If you are a chocolate lover, you are going to love hearing about this. It is a little known fact that chocolate can be beneficial to your health. This article will help give some insight on why chocolate is beneficial to your health. Eating chocolate can actually be heart healthy.

Chocolate contains flavonoids, that are great for your heart. What are flavonoids you ask? Flavonoids are found in many foods and beverages. Flavonoids are found in cranberries, apples, peanuts, red wine, tea, onions, and most importantly, chocolate just to name a few. Flavonoids act as antioxidants to our bodies. The definition that American Heritage Dictionary gives for flavonoid is any of a large group of water-soluble plant pigments, including the anthocyanins, that are beneficial to health.

Flavonoids repair damage and protect from environmental toxins. Antioxidants help our bodies resist damage by “free radicals”, formed by such things as breathing, or environmental things such as cigarette smoke. If our bodies do not have enough antioxidants, those “free radicals” can damage our bodies causing a rise in LDL cholesterol oxidation and the forming of plaque on the walls

of your arteries. Flavanoids also help to reduce platelet activation and may affect the relaxation of blood vessels.

When you are ready for some chocolate, here are some more things to consider. Dark chocolate is much higher in flavonoids than that of milk chocolate. Milk chocolate tends to be processed much more than dark chocolates, and in this process, flavonoids are lost. So if you are going to eat chocolate for the health benefits, it would be wise to eat the dark chocolates.

So now that you have this information, you are probably thinking “What about all the fat contained in chocolate?”. Chocolate is not nearly as bad as people once thought, when you are talking about its fat. Keep in mind we are not talking about a chocolate bar that contains caramel, nuts, etc inside them, because these are not healthy. Most of the calories found in a candy bar, come from all the other things that are added to them, not the actual chocolate.

My suggestions on chocolate eating is to get some Dove brand dark chocolates (the small snack size chocolates), and eat about 3 to 4 of them a day. The best part about this is that there is no need for you to feel bad about it.