Super Chocolate

We know now that chocolate is good for you – dark chocolate, that is. It’s claimed that the beneficial effect is because dark chocolate contains flavanols. Regular (milk) chocolate doesn’t contain significant amounts of flavanols or any sterols.

As you can imagine, chocolate manufacturers are jumping on the band wagon started by some European companies.

Mars Inc. has made CocoaVia, which contains flavanols and sterols, but no trans fatty acids. There are eight different flavors, and each bar contains 100 mg flavanol and about 1.5 grams of sterols; however, they have between 2 and 11 grams of fat and 80-140 calories. So it’s not necessarily the sort of bar you can eat twice a day without modifying your diet a bit – otherwise you’ll gain an extra pound of weight each month!

Hershey has a similar bar in the works, but Nestle say they are not fortifying chocolate.  To get ‘enough’ flavanols and sterols in a pleasantly-tasting candy is not going to be easy, without stoking the obesity epidemic a little. Consumers will require discipline if they are to avoid putting on the pounds, just as if they had eaten one or two regular chocolate bars. Remember, there’s no scientific proof (yet!) that products like the CocoaVia will actually save lives.

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