Chocolate is a weakness for everyone, but you don’t need to feel guilty the next time you indulge into some ‘Dark Chocolate’. Owing to the multiple health benefits it provides, handling the cravings from your sweet tooth got a lot easier.
Here we present the top 10 health benefits of chocolate:
1.     Weight Loss
Can you believe it? But it’s true that chocolate helps you to loose weight! Dark chocolate lessens cravings for sweet, salty, and fatty foods. So indulging in a bit of healthy dark chocolate makes it easy for you to avoid binging on other food and make it easier for you to stick to your diet plan.
2. Â Healthier Heart
Studies have shown that about a square of dark chocolate a day lowers blood pressure and reduced risk of heart attack and stroke by 39 percent. Most of the credit goes to flavonoids, antioxidant compounds that increase the flexibility of veins and arteries. A chocolate bar has five times the flavonoids of an apple, so it’s a yummier way of keeping fit!
 3.     Prevents diabetes
Quite an antithesis isn’t it a Candy bar and Diabetes? But studies have shown that a Candy bar’s worth of dark chocolate once a day for 15 days has shown the potential for insulin resistance drop by nearly half.
4.     Happier Kids
Women who ate chocolate daily during their pregnancy reported that they were better able to handle stress better than mothers-to-be who abstained.
5. Yummy Sun-block:
Researchers recently tested chocolate flavanols’ sun-protecting prowers. After 3 months eating chocolate with high levels of flavanols, their study subjects’ skin took twice as long to develop that reddening effect that indicates the beginning of a burn. Isn’t this a better way to protect the skin?
6. Higher IQ:
Next time you’re under exam pressure or on a highly stressful work project, don’t feel so guilty about grabbing a dark chocolate bar. Not only will it help your body ward off the effects of stress, but it’ll boost your brain power when you really need it.
7.   Better than your  Cough syrup.
One study found that chocolate quieted coughs almost as well as codeine that is usd in your average cough syrups. All this thanks to the theobromine chocolate contains. This is the chemical, responsible for chocolate’s feel-good effect. Your cough syrup doesn’t taste as good as chocolate, plus there are no side effects of drowsiness in dark chocolate!
8.     Diarrhea Relief
Your baby suffering from diarrhea? Try giving her a bar of chocolate instead. It is a tradition followed since ancient times where both South American and European cultures dating back to the 16th century of treating diarrhea with cocoa. Â Modern day Scientists agree with them as they found that cocoa flavonoids bind to a protein that regulates fluid secretion in the small intestine, potentially stopping the trots in their tracks.
So not just for your baby, but you too could try out some chocolate when you have a diarrhea problem.
9. Chuck that Asprin
Cocoa has anti-clotting, blood-thinning properties that work in a similar way to aspirin, which can improve blood flow and circulation.
10. Spectacles? Naah dark chocolate please!
Because of chocolate’s ability to improve blood flow, in particular to the brain, researchers in a small 2011 study that chocolate may also increase blood flow to the retina, thereby giving vision a boost.
Along with all this perks, we must not forget that huge proportions of milk and sugar go into chocolate. Be wise love your chocolate and eat it too, but not more than 4 bars a week! 🙂
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