Healthy Chocolates Smoothie

Chocolate is a perennial gift, almost as common as soap and fruitcake. The quality ranges from High Fructose Corn Syrup tubular brown goo in Brand's candies and Tootsie Rolls all the way up to $2000 boxes of exclusive Beverly Hills handcrafted cocoa confections. Most of us prefer something in between. While my wife always goes for the Belgium variety, I like the bitter raw flavor of the cocoa. My favorite is an 85% dark.

Despite the myth that chocolate causes pimples (it's the sugar, not the cocoa!), chocolate has a wide spectrum of health benefits. It can lower blood pressure, reduce the instance of blood clots, and even help prevent cancer. It's rich in phenolic phytochemicals-or in layman's terms, antioxidants. Cocoa has even more antioxidant flavonoids than green tea or red wine.

But not all chocolate is created equal.

It's not just the taste that separates A Nestle's Crunch from a Scharffenberger's dark chocolate bar. When trying to maximize the health benefits of chocolate you are receiving, always go for the dark. In fact, the higher percentage of cocoa, the better. 50% cocoa is really a good place to start, but I'd suggest jumping up to 70% if you can handle the strength. The reason health benefits in milk chocolate are so low is because such a low percentage of what you are actually eating is chocolate in the first place. In most cases, milk chocolate contains many more sugars and milk solids, which all but nullify the antioxidant from the actual cocoa powder.

So you've decided to go with the healthy dark chocolate. Now you need to weed out the processed from the natural brands. Heavy processing can dramatically reduce the antioxidant and flavonoid levels in otherwise healthy chocolate. Dutch processed chocolate is a particular culprit, not healthy chocolate in the least. So, go with organic brands. Or even better, find "single source" batch of chocolate. Higher end chocolate makers will source their bars like wines, making entire batches of bars harvested from one particular date from one particular region. To maintain authenticity, these brands of healthy chocolate go through minimal processing. Connoisseurs collect and cherish particular batches of single source cocoa bars. These chocolates offer some of the highest phenolic phytochemal levels and some of the best chocolate health benefits.