Three Healthy Beverages
January 18, 2011
Imagine you dreamed of making a beverage that is packed with antioxidants, containing enough polyphenols to lower your risk of heart disease and cancer, while simultaneously detoxifying your body and boosting your immune system...
Wouldn’t your new creation be the wonder drink of the ages?
Nope… it already exists! In fact, you have three to choose from.
Beverages such as tea, coffee, and low fat chocolate milk can make positive contributions to your nutrition and health.
There is plenty of research that supports tea as not only strengthening the body's immune system, but also reducing plaque buildup on arterial walls, thus lowering the risk of cardiac disease. Tea is rich in antioxidants, often containing more polyphenols than fruits and vegetables.
Antioxidants help repair cell damage due to stress and aging.
Coffee is similar to tea in that it, too, is loaded with polyphenols. Research shows that coffee actually has higher amounts of antioxidants than green or black tea and some fruit and vegetables juices. Consuming coffee can lower your risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. New research is looking into the possible positive effects on dealing with neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
What about the chocolate? Studies find that chocolate milk helps the body recover from exercise quickly. It also increases bone density and muscle mass. And it's also been shown that chocolate milk can help contribute to weight loss! (Remember we're talking about low fat chocolate milk.)
Now that you know more about the nutritional contributions of tea, coffee, and chocolate milk, I hope you enjoy them more. They can all be part of your healthy lifestyle!
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Dear Bryn- I’d love to see the references to your statments about health benefits from chocolate milk. Everything I’ve read suggests that something in milk (perhaps calcium?) immediately negates the benefits of chocolate… This is why (as I understand it), the nutritional benefits of dark chocolate are absent in milk chocolate (even after you compensate by weight or volume for the milk and sugar in milk chocolate). Perhaps there really are some true benefits from milk chocolate, besides the milk.
Thanks for your comment.
I have not come across anything said about a component in milk that negates the benefits of chocolate. Rather, chocolate milk (the liquid beverage) does not contain a lot of cocoa powder, but that is where the antioxidant power is located – in the cocoa solids. It’s the quantity of cocoa solids that determines the impact.
Comparing solid chocolate bars: the nutritional benefits in milk chocolate bars are not absent, just a lot less than in dark chocolate bars. Dark chocolate contains much more “chocolate” than milk chocolate. The minimum amount of chocolate in a milk chocolate bar is 10%, and the minimum amount of chocolate in a dark chocolate bar (both semi-sweet and bittersweet) is 35%. These days most dark chocolates hover around 60 to 70%. Since the flavanols and antioxidants are in the chocolate, not in the added ingredients, it makes sense that dark chocolate packs more of a nutritional punch than milk chocolate.
For folks who can’t take dairy, chocolate hemp milk is a nice alternative – plus it has the additional benefits of hemp seed oil. (It’s also creamy and delicious!)