It can be difficult to be the health conscious, gung-ho fitness disciple, and modern day food conservationist that we all want to be. The difficulty isn’t in working out or finding healthy food; the true difficulty is in avoiding all the unhealthy food. It is infinitely harder to give up all the unhealthy food because it is designed to taste really good – the dessert menu is your nemesis – because unhealthy food gets to use as much sugar and salt as it wants. Well thankfully, there is at the very least one solution to being able to eat sweet things while staying healthy. That solution is dark chocolate. It may be a little bit more bitter compare to its milk chocolate counterpart, but it is still sweet enough to count as a dessert in our book.
Dark chocolate has a lot of health benefits that make it the go to treat for gym rats and health conscious people everywhere. Eating dark chocolate can help lower your blood pressure, improve your heart health, fight oxidative stress, prevent cancer, improve your cognitive abilities, and even help regulate your cholesterol levels. Oh, and as an added bonus, it even promotes hair growth and makes your skin look better.
The secret to dark chocolate’s amazing health benefits is that dark chocolate has a purer cocoa content than other forms of chocolate. A bar of dark chocolate can be anywhere between 60-99% pure cocoa. Cocoa is rich in phenolic antioxidants – more so than most other foods – at such high levels that it can be considered a super antioxidant. These antioxidants are what give cocoa its power, especially its cancer fighting abilities. The antioxidants kill free radicals that cause cancer. Imagine that, treating yourself to a dessert that actually puts a lid on cancer; what a healthy treat.
