Chocolate is healthier than you think.

Chocolate comes from cocoa, which comes from a tree, that makes it a plant. Therefore, chocolate counts as salad!

Just joking, but despite its fame chocolate has some healthy properties not so well known:

HotChocolateMassageThe smell of chocolate increases theta brain waves, which triggers relaxation.

Eating a bar of chocolate may cheer you up, but smelling it calms you down, says a British psychologist.

Neil Martin, a psychologist at Middlesex University, asked 60 volunteers to sit in a room wearing goggles and headphones while smelling different scents. He used electroencephalography to record their brain waves during the process.

Half the volunteers were smelling real foods, while the others experienced synthetic smells. The real foods included chocolate, coffee, baked beans and rotting pork. But apart from chocolate, the smells had little effect on the subjects.

Chocolate produced “theta” brain waves, which are associated with relaxation and sleep. They are also related to memory, so, if you are studying you may find it easier with some chocolate perfume.

Eating dark chocolate every day reduces the risk of heart disease by one third.

Dr. Oscar Franco from the University of Cambridge tried to determine the impact of eating chocolate on cardiovascular events, such as stroke and heart attack. He and his team compiled a review of seven studies using data from 114,000 patients and found that people who consumed the most chocolate had a 37 per cent lower risk of developing heart disease and a 29 per cent lower risk of suffering a stroke than those who consumed less chocolate.

Although the analysis suggests a certain benefit of eating higher quantities of chocolate, the findings still need to be interpreted with caution, in particular because commercial chocolate is high in calories and eating too much of it could lead to weight gain, which increases various health risks.

 

“Chocolate may be beneficial, but it should be eaten in a moderate way, not in large quantities and not in binges,
If it is consumed in large quantities, any beneficial effect is going to disappear.” (Dr Oscar Franco)
 

cepillarse con chocolateChocolate has an anti-bacterial effect on the mouth and protects against tooth decay.

It is so successful in combating decay that scientists believe some of its components may one day be added to mouthwash or toothpaste. A study carried out by researchers at Osaka University in Japan found that parts of the cacao bean, the main ingredient of chocolate has an anti-bacterial effect on the mouth and can fight effectively against plaque.

They tested their theory on a group of rats by adding an extract of cacao bean peel to their drinking water. Another group drank regular water instead. Both groups were fed with a high-sugar diet and both were infected with streptococcus mutans bacteria, which contributes to plaque and tooth decay. After three months, the study found that the rates with regular water had 14 cavities on average compared to just 6 cavities for those who received cacao bean peel in it.

 

Some history.

The inventor of the Chocolate Chip Cookie sold the idea to Nestle in return for a lifetime supply of chocolate.

Ruth Wakefield is said to have been making chocolate cookies and running out of regular baker’s chocolate so she substituted it by broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate from Nestlé, thinking that they would melt and mix into the dough. They did not and the chocolate chip cookie was born.

As the chocolate chip cookie recipe became popular, sales of Nestle’s semi-sweet chocolate bar increased. Andrew Nestle and Ruth Wakefield made a deal. Nestle would print the cookie recipe on its packaging and Ruth Wakefield would have a lifetime supply of Nestle chocolate.

In 2013, Belgium issued a limited edition of chocolate flavored stamps.

A set of special stamps that smell and taste of chocolate went on sale in Belgium in 2013.

More than 500,000 stamps were printed on special paper with the aroma of chocolate. A team of fragrance and taste experts from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland were involved in creating the collection.

The numbers.

Every second, Americans collectively eat 12 Kg of chocolate.

During your lifetime, you’ll eat about 800kg… the weight of a small car!

Wich car will depend on what country you are from. If you are Swiss you eat around 10.3 kg of chocolate a year, but if you are American you would around 5.3 and if you are Spaniard that would be 3.5.You can tell good weather has something to do with this data!

Chocolate puntos

A lethal dose of chocolate for a human being is about 10 kg, or 66 chocolate bar.

In general, the amount of theobromine found in chocolate is small enough and chocolate can be safely consumed by humans. However, occasional serious side effects may result from the consumption of large quantities.

Serious poisoning happens more frequently in domestic animals, which metabolize theobromine much more slowly than humans, and can easily consume enough chocolate to cause chocolate poisoning.

The most common victims of theobromine poisoning are dogs. The toxic dose for cats is even lower than for dogs, however, cats are less prone to eating chocolate since they are unable to taste sweetness.

Other curiosities.

White Chocolate isn’t technically Chocolate, as it contains no cocoa solids or cocoa liquor.

It does, however, contain cocoa butter, which is a product of the cacao plant.

To make chocolate, the seeds of the cacao plant are harvested and allowed to ferment slightly. The peel of the seeds is cracked, revealing chocolate liquor core. This substance is the base of most chocolates, but it can also be separated into cocoa solids and cocoa butter.

Cocoa butter is the fat of the chocolate. When white chocolate is made, the separated cocoa butter is mixed with milk and a sweetener, and it is also frequently flavored with vanilla.

Measure the speed of light using chocolate.

nena chocolate

You don’t need fancy equipment to measure it. All you need is a microwave, a ruler, a bar of chocolate and a calculator.

Follow the steps:

  1. Take the turntable out of the microwave and put a plate upside down over the gear You need the chocolate to stay still while you heat it. Put your chocolate bar in the middle of the plate.
  2. Heat the chocolate until it starts to melt in two or three places. This should take about 20 seconds.
  3. Take the chocolate out of the microwave. Measure the distance between the melted spots. Express it in meters (centimeters/100). Multiply this number by 2 to get the wavelength λ.
  4. If your microwave is a standard model, it will have a frequency of 2.45 gigahertz. That’s 2,450,000,000 hertz.
  5. The formula goes c=λf so you are only one multiplication away the result:
    speed of light = (distance between two melted spots of chocolate x 2) x 2450000000

The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second. Did you get it?

Posted by Shedka

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