Chocolate!

I'm sure everyones heard that a nice "dark chocolate" is good for you, in moderation of course. It seems chocolate has specific "flavonoids" that when consumed, cause the antioxidant status of your blood to increase. This rise in antioxidant levels helps protect us from damage to the heart and blood vessels, while it also guards our DNA from damage that can lead to cancer. Chocolate can also improve the flow and function of blood vessels and help control inflammation in your body. Doctors recommend a daily glass of red wine for the same reason and it's why books/TV shows usually say "Have a glass of wine OR a small piece of FINE chocolate for the antioxidants."

As you all know, I'm all about a glass of wine, so I've never really looked into the chocolate thing. Problem is I'm not really a red wine fan, so today I went looking online for what exactly a "FINE CHOCOLATE" is.

I would have never guessed it was such a huge ordeal! I found a site called Seventypercent.com that basically reviews different types of chocolate with cocoa levels of 50% and beyond, which are the types of chocolate thats supposed to be healthy for you.

According to their site a "fine chocolate" is:

When we refer to 'fine chocolate' we mean good, dark, strong chocolate made from high quality ingredients. We call this kind of chocolate 'fine' to distinguish it from the many candy bar products that are also called chocolate, even though cocoa may only be present in a small percentage in the coating of the bar.

There's no 'industry standard' official term that means better quality chocolate, but we like to use 'fine chocolate' to mean any chocolate made with a good proportion of cocoa solids - 50% minimum for dark chocolate. We also think a fine chocolate should consist only of the basic natural ingredients of chocolate - cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar and sometimes real vanilla and soya lecithin as an emulsifier.

Ideally, a fine chocolate would be one made from a carefully selected blend of 'flavour' beans and would be made with care and love by manufactures concerned about taste and quality.

So like I said earlier, they also offer reviews, but I'm too lazy to go through all of them, so I just picked a few brands that were on the top of their list and then went searching for places to actually buy the chocolate, because their site has a store but it's based in London so everything is in pounds and thats too complicated for me, not too mention, shipping would be a bitch!

Instead, I googled a some of the names, and came up with a few places to buy "fine" chocolate bars. One of them was http://www.worldwidechocolate.com/ - but after looking around a bit, I thought it was hella pricey so I looked some more, but unfortunately they are all about the same price.

I'm talking no less than $8 to over $20 for a SINGLE candy bar!! For that price I was hoping the bar would be the size of my laptop or a large dinner plate? I dunno. It's not though, it looks to be thinner but around average length of a supermarket candy bar.

One of the highest rated chocolates is "Amedei" and I found it on Amazon.com from $12 to $20.

So now I have to ask myself if I really want to pay $12 for a chocolate bar. Part of me does, just so I can taste what these people are talking about, and then of course for the health benefits.... but to be truley honest, I'm more likely to buy one based on my curiosity of the taste!

It would suck to spend $12 and not like it though, which is a strong possiblity because from what I've read, they take a lot of the good stuff out of it like sugar and milk! Milk chocolate doesn't have the health benefits though, which bring me into a whole other rant about our media and them only giving us a fraction of the story. They tell you to eat some fine chocolate, but they don't even bother going into what classifies as a fine chocolate, or where to get them..etc..etc....which is lame. It's telling you a story but not really giving you any sort of ending, so most of us don't do much with what we hear or we do the wrong thing and think they are talking about a Hershey bar, and totally miss the point.


Errr. Anyway, maybe I will splurge on the $12 candy bar, but I'm not quite sold. Totally considering it though, just so I can see what all they hype is about! I'll definitely update here if I do :)