Chocolate’s yummy, so many people love it and yet so many people are afraid to eat it, because of it’s bad reputation, dark chocolate doesn’t always get the props it deserves and trust me, it deserves them. Now when I say dark chocolate, I’m talking dark, with at least 70% cocoa content, it’ll say how much on the wrapper usually.
Why the high cocoa content? Because anything below 70%, or maybe 60% is considered milk chocolate, which has way more sugar in it, as well as sometimes having a lot of extra ingredients. But don’t even talk about white “chocolate” which has 0% cocoa content, by definition it’s literally NOT chocolate.
So, without further ado, here are just some of the many reasons why dark chocolate is so dang cool.
#1 Dark Chocolate Is Super-Duper Nutritious
The type of dark chocolate is the high quality stuff, which has so many valuable nutrients it’s not even funny, including contains fiber, iron, magnesium, copper, manganese, potassium, zinc, selenium, and phosphorus.
Plus it’s got tons of heathy fats like saturated and monounsaturated fats which are easily digestible, while also containing only trace amounts of unhealthy, unstable polyunsaturated fats.
Once again, it’s a huge boost to your daily values (for all those nutrients listed above) that really helps your body out throughout the day and into the upcoming weeks of hard work. No joke, this is one of the most awesome things ever when it comes to underrated nutritional heroes in the food world.
#2 Improve Your Cardiovascular Health
Chocolate gives your overall heart health a serious boost, reducing the risk of possible future problems, while also improving your everyday life in more ways than one. Let’s get into that a bit more…
Reduce blood pressure: First off we have the fact that the flavanols, magnesium, and copper that are in dark chocolate can help to easily improve your blood flow, make the blood vessels more flexible and less clenched/tight, and also help regulate blood pressure and your heartbeat.
Lowers cholesterol: If you’ve been here before, you’ve probably heard about the done about lowering LDL (bad/high) cholesterol with different types of food, but what we haven’t talked about is how dark chocolate faired in these test, well it turns out that it did really, really well, helping to lower cholesterol by as much as 10%-12%, that’s a lot for those who don’t know.
Overall heart health: Besides that though, it just helps your heart out in so many ways that it ends up doing things like reducing high blood pressure, inflammation and also reduce the risk of death to cardiovascular problems by an enormous 50%.
3# Antioxidant Powerhouse
Raw unprocessed cacao beans, which is what dark chocolate, or chocolate in general comes from are some of the absolute MOST antioxidant-rich foods on the entire planet, with whopping ORAC (a system used to measure the health benefits and antioxidants in foods) score of 20,816, that’s INSANE… Especially for something that just tastes this good. Some of it’s benefits include prevening terrible disease and other ailments such as Alzheimer’s, premature aging, UV-skin damage, heart diseases, and even cancer.
