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One of the biggest debates amongst scientists and nutritionists alike is whether chocolate is good for your health. Over the years, we’ve heard mixed reports time and time again: first, chocolate is cited for being fantastic to the point of lifesaving; and the next moment, it’s so terrible that we shouldn’t even eat it as a treat.
The reality is, chocolate is good for you, but not all types of chocolate, and not in excess. With that said, it can also have some side effects.
To start with, it’s important to know that milk chocolate – i.e. chocolate that has been processed with milk and sugar – isn’t good for your health. Or, rather, it has some health benefits, but they’re entirely outweighed by their high sugar content. Dark chocolate is much more interesting, and has a much higher potential for being advantageous to health.
We’ll be covering the full list of benefits and side effects of dark chocolate that you should know about in this video.
Benefits
1. It Has Antioxidant Properties
Antioxidants protect your body’s cells from heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. They do this by balancing out the damaging effects of free radicals.
Cocoa beans contain flavanols, a type of antioxidant that reduces the damage free radicals cause to the body’s cells. Although findings from scientific studies can’t decidedly say whether eating chocolate reduces the risk of getting certain cancers, they show that flavanols support the heart’s work. Since these antioxidants are found in cocoa beans, you should eat chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa in its ingredient list – as in, dark chocolate – to benefit from its antioxidant properties.
2. Dark Chocolate Can Boost Your Focus
As we know, dark chocolate has a broad range of powerful antioxidant properties, and it contains natural stimulants like caffeine, which have been proven to heighten mental alertness. Caffeine can also benefit a variety of brain functions, including memory, mood, energy levels, reaction times, and general mental function.
Another helpful nutrient in dark chocolate is magnesium, which helps you to de-stress, making it easier to stay calm while working on the task at hand. One study went some way to prove the benefits of dark chocolate by finding that that flavanol-rich chocolate improved the brain’s cognitive functions in healthy young people.
3. It Protects Your Skin from Sun Damage
The antioxidants in dark chocolate are cleverer than you think – they can even help you stay protected under the sun. High-cocoa chocolate can increase micro-circulation in the skin itself. Increased blood flow to the topmost layers of the skin can provide the healthy oxygenation your skin needs to protect itself.
Dark chocolate also contains several polyphenols, called catechins and epicatechins, which have been proven to supress the effects of photoaging, UV-induced radiation, and toxic activity in the skin. So chocolate may also help your skin to stay healthier and younger-looking.
4. It Supports the functions of Your Heart
Flavanols, one of the most potent disease-fighting antioxidants in dark chocolate, effectively prevent the oxidation of LDL, known as bad cholesterol. Studies have found that dark chocolate can also help in making platelets in the blood less able to create clots, which can cause heart attack or stroke, and processing nitric oxide, which helps improve blood flow throughout the body, including the brain.
Experts think that eating small amounts of dark chocolate every day can help control chronic inflammation, which can lead to heart disease. Dark chocolate can also reduce insulin resistance, which is another common risk factor for many diseases like heart disease.
5. Dark Chocolate Lowers Blood Pressure
Flavanols, as you might have guessed, are the key ingredient in dark chocolate that make it healthy in small doses. When it comes to blood pressure, flavanols stimulate the lining of your arteries to produce nitric oxide, which relaxes the arteries. With that, they improve the blood flow within your entire circulatory system.
One study of 44 adults in 2005 helped back up this research. Participants were split into two groups and given a small daily dose of either white or dark chocolate for 2 weeks. By the end of the study, those eating dark chocolate lowered their systolic blood pressure by nearly three points and their diastolic blood pressure by almost two points, on average. Those eating white chocolate saw no change to their blood pressure whatsoever.

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