Chocolate is good for you.
For real.
And not just like this:
(Love that one)
Chocolate is really and truly a super food. It’s packed with antioxidants that contribute to a healthy heart, protect your skin from sun damage and support your immune system. It’s filled with magnesium which many of us are deficient in and which helps with stress and anxiety (part of the reason we feel better when we eat chocolate ice cream after a bad break up?), sleep and muscle soreness.
So chocolate cupcakes for everyone! Right?
Well, not really.
The one problem with chocolate is our insistence on combining it with sugar.
And sugar is not a super food. It is, in fact, the opposite of a super food. It’s an evil food. It’s like the Lex Luthor food.
It’s like the if Lex Luthor and Doctor Doom had a baby food.
Okay, you get it.
It’s bad news.
So when you put sugar with chocolate it’s like putting kryptonite with Superman. Superhero chocolate loses all of its super powers.
So sad.
We don’t want that. We want to be Superman minus the kryptonite. We want our chocolate without the sugar.
That means reading labels and looking for the words “RAW CACAO.” Cacao is the natural plant and raw means it hasn’t been heated – a process that the cocoa in the baking aisle of your supermarket has undergone and which kills all of the nutrients in the original cacao plant.
You’ll find raw cacao as “nibs” which is like rough little chocolate chips:
Powered forms is also excellent:
Navitas and Giddy Yoyo are both excellent brands that you can find in any health food store – sometimes even the larger grocery stores will carry it.
You can use raw cacao in your baking. I use it here .
You can put it in your smoothie like I do here.
As you’ll quickly discover when you can’t resist eating one of those cacao nibs because they look so much like chocolate chips, raw cacao on its own is very bitter. (my son actually cried) So, you do need to combine it with something sweet. But by using raw cacao and controlling your own sweetening, you can keep the sugar content low and also choose healthier sweeteners such as banana, dates, coconut sugar or even honey.
So there you go. I give you permission to eat and enjoy chocolate. Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya!
