor says
- It’s good for you because it has vitamins and minerals, and compounds that help keep blood vessels elastic. What’s more, you can’t give it up even if you try
Chocolate isn’t really filling, but it tastes good and studies suggest it can make you feel good, too. You often cannot stop after eating a single piece, so you polish off the entire bar, if not more, leaving only a guilty conscience. So is eating chocolate unhealthy?
“It depends on the type,” says Dr Johannes Georg Wechsler, president of the Federal Association of German Nutritional Physicians.
Dark chocolate with a cocoa content of at least 70 per cent can have positive effects on the body, he says, due in part to the flavanols in cocoa, chocolate’s main ingredient.
A group of bioactive compounds found in certain plant-based foods, flavanols help to keep blood vessels elastic and have also been shown to lower high blood pressure slightly.
Dark chocolate has a higher proportion of flavanols than light chocolate does since its cocoa content is higher. And light chocolate contains more sugar and fat than dark chocolate does, Wechsler notes.