After watching Woody Allen’s classic slapstick comedy movie ‘Sleeper’ where they mention that in the future, they have proven that hot fudge and cream pies are some of the healthiest things for you, I was thinking about how we have gone in only about 15 years from thinking chocolate is terrible for the human body, causing pimples, racing hearts, obesity, and certain death, to the current understanding that chocolate is actually really good for you. This is a great turn around and one that many of chocophiles were expecting!

There has been plenty of research on how the Kuna in Panama due to their high daily chocolate intake have much lower death rates from diabetes and heart disease than one might expect, probably from the high antioxidant flavonol content of dark chocolate drinks they consumed. There have also been many studies of the LDL cholesterol and blood pressure lowering properties of chocolate, and even that some of the traditional drinks of Central America like tascalate that contain achiote seeds and cacao seeds may prevent malaria, research done by our friend Steven Maranz at Cornell Weill Medical Center in New York.

Now in the last few weeks there have been two new exciting studies on the healthful benefits of chocolate, including the mechanism by which chocolate lowers blood pressure by inhibiting the blood-pressure-raising enzyme ACE (just as many ACE inhibitor prescription drugs do), as mentioned in this overview article and in the original research done at Linköping University in Sweden. The other interesting recent chocolate research showed that elderly women who consumed chocolate at least once a week had lower rates of fatty plaques in their large blood vessels and fewer heart disease-related hospitalizations and deaths.

Further good news is that the cacao that Madre mainly uses from Chiapas, Mexico is one of the highest in the antioxidants that gives most of these benefits, of all the cacao we looked at from Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa, so you can eat less, have less sugar, and still get the same amounts of beneficial antioxidants as eating large amounts of other chocolate.

Now we just have to work on proving that those cream pies are good for you too! ;-)