I grew up hearing the same rule: dark, bitter chocolate is healthier for you than its creamier, sweeter milk alternatives.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve learned to like the higher percentage stuff. But for a long time, I felt my Dairy Milk Tiffin habit was unfairly persecuted.
Turns out I’m (sort-of) right, according to professor in nutrition at King’s College London, Sarah Berry.
Speaking to gut health company ZOE’s co-founder Jonathan Wolf on their podcast, she joined Spencer Hyman, the founder of chocolate distributors Cocoa Runners.
“To group chocolate and all the different types of chocolate into one health recommendation is wrong,” she said.
Why?
Very dark chocolate is higher in fibre, the nutritionist said, whereas its presence is “very low” in the milk kinds.
But the professor, who studied cocoa butter as part of her PhD, says that the cocoa bean’s fat “is very special... It seems to have this cholesterol-neutral effect compared to other fats that have a similar saturated fatty acid composition”.
She adds that the flavanols found in good-quality milk or dark chocolate may even benefit your blood pressure. Polyphenols present in the food can also have health benefits.
“Chocolate could say it’s 75%, 85% cocoa or chocolate solids, but actually depending on how it’s processed, where it’s sourced from, etc, determines the different levels of the really active kind of potent polyphenols,” Dr Berry said.
“The biggest unhealthy ingredient that’s in chocolate is the sugar,” she revealed, adding that while white chocolate has almost none of the health benefits of cocoa, lower-sugar dark chocolate has certain blood benefits.
And while Dr Berry does concede that 75%+ dark chocolate offers the biggest health boosts “as a rule of thumb”, Hyman added that a lot of supermarket “dark chocolate” brands only have 39% cocoa solids.
“The amount of solids doesn’t necessarily equate to how kind of bioactive those solids are,” Dr Berry agreed. She also shared that different people metabolise different chocolates in variable ways.
So what should I aim for?
Hyman says that if the main ingredient in your chocolate bar is sugar, it might be a sign the product isn’t of the highest quality.
He adds that what satisfies you most without leaving you compelled to chow down the whole bar is likely best for you.
“It could be a dark milk chocolate, could just be a dark chocolate, and savour them, because that will basically satisfy your stomach, speed up digestion, and also just get you in the habit of savouring for flavour,” he said (a high cocoa butter content can help to prolong the taste of chocolate).
“The amount of cocoa solids is a crude measure” of its health benefits, Dr Berry said.
“Not only is chocolate hugely variable, we are, in how we process it and benefit from it.”
There are two pieces of bad news, though: from a health perspective, Dr Berry stresses the mass-manufactured bars most of us are used to are “an entirely different food to the kind of craft chocolate [they were] thinking about”.
Though she says “there’s a different purpose sometimes for the different types of chocolate,” adding that she doesn’t see the point of demonising processed food, she doesn’t think most of them are exactly blood boosters.
Lastly, it’s a tough day for white chocolate lovers from a strictly health-based perspective.
“It’s not got any of the dark, cocoa solids in, so the solids that contain the polyphenols and these other compounds,” Dr Berry said.
Though she says she doesn’t “see it as a particularly helpful narrative sometimes to be comparing one versus the other,” from a blood benefit point of view only, “it’s out.”