Oh no, Valentine’s Day is coming up and you know what that means- Chocolate… EVERYWHERE. It’s in the front of the grocery store as you walk in, it’s advertised on every website you visit at home, and it’s even generously available at your workplace for the whole month of February. Nothing succeeds more than Valentine’s Day in making you feel like crap if you, A. Don’t have someone special, or B. Are trying to avoid sweets. Well I am not a love doctor and I can’t build you a significant other (by the 14^th at least), but I can make you feel a little better by telling you that although Valentine’s Day maybe be your enemy this time of year, chocolate doesn’t have to be.

Photo by: Dramafever

With many things in life progress is made, not by trying to be perfect and of course not by completely giving up, but by making better choices. If you’re a chocaholic like me, you may find yourself constantly struggling to balance a healthy and fit lifestyle with your love of chocolate always on the tip of your taste buds. Well I am here to tell you that you can you still reach or maintain your health goals while satisfying your love for chocolate.

In a nutshell, certain dark chocolate:

• Can help lower blood pressure and heart disease
• Contains many antioxidants that fight against free radicals
• Satisfies hunger for a longer period of time
• Is a great choice for diabetic because in moderation of course
• Can help reduce stress

Click to read more about the possible benefits of dark chocolate. 

10 Products to Satisfy Your Chocolate Cravings

Remember when I said that thing about progress and making better choices? Well now I am going to help you make better choices by providing you with a list of health products that I believe are great for satisfying chocolate cravings.

1. Metromint Chocolatemint Water- Chocolate infused water. Just the right amount of chocolate flavor to satisfy your sweet tooth without grossing you out. One of my personal favorites.  Buy

Calories-0. Calories from fat-0. Carbs-0. Fiber-0.

2. Teraswhey Dark Chocolate Protein Powder. Throw some in your post-workout shake or make some chocolate milk. Buy

Calories-110. Calories from fat-15. Carbs-5. Fiber-1.

3. Betty Lou’s Chocolate Powdered Peanut butter- Powdered peanut butter is great because it has significantly less calories, oh yeah and this one is mixed with chocolate. Spread it on a banana or mix it in with some yogurt. Buy

Calories-40. Calories from fat-10. Carbs-6. Fiber-2.

4. Numi Chocolate spice or Chocolate mint tea- All the great benefits of tea, along with the great benefits of chocolate. Double whammy. Buy

Calories-5. Calories from fat-0.5. Carbs-0. Fiber-0.

5. Alpen Dark Chocolate Muesli Cereal- A much healthier alternative to cocoa puffs. Buy

Calories-170. Calories from fat-23.4. Carbs-30. Fiber-3.2.

6. Annie’s Homegrown Double Chocolate Chip Granola Bars. Oh look, you’re getting double the chocolate and double the benefits. Score. Buy

Calories-110. Calories from fat-30. Carbs-21. Fiber-3.

7. Garden of Life Chocolate Macadamia Nut Protein Bar- An excellent source of antioxidants, protein, AND fiber. Triple threat. Buy

Calories-230. Calories from fat-70. Carbs-25. Fiber-9.

8. NuGo Slim Brownie Crunch Protein Bar- It’s a healthy chocolate brownie protein bar. Do you really need more convincing? Buy

Calories-190. Calories from fat-50. Carbs-19. Fiber-7.

9. ACURE dark chocolate mint lip balm-No of course you don’t eat this, but I have a theory that if you smell it on your lips long enough your chocolate craving will die down. Buy
10. Wrigley’s EXTRA mint chocolate chip desserts delight gum-A good way to get that chocolate taste in your mouth for a while without consuming it. Disclaimer: This product contains some ingredients that I would not recommend you ingest on a regular basis.  **Wrigley gum can be bought at most grocery stores, markets, and gas stations

Calories-5. Calories from fat-0. Carbs-2. Fiber-0.

11. One-A-Day Chocolate brownie Multivitamin vitacraves- These guys are geniuses. A chocolate flavored multi-vitamin. To a chocolate lover, that’s a lot of bang for your buck. Buy

Calories-20. Calories from fat-0. Carbs-5. Fiber-0.

Almost all of the products listed above are available at Sprouts Farmers Market.

Now you may have noticed that some products above were in bold while others weren’t. The items in bold are special because they represent not only a good way to curb a chocolate craving, but a significant amount of fiber. Fiber is important for many reasons including:

• Promoting intestinal health
• Slowing the rate of digestion, which leads to better blood sugar control
• Playing a role in lowering LDL cholesterol
• Inducing the “feeling fuller longer” effect on your appetite preventing overeating
• Lowering the risk of developing a heart attack, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, obesity, and certain cancers

The presence of fiber in anyone’s diet is necessary, but it is extremely beneficial for a diabetic or prediabetic in particular. On top of all the previously listed benefits, Fiber has the ability to help control the rise of blood sugar in your body after a meal. Fiber directly affects carbohydrates, which must be closely monitored in diabetics and prediabetics. These bold products are really GOLD products for diabetics who love chocolate. Not only do all the bolded products contain a significant amount of fiber, but they also contain less than 30% of calories from fat.

