Mary Poppins had a spoon full of sugar, now the Queen's chocolatier has invented healthy chocolate. By Charlie Cottrell
It's the news chocolate lovers have been waiting for; chocolate is healthy and you should eat it every day. At least that's the message from the Queen's chocolatier, Prestat, whose high antioxidant chocolate bar, Choxi+ hits the supermarkets next week.
As with red wine, rating the health benefits of chocolate has split nutritionists who debate the value of its high antioxidant levels compared to its similarly high calorie and fat content.
But Prestat's director, Bill Keeling, believes he has the solution; "by using cocoa beans with a naturally high antioxidant level combined with a gentle processing technique, we have been able to preserve around 50 per cent of the antioxidants found in the cocoa bean." The result is a chocolate bar that delivers more than twice the antioxidant levels than any other chocolate product, for the same calorific value.
The numbers look convincing. On the ORAC (Oxygen radical absorbance capacity) scale, used by nutritionists to measure the antioxidant value of foods, 10g of Choxi+ scored 4600, compared with 1360 for 10g of walnuts and 240 for 10g of blueberries. And all for less than 60 calories.
