0How Other Kinds of Processing Affect This Food
Freezing. Chocolate freezes and thaws well. Pack it in a moistureproof container and
defrost it in the same package to let it reabsorb moisture it gave off while frozen.
Medical Uses and/or Benefits
Mood elevator. Chocolate’s reputation for making people feel good is based not only on its
caffeine content—19 mg caffeine per ounce of dark (sweet) chocolate, which is one-third the
amount of caffeine in a five-ounce cup of brewed coffee—but also on its naturally occurring
mood altering chemicals phenylethylalanine and anandamide. Phenylethylalanine is found
in the blood of people in love. Anandamide stimulates areas of your brain also affected by
the active ingredients in marijuana. (NOTE: As noted by the researchers at the Neurosci-
ences Institute in San Diego who identified anandamide in chocolate in 1996, to get even
the faintest hint of marijuana-like effects from chocolate you would have to eat more than
25 pounds of the candy all at once.)
Possible heart health benefits. Chocolate is rich in catechins, the antioxidant chemicals that
give tea its reputation as a heart-protective anticancer beverage (see tea). In addition, a series
of studies beginning with those at the USDA Agricultural Research Center in Peoria, Illinois,
suggest that consuming foods rich in stearic acid like chocolate may reduce rather than raise
the risk of a blood clot leading to a heart attack.
Possible slowing of the aging process. Chocolate is a relatively good source of copper, a
mineral that may play a role in slowing the aging process by decreasing the incidence of
“protein glycation,” a reaction in which sugar molecules (gly = sugar) hook up with protein
molecules in the bloodstream, twisting the protein molecules out of shape and rendering
them unusable. This can lead to bone loss, rising cholesterol, cardiac abnormalities, and a
slew of other unpleasantries. In people with diabetes, excess protein glycation may be one
factor involved in complications such as loss of vision. Ordinarily, increased protein glyca-
tion is age-related. But at the USDA Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center in North
Dakota, agricultural research scientist Jack T. Saari has found that rats on copper-deficient
diets experience more protein glycation at any age than other rats. A recent USDA survey of
American eating patterns says that most of us get about 1.2 mg copper a day, considerably
less than the Estimated Safe and Adequate Daily Dietary Intake (ESADDI) or 1.5 mg to 3
mg a day. Vegetarians are less likely to be copper deficient because, as Saari notes, the foods
highest in copper are whole grains, nuts, seeds, and beans, including the cocoa bean. One
ounce of dark chocolate has .25 mg copper (8–17 percent of the ESADDI).
Adverse Effects Associated with This Food
Possible loss of bone density. In 2008, a team of Australian researchers at Royal Perth Hos-
pital, and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital published a report in the American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition suggesting that women who consume chocolate daily had 3.1 percent lower bone
Chocolate