So don’t be afraid to indulge a little come Valentine’s Day, you deserve all the benefits that chocolate has to offer you.

Calories in versus calories out is important, but not the essential key to weight loss and weight maintenance.

This is a great blog (below) to argue the point that 1600 calories from twinkies does not treat your metabolism the same as 1600 calories from a properly balanced diet full of the right carbohydrates, a combination of high biological value proteins and complete vegetarian proteins, and the right mix of fats including the optimal ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fats.

–Emily Barr, MS,RD,CNSC

Is a Calorie a Calorie?

By MARK BITTMAN

I was looking forward to “Why Calories Count,” the new book by Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim. I figured gaining an advanced education in calories might allow me to better understand diet and weight gain. These two are not faddists but clear thinkers: actual scientists. But of course there is more to weight gain than the calorie. 

This was obvious from the moment I asked Ms. Nestle a key question: “Is a calorie a calorie?” This sounds simple, and if the answer is “yes,” all you do is take in fewer calories than you expend and you’ll lose weight. It need go no further than that.

It might help to first define a calorie, and that’s easy: it’s a measure of the energy derived from a food source. A gram of fat has been determined to have nine calories and a gram of protein or carbohydrate four calories; so for any given measure, fat has more than twice as many calories as protein or carbs. Those numbers are not perfectly accurate, but they’re good enough.

A food isn’t a food — they’re all different — but since a calorie is just a measurement of energy, how can it vary? When I asked my question, Nestle’s answer was confounding: “Yes and no,” she said, adding, “It’s Talmudic.” Because calories change as they enter the body, the nine grams for fat and four for everything else turn out to be not very accurate measures at all; besides, foods are only rarely one thing or another.

Here’s what is true, she said: “The studies that have measured calorie intake, that have put people on calorie-reduced diets and measured what happened, show no difference in weight loss based on composition of the diet.” When people are essentially incarcerated, when all intake is weighed and measured, they will lose weight if the calories in their diets are reduced — regardless of the composition of the diet.

“That’s why we hear a calorie is a calorie,” she said. “But no one lives under experimental conditions, and foods are complicated mixtures: fiber makes a difference and form makes a difference.” (Fiber is special because it’s not digested or digested incompletely. Most of its calories don’t get into the body, which is one reason why fruits and vegetables, which are high in fiber, help with weight loss.)

The “calorie is a calorie” argument is widely used by the processed food industry to explain that weight loss isn’t really about what you eat but about how many calories you eat. But if it were just about calories, you could eat only sugar and be fine. In fact, you’d die: sugar lacks essential nutrients.

That’s an obvious case. But although a calorie may be a calorie when people talk about weight loss and nothing else, there are other factors involved. And once you get past my perhaps lame “Is a calorie a calorie” question, you can begin to see something approaching the truth. For one thing, says Nestle: “There are dozens of factors involved in weight regulation. It’s hard to lose weight, because the body is set up to defend fat, so you don’t starve to death; the body doesn’t work as well to tell people to stop eating as when to tell them when to start.”

An important question, then, is really something like, “What can I eat to keep from putting on weight?” and here the answer turns out to be not only easy but also expected. “If you’re eating a lot of fruits and vegetables,” Nestle says, “you’re not taking in as many calories as you would if you were eating fast food and sodas.” Yes, that’s a calorie issue; the latter group is way higher in calories than the former. But though there’s a difference between eat less and eating better, “eating better makes it much easier to eat less.”

Ultimately, the calorie is political: marketing affects instinct, and Nestle and Nesheim really shine in their analysis in this realm. (Their slogan: “Get organized. Eat less. Eat better. Move more. Get political.”) When I asked Nestle what she would do, given that people in the United States were obviously eating too many calories and that the resulting excess weight was costing all of us life years and money, she answered quickly: “We need a farm bill that’s designed from top to bottom to support healthier diets, one that supports growing fruits and vegetables and making them cheaper. We need to fix school lunches so they’re based on fresh foods, and fix food assistance programs so people have greater access to healthier foods.”

Her list goes on: fix the food-safety system; make it possible for people to get into farming; fix front-of-packaging labeling.

