Source: goop.com
Some headlines are too good to be true. But as SF Bay-based weight loss, hormone, and women’s health expert Dr. Sara Gottfried (her new book, Younger, is out this month) verifies: Chocolate is good for you. The health benefits of dark chocolate are widely varied and impressive; it’s loaded with an extremely high concentration of free-radical-fighting antioxidants, plus B vitamins, minerals like magnesium and calcium, and more. Dark chocolate (the higher the cacao percentage the better) has been shown to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, raise serotonin levels, improve cardiovascular health and brain function, lower inflammation…the list goes on.
What’s the caveat? As with any food, quality matters when it comes to health benefits: Where you get your chocolate from, how it was made, what other ingredients (if any) were added to it—all of it matters. Which is why, here, we’ve rounded up not just the best but the healthiest chocolate (much of it part of a growing bean-to-bar movement); caught up on the newest research with Gottfried; talked with top-notch, SF-based indie chocolate maker, Dandelion Chocolate; and added our favorite at-home chocolate making kit. In essence, it’s all good news: Chocolate bars and beans that taste incredible while being incredibly good for you, too.
Read the full story here.