Unprocessed Dark Chocolate: Across the Board Healthy, Healthy, Healthy: A Review

Early this year, Dr. Steven Warren, a well-known health-conscious family physician who hosts the weekly national television show, Health Matters With Dr. Steve, released a report on the healthy benefits of unprocessed dark chocolate.

Warren summarized the findings of more than 30 studies done in Finland, Great Britain, Italy, and multiple universities throughout the U.S.--all but one of them done within the past two years--and reached a unanimous conclusion ... unprocessed dark chocolate, cocoa, is an extremely healthy food source for humans.

Warren says there are more than 300 different chemical components found in cocoa, and almost all of them are healthy for the human body in one way or another.

The list of areas where cocoa consumption can benefit our bodies is a basic Who's Who of the human anatomy.

Blood pressure, teeth and gums, liver, heart, pancreas, mental acuity, tumors, asthma, muscles, bones, and kidneys all are impacted positively by a regular diet, possibly three pieces a day, of healthy, unprocessed dark chocolate. In addition, Warren learned from these studies that healthy antioxidants, graded on ORAC scores, spiked synonymously with the consumption of chocolate; the negative impacts of Parkinson's disease were diminished; and optimum trends of increasing HDL (good) cholesterol and decreasing LDL (bad) cholesterol were recorded within two weeks of launching a regular program of eating healthy dark chocolate.

More and more studies are being released each day in regards to the positive impact antioxidants provide in the process of neutralizing electrically charged free radicals in the human body. That's huge news health wise, as some researchers are beginning to associate free radicals with many major health issues in this country today, including cancer and some heart diseases.

According to ORAC scores, which measure the effectiveness of antioxidants in a substance or compound to neutralize free radicals by supplying them with the outer-shell electron free radicals need without antioxidants becoming electrically charged themselves, cocoa has more active antioxidants in it than any other substance on the planet.

In another of the many studies summarized by Warren, it was concluded that a steady consumption of cocoa can slow the effects of Parkinson's disease. Though not totally understood how, there's an argument that the benefits of cocoa don't stop at antioxidants, but through iron-chelating activity and other means impact signaling pathways in brain cells, and in doing so slow nigrostriatal dopminergic cell loss endemic to Parkinson's sufferers.

An interesting fact about the consumption of unprocessed dark chocolate is that it often takes little time to realize positive results. A recent study done at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, noted that after consuming healthy flavanol-enriched chocolate for two weeks, test subjects saw their LDL (bad) cholesterol levels drop 6 percent and their HDL (good) cholesterol levels increase 9 percent.

Bibliography

Warren, Dr. Steven, "Healthy Chocolate Science Update 2009"