Must read chocolate lovers

We don't know whether dark chocolate is healthy; chocolate makers (Mars being one of the most prominent) have been attempting to relate chocolate to health food in order to boost sales.

The studies are sometimes amusing, and the university's public relations division releases them before they are published. Most of us first learned that milk chocolate could help a football team avoid concussions in this way. The study, which was funded by a local milk chocolate company, was eventually discredited by the University of Maryland. Oops.

Because none of these research are required to be pre-registered, we don't know how many of them were never published because the results were not intriguing.

Even the way researchers are questioned isn't optimal; queries are frequently focused on extremely particular relationships rather than bigger themes that an inquisitive researcher might wish to investigate. No one is willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to investigate if there are any risks.

A recent study concluded that carbohydrates are detrimental to one's longevity. Some researchers inquired about people's carb intake over the last two decades - seriously? We all know how difficult it is to obtain correct data in this manner, hence the study is most likely useless.

We don't have appropriate definitions of dark chocolate, which is relevant to study design.

How in the world is a researcher going to figure it out? Will people know what proportion their "bittersweet," "semi-bitter," and other chocolates contain if you ask them how often they consume chocolate? Is a researcher going to inquire about the flavonol content, or at the very least the solids content, from the brand?

So it's unclear whether chocolate is healthful, and how we'd define "dark chocolate" to ensure that we're grouping things that are sufficiently comparable

.Assuming that some of the study is objective and reliable, we can take a step back and look at the overall findings: it appears to be mildly neuroprotective. But I'm cheating": to obtain a broad picture, I'm looking at several forms of science, from lab-scale to population-scale.

There's no reason to suppose that eating high-fat chocolate puts us at risk for diabetes when consumed in moderation (low sugar and low insulin response). There don't appear to be any ailments treated or caused by people consuming a lot of chocolate in countries like Switzerland.

One of benefits of dark chocolate is its free radical fighting ability. Free radicals are unbalanced compounds created by cellular processes in the body, especially those that fight against environmental toxins we’re exposed to on a daily basis. Antioxidants are the compounds that are believed to neutralize free radicals and protect the body from their damage.

Antioxidants include vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals — helpful plant compounds