And a couple of big ones: “Stop marketing food to kids. Period. Just make it go away.” And get rid of health claims on food packages too. “Unless,” she says, reverting to her pure science role, “they’re backed up by universally accepted science. Which would get rid of all of them.”

Even if a calorie is a calorie, the situation is not so simple.

……

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 A new study shows that eating fiber from whole grain my reduce your risk of dying from heart disease, infections, and respiratory disease!!!

Study: Fiber From Whole Grains Reducing Risk Of Dying From Heart Disease, Infections, and Lung Disease

By Denise Mann, WebMD Health News

Reviewed by Elizabeth Klodas, MD, FACC

Feb. 14, 2011 — Filling up on fiber — particularly fiber from whole grains — may reduce your risk of dying from heart disease, infections, and respiratory diseases, says a new study published online in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Men and women who ate the most dietary fiber were 22% less likely to die from any cause when compared to study participants who ate the least amount of fiber. The protective effect came mainly from cereal fiber in grains, not other sources of fiber such as fruits and vegetables.

“Prior studies have focused on the relationship between fiber intake and cardiovascular disease, but few have examined the link between dietary fiber and mortality,” study researcher Yikyung Park, ScD, a staff scientist at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Md., says in an email. “Our analysis adds to the literature and suggests that dietary fiber is associated with a decreased likelihood of death.”

Fiber-rich diets help lower blood cholesterol levels and blood sugar levels, which may explain why it is considered heart-healthy. Exactly how fiber may reduce risk of death from lung disease and infections is not known, but these diseases tend to be inflammatory in origin, and fiber may have certain anti-inflammatory properties. Heart disease is also believed to be linked to inflammation.

Still, study authors caution, it could be that people who eat more fiber are healthier overall, and that this may be why they are less likely to die from all causes in the new study.

Park and colleagues analyzed data on 219,123 men and 168,999 women who completed a food frequency questionnaire in 1995 and 1996. During nine years of follow-up, 20,126 men and 11,330 women died. Risk of death was lower among study participants who ate the most fiber.

On average, men ate 13 to 29 grams of fiber per day, and women ate 11 to 26 grams. Overall, the risk of death from heart disease, infections, and respiratory diseases was reduced by 24% to 56% in men and by 34% to 59% in women who got the highest amounts of fiber in the study.

People who ate the most fiber tended to have higher education, a self-rated health status of good-excellent, a lower BMI, be physically active, and use menopausal hormone therapy (in women). They were also less likely to smoke, drink alcohol, or eat red meat. Nevertheless, even after adjusting for many of these factors, the association between survival and fiber intake remained significant.

‘Big Suprise’

“The most interesting result was that dietary fiber was protective for respiratory disease and infections,” he tells WebMD in an email. “This was a big surprise. It was even more surprising that the effect appeared larger than for heart attack and stroke.”

“Eating more fiber, particularly fiber from grains, may be related to reduced risk of dying from many different types of diseases — not just cardiovascular disease,” he says.

The new U.S. dietary guidelines recommend that at least half of all grains consumed be whole and unrefined. The refining process removes all the bran, which contains the fiber. The goal for fiber is 25 grams per day for women 28 grams per day for men, and as it stands, most of us fall short.

Boost Fiber Now: Here’s How

So how can you get more fiber in your diet?

“The easiest way to accomplish this would be to always choose ‘whole grain’ breads, cereals, and baked goods over ‘white’ or refined varieties,” De Koning says. Specifically, breads that list “100% whole wheat flour” as the first ingredient would be a good choice over ones that list “wheat flour” as the first ingredient, as this is likely refined white flour, he says.

“Another nice way to increase cereal fiber would be to eat cooked cereals such as steel cut oats at breakfast instead of cold ones,” he says.

The new study did not look at fiber supplements. “But it is unlikely that simply taking a fiber supplement would give the same benefit of as eating whole grains,” he says. “Whole grains are high in many health-promoting compounds that might not be present in a commercially produced fiber supplement. Some of these include antioxidants, which may help to prevent a runaway inflammatory response. It is this runaway inflammation that may be responsible for high mortality due to respiratory and infectious diseases.”

Neil Schachter, MD, professor of pulmonary medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, reviewed the new study for WebMD.

“This is an impressive study, but it’s certainly not definitive,” he says in an email. “The data suggests that the amount of dietary fiber intake is associated with significantly lower mortality in this initially healthy group [and] both men and women had statistical benefits,” he says. “The benefit was primarily seen in diets with grain (not fruits) as the source of fiber.” 

Schachter says the study’s strengths are its large size and relatively long follow-up period. Its weaknesses include the fact that not all of the potentially relevant information about study participants was known to the researchers, including vaccination history and level of medical care — all which could play a role in their mortality.