Craving Chocolate? Here's Why!
Blog post by Lindsay Mustard, Holistic Nutritionist
You’ve been hit. Again! This time with the longest and most intense craving for chocolate that you’ve ever experienced. Okay, maybe it is the same craving that you are hit with each and every day, but play along. Our cravings for chocolate are a regular thing. Our bodies love its richness and bold flavour. But why? That’s what we’ll be tucking into in this blog post.
Chocolate has been a favourite snack, dessert and cheat food for thousands of years. If we’re not eating it by the bar, we’re making chocolate fondues, cupcakes or ice cream with it. Chocolate is loved by almost everyone - so this is why we crave it.
5 Reasons Why We Crave Chocolate:
For the Sugar
Our bodies love to consume foods that are high in sugar and fat. Why? Because hundreds of years ago, our ancestors didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. They would stock up on the fatty and most flavourful foods whenever they had the opportunity to out of fear of going hungry for a few days or weeks. Fast forward to today, we eat like our ancestors, but our next meal is almost always a few short hours away. Instead of storing the food as fat to survive until our next meal, we stockpile the excess calories and continuously add to the overload. We often reach for the dark stuff when we feel our energy levels dropping and turn to chocolate to give us a quick boost. Depending on the brand and type of chocolate you consume, you can easily consume up to 24 grams of sugar in one bar. To put that into perspective, 24 grams of sugar is 6 teaspoons. The recommended dietary allowance of maximum for females to consume over the course of one day. You just ate that in one snack! So how do we meet your chocolate cravings without going into a sugar coma? Say hello to Zazubean dark chocolate. Sweetened with coconut sugar or stevia depending on the bar type, and bursting with flavour and superfoods - you might eat the whole bar, but that’s okay, there’s only a fraction of the amount of sugar than in a conventional bar!
Caffeine
You didn’t sleep well, you’re been chugging back coffee but that’s not helping like it normally does, so what do you do? Reach for an alternative stimulant. Chocolate. Depending on the strength of the chocolate, bars with over 70% cacao can contain up to 30 mg of caffeine. To put that into perspective, the average cup of coffee contains roughly 85-200 mg of caffeine. Yes, it’s far less than physically drinking a cup of coffee, but it adds up. Caffeine stimulates our central nervous system and can help with weight loss, improve memory, levels of alertness and concentration. On the other hand, caffeine can also heighten levels of anxiety, insomnia and increase one’s heart rate and blood pressure if consumed in too high of quantities. In other words, chocolate is the perfect sweet spot between too much and just enough caffeine to result in a productive workday. The next time you feel yourself craving chocolate, reach for a few squares of Zazubean Buff or Nudie dark chocolate to satisfy your sweet tooth and need for caffeine.
Hunger
If you’ve ever missed a meal and gone one too many hours without a snack, you have unfortunately had to experience hanger. The combination of hungry and angry. Often described as short-tempered, unpleasant to be around and frequently moody. Life happens, we get busy and we reach for the most convenient of foods. Almost always it happens to be chocolate. This point ties into the first point as traditional milk and some dark chocolates contain high amounts of sugar that often lead to one consuming one bar too many. If you feel a hunger pang coming on, reach for the darkest of chocolate, ideally Zazubean Nudie, Strong or Buff, and allow the chocoalte to melt in your mouth. The richness of the cacao butter and the deep cocoa notes will allow you to transition from a state of hangry, to simply hungry and allow you to build a well-balanced meal without taking anyone’s head off in the process. Who knows, after eating dark chocolate, you might not be hungry at all anymore. Chocolate has been proven to be an appetite suppressant and results in reduced levels of ghrelin, our appetite-stimulating hormone. Hoorah for dark chocolate!
Magnesium
We saw that smile spread across your face as you quickly stored this tidbit of information away in your brain to be able to say, “I need the Magnesium!” the next time your spouse bugs you for not sharing your bar. We see you! And we love the way you think. Dark chocolate is a plentiful source of magnesium, a powerful cofactor in our bodies that helps to regulate over 300 biochemical reactions in our bodies. In other words, we need magnesium to perform almost every function that involves our musculoskeletal, nervous or circulatory system. Basically, you can tell your spouse that you need chocolate to survive… In all seriousness, dark chocolate offers an average of 64 mg in a 1-ounce serving. The RDA (Recommended Dietary Allowance) is between 310-420 mg depending on your gender. If you can get it through chocoalte, who wouldn’t want to eat their way to better health?
Stress
Stress, with a big, bold, capital letter S, Stress. Whether we’re high-strung about an issue at work, a situation with a family member or you recently got into a fight with our spouse, chocolate has a natural self-soothing effect that takes us from wound up to as cool as a cucumber. Something magical occurs inside when a piece of dark chocolate hits your tongue in the midst of a long day. Your eyes close, you’re teleported to a calmer environment and for a short moment, you feel relaxed. Chocolate, as mentioned before, provides both healthy fats, a small serving of sugar (depending on the brand!) and tyramine, a derivative of the amino acid tyrosine. This amino acid is a precursor to dopamine, the feel-good chemical that lights up the reward center in our brains. As little as a square or two of dark chocolate has the ability to improve our mood, serotonin levels and endorphin levels. This naturally improves our mood, reduces our appetite and is a vital part of our reward and mood regulation. The better we feel, the better we behave. So the next time your spouse starts acting up, slap a square of Zazubean dark chocolate on their tongue.
There you have it. The five most common reasons we reach for the dark stuff. Choose your chocolate wisely and be sure to stock up on Zazubean Nudie & Buff bar to fight off your next cravings. When its sweetened with coconut sugar, fairly traded, organic, gluten-free and ridiculously low in sugar - you can’t feel bad about eating the whole bar. Especially when you’re eating it for the magnesium! You can also try Zazubean’s new keto bars SLINKY OAT MILK, Grass fed Milk and Super dark panama for no added sugar.