Chocolate and You

Dark chocolate is surprisingly low in calories if you eat it in modest amounts. And, fortunately, while I have a sweet tooth, I rarely crave more than a bite of the really dark stuff. A single perforated square of Taza 80% stone ground dark chocolate weighs about 7 grams. That's less than 50 calories!

For what it's worth, the recent medical study which showed an impressive 22% reduction in stroke incidence among chocolate eaters fed its subjects 7 times that amount of chocolate. So I guess that if you want the important health benefits, you've got to eat an unhealthy quantity (on the other hand, I assume that 80% chocolates are richer in healthful favanols than the supermarket chocolate the researchers used).

Twice that quantity (100 grams, or an enormous whole jumbo bar) has been shown to help with blood pressure.

I'd suppose that if I were to eat an entire kilo of chocolate every day, I'd live to 200. All nine hundred pounds of me!