Study shows potential benefit of dark chocolate for liver disease patients

Doctors could soon be prescribing a dose of dark chocolate to help patients suffering from liver cirrhosis and from dangerously high blood pressure in their abdomen, according to new research presented at the International Liver CongressTM 2010, the Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Liver in Vienna, Austria.

According to the Spanish research, eating dark chocolate reduces damage to the blood vessels of cirrhotic patients and also lowers blood pressure in the liver. Dark chocolate contains potent anti-oxidants which reduce the post-prandial (after-meal) blood pressure in the liver (or portal hypertension) associated with damaged liver blood vessels (endothelial dysfunction). The data also showed that eating dark chocolate may exert additional beneficial effects throughout the whole body. In comparison, white chocolate, which contains no beneficial 'phytochemicals', did not result in the same effects.

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Taken from : http://www.worldwidehealth.com/health-article-Study-shows-potential-benefit-of-dark-chocolate-for-liver-disease-patients.html

Is It the Dark in Dark Chocolate?

The use of the term “dark chocolate” is misleading: There is nothing about the color of the chocolate that will tell you the flavanol content. One of the key places in the manufacturing chain where significant loss of flavanols occurs, after fermentation, is an alkalization step called dutching. The Dutchman van Houten discovered 200 years ago that adding alkali-potash to cocoa nibs would enhance the taste, texture, and appearance of the cocoa. Dutched cocoa has the bitterness eliminated, together with most of the active flavanols. One relatively underreported effect of alkalization is, in fact, darkening of cocoa, so that a very dark chocolate might be essentially devoid of flavanols.

If the industry wants us to use chocolate as a health food, then they will have to change their behavior. Specifically, what the world needs is a label on each package that describes the flavanol content of the chocolate. It should be obvious that the percent of cocoa, like the color of chocolate, does not represent a measure of flavanols at all. The medical community should encourage the industry to participate. Probably the most effective mechanism is for the lay press to stop talking about dark chocolate or percent cocoa and start discussing flavanol content.

A second issue involves chocolate as a health food. We like chocolate, and the average person eats a great deal of it every year. Although there is little evidence to indicate that chocolate is a cause of obesity, weight loss in the presence of a high chocolate intake, necessarily rich in fat and sugar, will be very difficult. Here, however, there is good news. Cocoa—as opposed to chocolate—is prepared by squeezing out the fat. Indeed this fat, called cocoa butter, although known as white chocolate, is not really chocolate at all. The resultant cocoa powder retains all the flavor of chocolate but is much lower in calories. Although no commercially available cocoa has a high flavanol content because of extensive processing, it is clear that natural cocoa powder can be a health food.

Xocai is made with cocoa that is cold pressed and no other company has that. High in antioxidants.

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Taken from http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/116/21/2360.full