Chocolate and Your Health: Fats

Chocolate, as we know, has health benefits comparable to those of any dark vegetable: it contains antioxidant flavonoids with beneficial cardiovascular properties. Chocolate's proven health benefits effects include antioxidant activity, vasodilation and blood pressure reduction, inhibition of platelet activity, and decreased inflammation.

Should we all push aside that spinach salad and reach for the triple chocolate mousse -- or a World's Sweetest Egg? Isn't chocolate a high fat food?

The good news about fat in chocolate is that chocolate contains a fairly even distribution of these three types of fats:

• Oleic Acid is the healthy monounsaturated fat found in olive oil.
• Stearic Acid is a saturated fat, but it is converted by the body almost entirely into oleic acid, and has been shown to have neutral health effects.
  
• Palmitic Acid is also a saturated fat, also found in palm oil. It may increase risk of heart disease and stroke. Studies on this particular substance are inconclusive, since its health effects seem to depend the means of processing and also by the other elements of the subject's diet.

Cocoa beans are about 50% fat, and good quality eating chocolate certainly will be fairly high in fat. If you do the math, though, you'll see that the quantity of palmitic acid -- the one to worry about -- will not be large. In fact, if you have a piece of lean beef or chicken for dinner and end your meal with good-quality chocolate, the saturated fat in your meal comes primarily from the meat, not the chocolate.

We're talking about good-quality chocolate here. If you're eating low-grade chocolates composed of 10% or less actual chocolate, plus tropical or hydrogenated oils, you can't expect the health benefits of cocoa.