Have you ever tried unprocessed dark chocolate? Or even dark chocolate comprised primarily of dark chocolate? It's so dry it tastes like paper. Of course, the worse something tastes, the more nutritious it usually is.
Sort of like raw broccoli and the steamed version found in Chinese food, the relationship between taste and nutrition in dark chocolate depends on its manipulation. When processed, it not only tastes amazing, but retains some of its curious benefits (one of which helped Harry Potter recover from a dementor attack in the "Prisoner of Azkaban). Unsweetened, dark chocolate loses most of its savory qualities (and some of its aesthetic ones), but offers more in terms of health.
The latest research to measure the effects of dark chocolate found that its redeeming chemical component -- flavonols -- can help weight loss and control blood sugar levels. The purer the chocolate, the more likely the effects, Medical Daily reported.
Like fruits and vegetables, dark chocolate contains flavonoids, associated with vascular health. Its most common type of flavonoid is flavanol, the subject of the current study. Because one of flavanol's trademark signs is a bitter taste, companies add sugar to make dark chocolate edible. Unfortunately, the manufacturing process counteracts some of flavanol's effects, particularly in controlling blood sugar.
It's a shame dark chocolate is so processed. Like beer and bananas (the latter one might be more of a perrsonal thing), I'm convinced raw (or near-raw) dark chocolate is an acquired taste. Probably, it will never taste as good as it does with sugar, but I think it could occupy a larger niche than it currently does if more people gave it a chance.
A typical Hershey's dark chocolate bar contains 45 percent cocoa, 60 percent for "extra dark" varieties. Specialty brands, however, offer a greater (and thus healthier) percentage. On one website's ranking of the top five dark chocolate bars, all contained at least 77 percent cocoa; the highest was 87 percent. The highest I've gone was 85. It was rough at first, but still satisfying. Kind of like the way skim milk is more tolerable when it's in cereal, I think specialty bars for the uninitiated would work well in a S'more.
