Is Chocolate Good For Your Health?

To the contrary of what happens with tea and coffee, that do not have any nutritional value, the cacao grain is very highly nutritive, having a fifty percent of fat, and about twenty to twenty five percent of carbohydrates, fifteen to twenty percent of proteins, one and a half percent of theobromine, five percent of water and three and a half percent of minerals and vitamins amongst which we can find calcium, potassium, sodium, phosphorous, vitamin A, thiamine, riboflavin and niacin.

Around the end of the last century the doctors compared its properties with maternal milk, and one of them even said that cacao was, out of the domestic drinks, the most nutritious; and was without a doubt the cheapest food that could be found since with all it had in it, it could be considered food and drink; and if it were to be induced to the famished artisans and to the boys that had an excess amount of work in the factories, instead of the unsubstantial drink called tea, its nutritional values would soon translate to a more healthy and robust condition. In a conference read to the Medical Society of Ireland in 1877, one of the members, Mr. Fausett said that he respectfully pleaded to recommend cacao as food to the infants’ diet to the attention of the brothers of his profession, especially to those who, working under the Poor Laws, had great and extensive opportunities of tasting its value.

Today, when the emphasis of what a diet is concerned, is put in the products lacking fat and sugar, chocolate tends to be considered a delicious sin. A cacao grain however in itself is a complete nutrient; despite the fact that intuitionalists point out that it is saturated fat. Even worse then chocolate is the sugar that is added, since even bitter chocolate has about two fifths amount of sugar.

Its value, however, as a source of quick energy has been recognized from a long time ago, Cortes himself said that a cup of this precious drink allowed a man to walk for a whole day without having to eat anything. In the year 1830, the British army drank more cacao than the rest of the nation all together, since it was given out daily while the other armies only served it around two or three times a week. The tradition of its consumption in the services continued on during the last war, when the government of the United States assigned Hershey’s to create a high-energy chocolate bar for the troops to use.

However it was not only the doctors that defended cacao as a beneficial and healthy food. Brillat Savarin (1775-1826) the French gastronome wrote in his book Physiologie du Gout remarked that people that habitually drank chocolate were the people that were more healthy and constant and were less susceptible to a multitude of diseases that got in the way of enjoying life.

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