Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate

The word of the day is that chocolate has anti-oxidants and good for you stuff. We also know it has some not so good for you stuff.
After doing extensive reading on the subject, I concluded that if you use your raw chocolate in moderation, it should be fine. This seems to me to be common sense:
For instance after eating one candy bar (not that I recommend it, due to the presence of sugars, processing, and possibly trans-fat) most people feel that pleasant chocolate happy feeling. After eating 10 candy bars, most people feel pretty bad.

Here is a web page with a lot of easy to read information about chocolate:
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/choco.html

You can grind your own raw cacao beans or raw cacao chocolate nibs in a spice grinder or coffee grinder, or you can purchase the finely ground powder (widely available on raw food online stores and health food stores).

Add raw chocolate to breakfast shakes, almond milk banana smoothies. I like pouring out a handful of cacao nibs onto a small plate with some raw cashew pieces or raw almonds and nibbling while I catch up on emails, check out cool videos on youtube, drink tea, read the news, etc. The bitter nibs mix well with the natural sweetness of the nuts.
If you don’t have a health food store handy, you can order from any number of online sources. Two I have used to buy raw food products are:
http://www.livingtreecommunity.com
http://www.alissacohen.com

Am I fat?

A long time ago I was grocery shopping - finding a big conflict between my budget consciousness and my health consciousness - deciding between the butter I held in one hand and the margarine I held in the other hand. A woman leaned towards me and said that margarine was about the worst thing I could put in my body - hydrogenation involved making oils, naturally liquid at room temperature, into something that would stay solid; that this process left traces of nickel - and who knows what else - which was used as a catalyst in the margarine.

She said that margarine actually worsens cholesterol (I confirmed the science on this subsequently) compared to butter which at least is a real substance in nature and if eaten in moderation, not bad. As I was interested, she further explained, hydrogenated oils make cell receptors rigid, and unable to function properly. Read more »