The Beneficial Effects of Chocolate

The Beneficial Effects of Chocolate
In its New World beginning, chocolate was favored as a food that relieved the effects of fatigue.

The emperor Montezuma, for example, could drink up to fifty goblets of xocoatl per day, which may seem enormous, but was probably the amount he needed for support in the day’s tasks (he kept a harem of six hundred concubines).

This anecdote is the source of the many beliefs in the aphrodisiac virtues of chocolate, virtues, incidentally, that remain to be proven.

Over the course of history, chocolate has been regarded as not only a food pleasant to the taste, but also as a remedy for different ailments, especially angina and circulatory problems.

This positive associations of chocolate and health lasted until the end of the nineteenth century; it was only with the industrialization of chocolate production and the manufacture of the sugar filled candies containing very little cacao (and fewer polyphenols) that chocolate began to be perceived as a substance harmful to health.

Up until now, researchers have studied mostly the potential impact of chocolate on cardiovascular disease in populations that consume large quantities of cacao.

Cacao’s beneficial effect on the cardiovascular system may be related to its antioxidant activity.

The ingestion of moderate quantities of cacao causes the blood’s antioxidant capacity to rise, thus diminishing the oxidant of proteins responsible for the formation of atheromatous plaques (plaques that protrude into blood vessels and black blood flow).

However, that this effect disappears when chocolate is eaten together with the milk, because of a dramatic change in polyphenols absorption.

Another effect of chocolate that certainly contributes to its beneficial for the cardiovascular system is the reduction of harmful blood platelet activity which reduces the risk of clot formation.

The similarity of the phytochemicals content in cacao and that of other foods suspected of playing a role in cancer prevention allows us to imagine that cacao may also exhibit anti-cancer properties.
The Beneficial Effects of Chocolate