Sweet Spot | Shelli Stein

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Hello friends, and from high above the Bay I
bring you this month’s Joyinmovement newsletter,

I am going to keep this month’s newsletter short
and SWEET and answer a question, or I should say borrow an answer to a
question people ask me quite often these days. Is chocolate really good
for us????

I bring you the answer written by Dr. John Berardi
Ph.D.

Chocolate – A Health Food?

Much ado is being made
about the…uhh…“health” properties of chocolate. It’s everywhere:

“Study Hails
Chocolate’s Benefits”

“Boosting Brain Power – With Chocolate”

“Chocolate is Good for
Health”

“New Research Endorses
Chocolate”

Now, come on, can all this “news” really be
true? Can chocolate, the ultimate “guilty pleasure” actually be good for
us? Is all this media attention on chocolate and its benefits
justified?

Or is this simply a case
of chocoholic justification?

Well, let’s ask Cornell
researcher Chang Lee, chairman of the Department of Food Science and
Technology. Comparing the antioxidant content and activity of green tea,
red wine, and cocoa, Lee and his team found that cocoa has nearly 2x
the antioxidants of red wine and up to 3x the antioxidants of green tea!

“If I had made a
prediction before conducting the tests, I would have picked green tea as
having the most antioxidant activity.” said Lee. “When we compared one
serving of each beverage, the cocoa turned out to be the highest in
antioxidant activity, and that was surprising to me.”

You see, it appears
that cocoa contains powerful antioxidants called polyphenols – yep, the
good stuff found in grapes, berries, and wine. Further, cocoa contains a
healthy dose of catechins and epicatechins – that’s right the good
stuff found in green tea.

But hold on a
second…before you rip open that Snickers bar, it’s important to note
that we’re talking about COCOA here, not milk chocolate. You see,
there’s a big difference!

Milk chocolate typically
contains sugar, cocoa butter, cocoa liquor, milk or milk powder, and
vanilla as the base ingredients. And something like Snickers contains
much more including lactose, soy lecithin, artificial flavor, corn
syrup, milk fat, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, egg whites,
and more.

All this means that you’re
getting very little real cocoa per bite! So I pretty much avoid milk
chocolate like the plague as it’s 100% junk food, plain and simple.

Real chocolate – the high %
cocoa healthy stuff – is another story. Real chocolate is a very simple
product. It contains cocoa. And it contains cocoa butter. That’s it.
And as a result of this simplicity, real chocolate has virtually no
sugar, is high in fiber, and is loaded with maximal doses of polyphenols
and catechins!

Check out the nutritional
profile of a 50g bar of healthy, 100% cocoa chocolate:

100% cocoa, 50g

250kcal

7g protein

13g carbs (0.5g sugar,
8g fiber)

24g fat (16g sat fat)

Now, moving down the scale of “healthiness”,
let’s look at some other options:

85%
cocoa, 50g

260kcal

5g protein

10g carbs (6.25g sugar, 3.75g fiber)

22.5g fat (14g sat fat)

70% cocoa, 50g

275kcal

3.75g protein

16.25g carbs (13.75 sugar, 2.5g fiber)

21.25g fat (12.5g sat fat)

Snickers Bar, 50g

282kcal

4g protein

35g carbs (30g sugar,
1g fiber)

14g fat (5g sat fat)

Notice that the farther we move from the high
cocoa chocolate, the following happens:

1) We get more calories

2) We get more sugar

3) We get less protein

4) We get less fiber

It’s
also important to note that as the % cocoa goes down, we usually get
fewer and fewer antioxidants while adding more and more artificial
ingredients.

My conclusion:

If you’re going to eat
chocolate at all, go 100% or go home.

Just make sure you do
so in moderation as, unlike Green Tea, all chocolate contains a fair
amount of calories and this needs to be considered as you try to work it
into your eating plan.

Thanks John, for a great
explanation. Now
trust me, you CAN taste the difference. Last year my cousin Corky returned from Europe with all
different cocoa blends for us to sample. As luck would have it, I saw her on a day when she still
had plenty of samples and we had fun indulging our taste buds. Viva la difference……..

A few quick announcements. Please consider joining
Steve Mackel and me for our upcoming Yoga and Running Retreat in June.
We are looking forward to sharing our time and experience with you and
continuing to inspire and be inspired by our students. As always, you can see
where I’ll be teaching and speaking by checking my schedule on my
website. All
the newsletters are archived on the site—please feel free to forward
them along to anyone you think would be interested. I do my best to keep them
educational and entertaining.

Remember that you are the
product of the choices you make. Your choices are ingredients, just like
the ingredients that Dr. Berardi referred to in his discussion of
cocoa. Be aware of your choices and choose ingredients that bring you
long term health and long term energy. Keep finding joy-in-movement, and I promise you that’ll
be one ingredient you’ll want to taste each and every day!

Gratitude to you all for your
continued feedback and gracious support of the work I do……….until
next month,

Keep finding that “sweet”
spot,

Shelli