As if we needed another reason (there are plenty, including being yummy & lowering the risk of heart disease), but it turns out that it also makes your brain more resilient to CO2 while helping you perform better at difficult tasks. Caveat: it’s a small test pool. But on the plus side, you get to eat more chocolate.
Seriously though, I don’t know of any adverse effects of chocolate in pregnancies, and theobromine is potentially good for the pregnant woman in a variety of ways. The trick, as always, is to consume it in moderation.
Whenever someone tells me chocolate is good for you, I then observe them tucking into Cadbury’s Dairy MIlk or Toblerone.
Now I am a huge fan of the latter, huge fan, but let’s be honest, that stuff is definitely not good for you!
Hmmm Toblerone White, probably my favourite :).
In the last year or so, I have become much fonder of dark chocolate. The trick for me was to avoid eating pretty much all chocolate for a while, then having the dark stuff.
You can also start with darker milk chocolate and just increase the percentage of cocoa steadily. That’s how I managed it, and not intentionally, mind. I was trying Green & Blacks’ chocolates and worked my way up from their ‘milk’ chocolate to the 85% cocoa, which is the sweet spot for me now. Any more and it’s just too bitter and dry.
Chocolate studies always raise my bullshit hackles after this guy showed how news media glom onto anything that sounds too good to be true (great story, read it)
I had the same healthy skepticism you did, as I constantly read about “X food is bad for you” followed a year later by “JK x food is good for you!”, which makes trying to build a sensible diet much more difficult.
Technically the researched article is about flavanols, so you could have some grapes or tea instead. Also, in many ways this is a replication of earlier findings, but using a more direct measurement of a phenotype.
If you can figure out how to get chocolate to flow through an IV tube, you are already a super brain. And then I would hope that you don’t do it anyway. :)
Butter, full-fat yogurt, real milk, tropical oils, egg yolks…
Basically, anything that directly contradicts the bullshit that the AHA has been spouting for decades, which led directly (as one example, we’ll skip HFCS for now) to the use of cheap, shelf-stable of trans fats by the food industry – contributing massively to heart disease, and those shitheads take no responsibility for it. “We just give guidance – it’s not our fault if people misuse it (or if we’re full of shit to begin with).”
Yeah, eggs. I remember “OMG if you breathe near an egg you will immediately DIE”, which is now “OMG if you ever stop eating eggs you will immediately DIE”.
Lindt’s dark chocolate bar with sea salt is my current favorite. The best bar I’ve ever tasted is Mo’s bacon bar. It contains bacon bits and sea salt, but it costs about $8.