Chocolate; a sweet way to improve your health. The NY Times recently had this article in their weekend magazine. Chocolate; most of us crave it. It is in many snack products and Hershey became a huge international conglomerate selling their version of the stuff. The good news is that Chocolate has some serious health benefits too, including the ability to help lower cholesterol. Take a statin or eat a Hershey bar; you decide. Check out the article here. Why Chocolate Is Good for Us By GRETCHEN REYNOLDSApril 24, 2014, 12:01 am In recent years, large-scale epidemiological studies have found that people whose diets include dark chocolate have a lower risk of heart disease than those whose diets do not. Other research has shown that chocolate includes flavonols, natural substances that can reduce the risk of disease. But it hasn't been clear how these flavonols could be affecting the human body, especially the heart. New findings from Virginia Tech and Louisiana State University, however, suggest an odd explanation for chocolate's goodness: It improves health largely by being indigestible.Researchers at Louisiana State reached this conclusion after simulating the human digestive system in glass vessels. One represented the stomach and the small intestine, with their digestive enzymes, and a second reproduced a large-intestine-like environment, with gut microbes from human volunteers. The scientists then added cocoa powder to the stomach vessel. read more