Britons devour an average 11 kg of chocolate each per year, with a fair chunk consumed over Easter. With chocolate claimed to boost our mood, this should make us blissfully happy this Sunday. But is this true? What really happens to our bodies when we binge on an egg or ten?

Just like the caffeine in coffee, the cocoa in chocolate is a chemical powerhouse, rich in active compounds that are quickly absorbed, affecting everything from our energy levels to mood. Nutritionally, cocoa in chocolate contains many biologically active substances that have positive effects on human health, including flavonoids, theobromine and magnesium.
Of course, much depends on the kind of chocolate you scoff – the healthy compounds are in the cocoa, so the darker the chocolate the better it is for you.

MOOD
Dark chocolate that contains at least 70 per cent cocoa is a much cheerier option than milk chocolate. Within one to two hours, the active compounds in the cocoa are absorbed into the blood stream, and give us pleasure.  Chocolate contains phenylethylamine, which has some aphrodisiac-like properties. However, the body gets rid of it very quickly, so the actual effect of this is very small and more likely to be psychosomatic. But chocolate does increase serotonin and endorphin levels in the brain to give that short post-eating high. In fact, the elation really is momentary. According to a 2007 study published in the journal Appetite – chocolate soothes a bad mood for just three minutes.

STRESS
There is some evidence that chocolate has a natural calming effect one to two hours after eating it. A Swiss study in 2009 found that subjects who ate 40g of dark chocolate a day over two weeks had reduced cortisol levels, our natural stress hormone.

THE FIRST BITE
Chocolate gives us immediate sensory pleasure from the taste on our tongues, and within 15 minutes sugar is converted to blood glucose that gives us an energy burst. But after an hour or so our blood glucose levels fall and “crash” – this is most severe with milk chocolate, the most sugary kind.  A spike in insulin causes a lower blood sugar level than you started with, causing headaches, fatigue and lethargy.

APPETITE
Chocolate has appetite-suppressing properties that can help you lose weight. Not only is it high in fat, which makes you feel full for longer, researchers in Italy have found the flavonol in dark chocolate improves insulin sensitivity, which improves our ability to absorb sugars rather than store them as fat. Another study in the Netherlands showed that even smelling dark chocolate resulted in a decrease in the hunger hormone, ghrelin.  This only applies to dark chocolate, as milk chocolate can often have the opposite effect. Tests in animals suggest that the flavonols in chocolate could potentially play a part in preventing obesity and type 2 diabetes.

GUT DISCOMFORT
Chocolate contains caffeine, a bowel stimulant that can trigger symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) as it transits through the small and large intestine 4-5 hours after eating it. Caffeine also raises acid levels in our stomach, which facilitate digestion, but can also result in heartburn, acid reflux or inflammation of an existing stomach ulcer. If you struggle with acid reflux or other gut problems, you might find that chocolate tastes great going down but not so good once it hits the stomach.

BRAIN FUNCTION
An Easter egg won’t make you an immediate genius, but regular doses of dark chocolate can improve our brainpower and memory, according to a number of studies. Moreover, a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2012 found a “surprisingly powerful” correlation between chocolate intake per capita and the number of Nobel laureates in various countries.

BLOOD PRESSURE
A 2012 Cochrane Group report into dark chocolate found that a couple of squares each day – about 100g – can lead to a small reduction in blood pressure. The report said flavonols in cocoa produce nitric oxide, which 'relaxes' blood vessels and makes it easier for blood to pass through them, lowering blood pressure.
Heart health and cholesterol
Several long-term studies have linked eating dark chocolate to a small decrease in “bad” LDL cholesterol, which can occur as little as two hours after eating chocolate. One study also suggests that bacteria in the stomach ferment chocolate into useful anti-inflammatory compounds that are also good for the heart health and reduce the death rate in heart attack survivors.

