Please tell me chocolate is good for me!

Who ever says that CHOCOLATE isn't good for a breast cancer patient, needs to be strapped down and whipped! Of course, without and estrogen being on the Ai's, I suppose being able to do the honors of whipping said person, might take care of my frustration of not have estrogen or chocolate.  Hm....NOPE, rather have my indulgence.....any GOOD chocolate.  Soy laden or not!   Sorry....just can NOT say NO!

Indulge! I get that chocolate craving too and just go with it. I've recently been researching the raw foods diet and ran across this interesting video by nutritionist David Wolfe about the benes of chocolate (he wrote a book called Nake Chocolate too) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezUqX7tctbs

Oh, sisters!!!  God bless you!  cp418, that Dove Dark with cran & almonds sounds like heaven.  As does the Brookside.  Remember the ol' Chunky bars, with the raisins & Spanish peanuts?  That was before we all went gourmet with this stuff.

I myself am a firm believer in the medicinal properties of chocolate, the darker the better.  One of my work buddies made me some chocolate chip cookies when I went out for my lumpectomy that were made not with chips, but with bitter & bittersweet chocolate bars chopped up in chunks.  OH.  MY.  GOD.   Definitely a peak experience. 

Now where is FemaraNChocolate??   She really should be here.  I'm going to PM her.

Kathi

Now if only chocolate was a Cure for Cancer!!!!!

My girlfriend was diagnosed with breast cancer and she loves chocolate more than any other food. However now she can hardly have it for the rest of her life due to the major risk of it stimulating a relapse and currently preventing proper treatment. This goes to almost everyone who posted. I'm not sure how it works with you, but for me the actuality that eating chocolate can be healthy is a close one as it tears me apart to see my girlfriend devestated because of this. To wishiwere, go ahead and strap me down or whip me but before you do you better believe I would make you take backs those words.

STRESS CAN LEAD TO CANCER, according to a study that was posted on this site recently.

EATING CHOCOLATE REDUCES MY STRESS LEVEL.  No question about it!

Therefore by conclusion, EATING CHOCOLATE REDUCES MY RISK OF CANCER, since there is stress in my life that I cannot otherwise control.

Add to this the fact that dark chocolate is an antioxidant, and we know that antioxidants are good for us!

  Valentine's Day is coming soon - it may be a "made for Hallmark" holiday but it is yet another good reason to buy and eat chocolate!

By looking at all the above posts, one can scientifically conclude that chocolate IS good for us! 100% of women can not be wrong!!!

Correct - chocolate is most effective at higher doses - just ask kids at Easter

Fidelia

The ONLY chocolate that's good for you/us/anyone is dark chocolate - 70% dark at LEAST, preferably even darker, and only in small amounts.  Any other type of chocolate has way too much sugar to have any health benefits, and in fact, is BAD for your health.  I'm with krs129 on this one - make jokes about chocolate all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that sugar contributes to and encourages cancer.  Dr. David Servan-Schreiber writes all about it in his book Anticancer, although he is by no means the only one who warns against the dangers of sugar.  In fact, I don't think you could find a single doctor who would tell you that sugar is good for your health.

I am working hard to eliminate refined sugar from my diet, and it is really HARD, because I have always had a sweet tooth - like most Americans!!  But to me, it is worth it to keep trying, because the benefits of giving up sugar are so great.  Thus, this thread is hard for me to read.  It's one thing to say, "I know sugar's harmful, but I love it so much that I'm not willing to give it up" - it's entirely different to insist that sugar is HEALTHY.

Just glancing through and I don't usually post in this portion of BC.org, but I eat chocolate three times a day and my cholesterol is down 34 points, and I have lost 12 lbs. even though I am taking Arimidex and have several years to go with that.  My mood is much lighter now, and energy level is as well.  So -- dark chocolate does work. My desire for other chocolate ( the regular candy like M&M's etc. that I was fond of ) is "greatly diminished ) as well as I don't tend to pig out on bad things as much as I once did. 

I tend to feel that most, if not all of this, would not have happened if I had not starting eating the three little chocolate bars a day that I have because that is the only thing I have truly changed in the last five months.  I meant to get back on my South Beach style of eating and exercising, but both of those things, for a variety of reasons, I have not put into effect yet. 

Sugar was always a big thing in my life, but I learned to use WheyLow and Splenda for the most part -- table sugar/cane sugar does not taste very good to me now, and the salt shaker never gets used at my house any more either.  I never believed that I could exist w/o my sugar and salt though the sugar was by far more dominate, and for sure I did not believe I would come to enjoy the taste of a lot of my food w/o the additives but once you get used to not reaching for your old friends -- the sugar bowl or salt shaker you find yourself NOT reaching for them and not missing them.

Hope no one minds that I dropped in --

Jackie

I make cocoa with 1/4 bar of dark chocolate and a cup of organic milk. Heat and stir well.

It is divine

Hi Ruth,

I think moderation is really as you say the key to most everything.  I have only been eating my chocolate for a few months -- I'm guessing five.  I saw this brand of chocolate at a local Home & Garden Expo.  I got some samples but did nothing about it for almost a year -- then a fellow in my office who was eating this chocolate did well and that convinced me.  I also ( and I have felt it is due to Arimidex ) started having difficulty with cholesterol and just did not want to have to deal with statin drugs which do tend to be hard on the liver.  So, I started my chocolate program.

I will pm you with a little more info as we are not suppose to really hype things much, but will say I do eat three small bars a day -- occasionally a 4th. if I really start to want a late night snack. 

Jackie

Hello Fellow Chocolate Lovers, I decided to do a little dark chocolate research (a tough job but somebody has to do it ). Anyway, I went googling, and found out some information for us. (Lance Armstrong's website www.livestrong.org had quite a bit of information.) The cocoa content should be at least 65-70%, "the higher the concentrate of cocoa in chocolate the bigger the antioxidant punch."  They mentioned two natural chocolate makers; Dagoba, which is organic, and Xocai, which does 'cold manufacturing' with no processed sugar. I checked both their websites, and at least around here, you would have to order them online. Dagoba is expensive, and Xocai very expensive (at least to me). So I went down to Walmart and bought 6 different brands of dark chocolate (the sacrifices one makes for science ). They ranged from 70-100% cacao, none of them had vegetable/coconut/or palm oil (which we'd want to avoid if we are eating chocolate for health purposes). All had similar nutritional and calorie counts. The one question I had was about the listing of 'traces of soy' or 'soy lecithin as an emulsifier' (also on the expensive online brands). I know we estrogen positive ladies are suppose to avoid too much soy, so googled and it sounds like being used as an 'emulsifier' should not be a problem (but if anyone has other information, please correct me). And, of course, MODERATION is the key. One to two ounces per day. I'm going to sign off now and sample my 'specimens'. Ruth