Benefits of Chocolate

Some of the benefits of raw chocolate or cacao are the high levels of antioxidant and magnesium content. Raw cacao is the highest food source of antioxidant. It is higher than green tea or red wine. How great is that. You can protect your cells by eating raw cacao!! So chocolate in it's raw form is good for you!

The high levels of magnesium contained in raw cacao supports heart health, relaxes muscles and eases menstrual cramping, increases flexibility, and improves brain function.

The greatest benefit here is cacao's effect on the brain. It actually assists the body in the production of brain chemicals like serotonin, phenylethylamine, theobromine, and tryptophan. These brain chemicals are responsible for making us feel less depressed, less stressed, and less anxious. Bottom line, these chemicals help increase our pleasure and I sometimes referred to these as the feel good chemcals.

Chocolate

We all love to hear about and eat chocolate. So I thought I would revisit this topic. There has been a controversy around chocolate and whether it is good for you. There is a form of chocolate which is very good for you. The form is raw chocolate or cacao. This is not the sweetened processed milk chocolate that you get in a candy bar.

Raw cacao usually comes in the form of bits of the dried cacao bean. The bits are hard and you definitely don't want to bite them. If you're going to eat raw chocolate, put a few bits in your mount and suck on them until they are soft. Then you can chew them up. If you bite into the hard bits, they taste like dirt or something worse! You can also take the bits and grind them up into a fine powder - like cocoa powder that you buy in the store. Except this will not be sweet and it will not have any hydrogenated fats in it. You can use it to make things like cocoa. Use Stevia to sweeten it.

More on the benefits tomorrow.