Cocoa Powder Healthier than many Fruit Powders

Cocoa beans are being heralded as the latest ‘super food’ by scientists who recently carried out a study on cocoa powder at the Hershey Center for Health & Nutrition in the US.

However, if you think gorging on chocolates is okay for you and your kids, the bad news is, it’s still not advisable. The reason being, branded, over-the-counter chocolates and chocolate products have a high amount of sugar and fats.

You still have to be careful about how you consume chocolate. The trick is:

• To find chocolate recipes that eliminate fats and sugar to a large extent, but preserve the benefits of cocoa powder.
• To balance the consumption of ordinary chocolate with fiber-rich health foods like brown rice, green leafy vegetables, and pulses.

Recent research has proved that chocolate powder is actually healthier than many fruit powders. It’s packed with more healthy plant compounds and antioxidants gram-for-gram than fruit juice, and provides far more nutritional goodness than food experts had previously thought.

The scientists have based their findings on a comparison of cocoa powder, the raw ingredient of chocolate, with powders made from fruits like acai berries, blueberries, cranberries, and pomegranates.

In their research into dark chocolate, which contains around 60 per cent cocoa, and cocoa drinks, scientists found that they too had more antioxidant activity and more flavanols, the health-giving plant chemicals, than many fruits.

This suggests that cocoa beans meet the nutritional criteria needed for fruits to be classed as ‘super fruits.’