But any health benefits from chocolate are based on moderation and cocoa content. Most of the studies say the beneficial effects of chocolate are in the range of 80g a week. And although both milk and dark chocolate both contain cocoa, milk chocolate contains a much higher amount of dairy product and sugars. Go for dark.

Reference: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

The term 'processed food' applies to any food that has been altered from its natural state in some way, either for safety reasons or convenience
 
In a huge cross-sectional study of what Americans eat every day, researchers at the University of São Paulo and Tufts University in Massachusetts found that more than half of the foods that Americans eat are “ultra-processed.”
 
The researchers define ultra-processed foods as those containing substances you wouldn’t ordinarily use while cooking—“flavors, colors, sweeteners, emulsifiers and other additives”—that either “imitate unprocessed or minimally processed foods” or “disguise undesirable qualities of the final product.” They’re packed with stuff designed to trick your senses into thinking that the gunk you’re about to eat actually tastes, smells, or looks like the real food you should be eating.
 
Ultra-processed foods, on the other hand, are literally sham food. And they make up a whopping 57.9% of the American diet. By comparison, minimally processed or unprocessed foods—like meat, most fruits and vegetables, eggs, pasta, and milk—make up only 29.6% of Americans’ daily food consumption. The rest of the average American diet consists of just plain "processed" foods (as opposed to ultra-processed or minimally processed ones) like cheese.

One advantage of cooking food from scratch at home is that you know exactly what is going into it, including the amount of added salt or sugar. However, even homemade food sometimes uses processed ingredients. Read on to find out how you can eat processed foods as part of a healthy diet.

​Most shop-bought foods will have been processed in some way. Examples of common processed foods include:

• breakfast cereals
• cheese
• tinned vegetables
• bread
• savory snacks, such as crisps 
• meat products, such as bacon
• "convenience foods", such as microwave meals or ready meals
• drinks, such as milk or soft drinks

 
Food processing techniques include freezing, canning, baking, drying and pasteurizing products. 
 
Not all processed food is a bad choice. Some foods need processing to make them safe, such as milk, which needs to be pasteurized to remove harmful bacteria. Other foods need processing to make them suitable for use, such as pressing seeds to make oil.
 
Freezing fruit and veg preserves most vitamins, while tinned produce (choose those without added sugar and salt) can mean convenient storage, cooking and choice to eat all year round, with less waste and cost than fresh.

​Ingredients such as salt, sugar and fat are sometimes added to processed foods to make their flavor more appealing and to prolong their shelf life, or in some cases to contribute to the food's structure, such as salt in bread or sugar in cakes.
This can lead to people eating more than the recommended amounts for these additives, as they may not be aware of how much has been added to the food they are buying and eating. These foods can also be higher in calories due to the high amounts of added sugar or fat in them.
 
Furthermore, a diet high in red and processed meat (regularly eating more than 90g a day) has also been linked to an increased risk of bowel cancer. Some studies have also shown that eating a large amount of processed meat may be linked to a higher risk of cancer or heart disease. 

​Processed meat refers to meat that has been preserved by smoking, curing, salting or adding preservatives. This includes sausages, bacon, ham, salami and pâtés.
The Department of Health recommends that if you currently eat more than 90g (cooked weight) of red and processed meat a day, that you cut down to 70g a day. This is equivalent to two or three rashers of bacon, or a little over two slices of roast lamb, beef or pork, with each about the size of half a slice of bread.
 
However, it's important to remember that the term "processed" applies to a very broad range of foods, many of which can be eaten as part of a healthy, balanced diet.

​Reading nutrition labels can help you choose between processed products and keep a check on the amount of processed foods you're eating that are high in fat, salt and added sugars.

​There are guidelines to tell you if a food is high or low in fat, saturated fat, salt or sugar. These are:

r example, if you are trying to cut down on saturated fat, try to limit the amount of foods you eat that have more than 5g of saturated fat per 100g.

Conclusion: It’s fine to eat processed foods in moderation. Look at the nutrition facts label and ingredients before you come to the conclusion if a processed food is good or bad. 

