🍫 Chocolate & Health

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, we thought we’d take this myth-busting Friday to sort the fact from the fiction… So what’s the real deal, when it comes to chocolate and matters of the heart? We get personal in today’s edition 💝

👍️ TIP OF THE DAY

Chocolate. Without the Chocolate?

Almonds and dates, eaten together, taste like chocolate.

That’s it, that’s the tip! Try it.

PS: Almonds have many of the same health benefits as chocolate, without the drawbacks. (We might be slightly biased towards almonds 😉 )

🧪 TEST YOURSELF

One-Minute Heart Health Test!

Checking your pulse is a valuable life skill, so if haven’t done it in a while, now’s the perfect time to get a quick refresher:

https://www.wikihow.com/Check-Your-Pulse 

How did you score?

• >100bpm is a bit fast unless you’ve just been exercising, or something else got your heart racing, or you are a child (a child’s heart is smaller and must beat more quickly to do the same job)

• 60–100bpm is considered a “normal” range, with younger people tending towards the higher end and older people tending towards the lower end

• 50–59bpm is an excellent resting heart rate; many fitness enthusiasts fall in this range

• <50bpm is a bit slow, unless you are a top athlete, or else deeply meditating, or sedated, or suffering from a hypoactive thyroid. Basically: if your heart rate is this low and you don’t already know why, time to visit your doctor about it.

Want a lower resting heart rate? Exercise more (whatever elevates your heart rate while doing it), your heart will get stronger, and your resting heart rate will slow.

(As with all things, start gently and increase as you go; check with your doctor if you have any concerns about your heart health)

🔎 THE MAIN FEATURE

Chocolate & Health: Fact or Fiction?

"Chocolate Is Good For The Heart"

“When making chocolate chip cookies, you don’t measure using cups, you measure by heart”

…but how good is chocolate when it comes to heart health?

First, what is heart health?

A healthy heart typically has a low resting pulse rate and a strong, steady beat. This is affected strongly by exercise habits, and diet plays only a support role (can’t exercise without energy from food!).

It is also important to have blood pressure within a healthy range (with high blood pressure being a more common problem than low, so things that lower blood pressure are generally considered good).

• Flavanols, flavonoids, and polyphenols in chocolate contribute to lower blood pressure

• Dark chocolate is best for these, as milk chocolate contains much less cocoa solids and more unhelpful fats

• White chocolate contains no cocoa solids and is useless for this

• Some of the fats in most commercial chocolate can contribute to atherosclerosis which raises blood pressure and ultimately can cause heart attacks.

• If you’re diabetic, you will probably not get the usual heart-related benefits from chocolate (sorry)

"Chocolate Is Good For The Brain"

Chocolate has been considered a “brain food”... why?

• The brain uses more calories than any other organ (chocolate has many calories)

• The heart benefits we listed above mean improved blood flow—including to your brain

• Chocolate contains phenylethylamine, a powerful chemical that has a similar effect to amphetamines… But it’s metabolized in digestion and never makes it to the central nervous system (so basically, this one’s a miss; we had a good run with the other two, though!)

"Chocolate Is An Aphrodisiac"

“If chocolate be the food of love, pass me that cocoa; I’m starving”

Most excitingly, chocolate contains phenylethylamine, the “molecule of love” or, more accurately, lust. It has an effect similar to amphetamines, and while we can synthesize it in the body, we can also get it from certain foods. But…

Our body is so keen to get it that most of it is metabolized directly during digestion and doesn’t make it to the brain. Also, chocolate is not as good a source as cabbage—do with that information what you will!

However!

Chocolate contains theobromine and small amounts of caffeine, both stimulants and both generally likely to improve mood; it also contains flavonoids which in turn stimulate production of nitric oxide, which is a relaxant. All in all, things that are convivial to having a good time.

On the other hand…

That relaxation comes specifically with a reduction in blood pressure—something typically considered good for the health for most people most of the time… but that means lowering blood pressure in all parts of your body, which could be the opposite of what you want in intimate moments.

Chocolate also contains zinc, which is essential for hormonal health for most people—the body uses it to produce testosterone and estrogen, respectively. Zinc supplements are popularly sold to those wishing to have more energy in general and good hormonal health in particular, and rightly so. However…

This approach requires long-term supplementation—you can’t just pop a zinc tablet / bar of chocolate / almond before bed and expect immediate results. And if your daily zinc supplementation takes the form of a 3.5oz (100g) bar of chocolate, then you may find it has more effects on your health, and not all of them good!

"Chocolate Is Good During Menstruation"

The popular wisdom goes that chocolate is rich in iron (of which more is needed during menstruation), and indeed, if you eat 7oz (150g) of dark chocolate made with 85% cocoa, you’ll get a daily a dose of iron (...and nearly 1,000 calories).

More bang-for-buck dietary sources of iron include chickpeas and broccoli, but for some mysterious reason, these are not as commonly reported as popular cravings.

The real explanation for chocolate cravings is more likely that eating chocolate—a food high in sugar and fat along with a chemical bombardment of more specialized “hey, it’s OK, you can relax now” molecules (flavanols/flavonoids, polyphenols, phenylamines, even phenylethylamine, etc) gives a simultaneous dopamine kick (the body’s main “reward” chemical) with a whole-body physiological relaxation… so, little wonder we might crave it in times of stress and discomfort!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Sugar Blues - by William Dufty

This is a “read it cover to cover” book. It charts the rise of sugar’s place in world diets in general and the American diet in particular, and draws many conclusions about the effect this has had on us.

This book will challenge you. Sometimes, it will change your mind. Sometimes, you’ll go “no, I’m sure that’s not right”, and you’ll go Googling. Either way, you’ll learn something.

And that, for us, is the most important measure of any informational book: did we gain something from it? In Sugar Blues, perhaps the single biggest “gain” for the reader is that it’s an eye-opener and a call-to-arms—the extent to which you heed that is up to you, but it sure is good to at least be familiar with the battlefield.

Check Out Sugar Blues on Amazon Today!

Enjoy your chocolate-fuelled day,

The 10almonds Team

DISCLAIMER: None of this is medical advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not medical advice or a solicitation to buy any supplements or medications, or to make any medical decisions. Always be careful. Always consult a professional. Additionally, we may earn a commission on some products/services that we link to; but they’re all items that we believe in :)