Reference: 
Processed Foods - What's OK, What to Avoid
Reviewed by Jill Kohn, MS, RDN, LDN
Published November 09, 2015
http://www.mensfitness.com/

If the fructose in sugar and high fructose corn syrup has been considered alcohol without the buzz in terms of the potential to inflict liver damage, what about the source of natural fructose, fruit?

​Only industrial, not fruit fructose intake was associated with declining liver function. Same thing with high blood pressure. Fructose from added sugars was associated with hypertension; fructose from natural fruits is not.  If you compare the effects of a diet restricting fructose from both added sugars and fruit to one just restricting fructose from added sugars, the diet that kept the fruit did better. People lost more weight with the extra fruit present than if all fructose was restricted.

These deleterious effects of fructose were limited to industrial fructose, meaning table sugar and high fructose corn syrup, with no evidence for a negative effect of the fructose in whole fruit. This apparent inconsistency might be explained by the positive effects of other nutrients (e.g., fiber) and antioxidants in fresh fruit.

If you have people drink a glass of water with three tablespoons of table sugar in it, which is like a can of soda, this is the big spike in blood sugar you get within the first hour. Our body freaks out and releases so much insulin we actually overshoot, and by the second hour we’re relatively hypoglycemic, dropping our blood sugar below where they were when we started out fasting. In response, our body dumps fat into our blood stream as if we’re starving, because our blood sugars just dropped so suddenly.

What if you eat blended berries in addition to the sugar? They have sugars of their own in them, in fact an additional tablespoon of sugar worth, so the blood sugar spike should be worse, right? No, not only no additional blood sugar spike, here’s the critical part, no hypoglycemic dip afterwards. Blood sugar just went up and down without that overshoot and without the surge of fat into the blood.

This difference may be attributed to the semisolid consistency of the berry meals, which may have decreased the rate of stomach emptying compared with just guzzling sugar water. In addition, the soluble fiber in the berries has a gelling effect in our intestines that slows the release of sugars. To test to see if it was the fiber, they repeated the experiment with berry juice that had all the sugar but none of the fiber. As you can see, a clear difference was observed early on in the blood sugar insulin responses. At the 15 minute mark, the blood sugar spike was significantly reduced by the berry meals but not by the juices, but the rest of the beneficial responses were almost the same between the juice and the whole fruit, suggesting that fiber may just be part of it. It turns out there are fruit phytonutrients that inhibit the transportation of sugars through the intestinal wall into our blood stream. Phytonutrients in foods like apples and strawberries can block some of the uptake of sugars by the cells lining our intestines.

Adding berries can actually blunt the insulin spike from high glycemic foods. Here’s what white bread does to our insulin levels within 2 hours after eating it. Eat that same white bread with some berries, though and you’re able to blunt the spike. So even though you’ve effectively added more sugars, in the form of berries, there’s less of an insulin spike, which has a variety of potential short and long-term benefits. So if you’re going to make pancakes, make sure they’re blueberry pancakes.

Reference: http://nutritionfacts.org/

​The truth is that corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup are two different products.

Both products are made from corn starch, but regular corn syrup is 100 percent glucose, while high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has had some of its glucose converted to fructose enzymatically.

Scientists are examining the potentially negative effects of consuming large amounts of fructose in the form of HFCS, but regular corn syrup is not part of that consideration, as it does not contain fructose.

That doesn't necessarily mean the corn syrup you buy in the store is HFCS-free, unfortunately.

Manufacturers sometimes add HFCS to regular corn syrup, but it will be listed as an ingredient if that is the case. So read labels carefully or stick with Karo, which does not add HFCS to their products.

Of course, like all refined sweeteners, corn syrup should be consumed in moderation. A few times a year around the holidays — in your grandmother's famous pecan pie recipe or the caramel candies everyone loves — sounds just about right.

Reference: http://nutritionfacts.org/