The Chocolate Diet

The Chocolate Diet

The amazing health benefits of chocolate revealed in a bite-size treat...

When chocolate is regularly named as the baddie in the battle of the bulge, it is easy to feel guilty when we consume the world's favourite indulgence. Yet that exquisitely pleasurable blend of bitter and sweet notes is deceptive - it's not unhealthy.

In fact, eating chocolate can actually help us lose weight. This breakthrough revelation for chocoholics everywhere is explored by respected Australian scientists Dr John Ashton and Dr Lily Stojanovska.

In The Chocolate Diet, they explain how we can incorporate chocolate into our daily lives and profit from its unique health properties. Full of facts, tips and mouth-watering recipes, this is essential reading for anyone who can't say no ...

Dr. John Ashton is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and specialises in food and nutrition research. He has authored five highly successful books in the area of food and health, and has had a particular interest in the health benefits of chocolate for several years.

The Chocolate Diet
Harper Collins Australia
Authors: John Ashton and Lily Stojanovska
ISBN: 9780732291792
Price: $19.99

Interview with Dr. John Ashton

Question: How can eating chocolate actually help us lose weight?

Dr. John Ashton: Dark chocolate contains compounds that act like switches in terms of our bodies' metabolism. One of the things that the compounds do, and we don't need a lot of them, is they switch on satiety hormones and those hormones help us fill fuller, for longer by registering signals in the brain that say 'yes, you don't need to eat'. After a really big meal you don't feel hungry and the reason for that is when you've eaten your body knows that it doesn't need to eat and then you don't feel like you need to eat. There are a number of mechanisms in the body that cause you to not want to eat and one of those is the satiety hormones and if we can stimulate those then you won't feel like eating.

There were some interesting studies conducted in France where they took a number of healthy young women and they simply got them to smell some dark chocolate and they found that the women didn't feel as hungry and they ate less, after just smelling. We don't need to eat a lot of dark chocolate for the effect, what we suggest in the book is that when you finish a meal and particularly if you want to loose weight, then reduce the serving size of your food and if you're worried about feeling hungry afterwards have a square or two of a high quality dark chocolate and that will help you to not feel as hungry.


Question: How often can we eat the dark chocolate?

Dr. John Ashton: You could do it everyday! It has to be dark chocolate because in cheaper chocolate and milk chocolate there is not any cocoa. The chocolate needs to be a 70% cocoa chocolate or higher, the higher you go the better, it does depend on taste though.


Question: How much dark chocolate should we have?

Dr. John Ashton: We don't need to eat a lot, a lot of people think that chocolate puts on a lot of weight but if you look at the amount of kilojoules per 100 grams in a breakfast cereal they're about 1,500 kj for 100g of breakfast cereal whereas there is only 2,000 kg in chocolate - it is a little bit more, but not that much more than breakfast cereal and you're eating less.

One of the other things they have found out, when they did an experiment at RMIT where they asked people to eat 100g of chocolate, everyday. Of course they got a lot of volunteers, but after about a week or so, the people didn't want to eat chocolate. Proving if you really eat a good quality dark chocolate, you don't need to eat a lot.

The other important thing is that it is a like a little switch which is why you don't need to eat a lot of it for it to happen. As I pointed out earlier, even just the woman smelling the dark chocolate, stimulated some of the satiety hormones, not as strongly perhaps as if you ate it but what this shows is that you only need to eat one or two squares to get the effect.


Question: What else did you find, that was interesting, during your research?

Dr. John Ashton: The other interesting thing, we found was that cocoa also contains compounds that create fat burning. Once we have stored our excess energy in our body, as fat, sometimes it can be very difficult to loose that but one of things we talk about in The Chocolate Diet is the number of ways that you can loose that weight. One of the ways chocolate can play is that it stimulates the body to burn fat rather than use your blood sugar reserves.

We also explain in The Chocolate Diet, the issue of weight, loosing weight and controlling weight is not easy, most people do find it difficult to loose weight and one of the reasons for that is that whether or not we put on weight is not just determined by how much food we eat and how much exercise we get (although that is important and will play a role) but that it is also determined by our hormones. Our body has many hormones that control many different functions, in our body and the regulation of how we burn sugar and how we utilise fat are regulated by these particular biochemicals in our body. What we are finding now is that there are certain foods that stimulate the body to burn fat and this can be a more effective way to loose weight than going on really strict diets. Really strict diets can help you loose weight in the short term but they're usually not sustainable, very unpleasant and we often feel embarrassed and guilty when we give in to a craving or go to a party or special dinner.

In The Chocolate Diet we give a number of suggestions, for example I have a friend who was leading weight loss classes and she had women doing the classes and some woman lost weight and some didn't and yet they were on the same exercise regime and the same dietary program. My friend talked to me about this and when I looked at it closely we found that the woman that lost weight were doing long periods of exercise, all in one big burst, to complete their exercise for the day whereas the other women were doing it in smaller portions. The women who did it in one portion, in one big burst, lost weight and the women that did the same amount of exercise split it into three sections didn't loose weight. In the book we explain why those sorts of things happen.


Question: What does The Chocolate Diet contain to help us use chocolate to actually lose weight?

Dr. John Ashton: In The Chocolate Diet we talk about a number of foods, other than chocolate, that can increase and stimulate your satiety hormones and fat burning. For example we've all been encouraged to use low-fat-milk to help loose weight; the fat in milk does contain some cholesterol and it certainly is not very good if we are prone to heart disease but on the other hand fat in milk contains compounds that promote fat burn. When talking to a professor his observation was that the people using skinny milk were often overweight and those using the full fat milk often had normal weight and I explained about the compounds that tell the body to turn on and burn fat.

One of the purposes of the book is to set this information out in relatively easy to understand explanations and give a guideline to the foods that we can choose to help us loose weight rather than the foods that help us put on weight. Many sweet foods stimulate the opposite; they stimulate a desire to eat more, which is a trap.

The other purpose of the book is to show that we can really enjoy chocolate, chocolate is a good food to have and it is particularly beneficial for woman in that it also contains a compound called phenylethylalanine which helps us feel good. Our body produces phenylethylalanine naturally when we fall in love and that is why chocolate is associated with romance. When we are feeling a little bit down, chocolate can give us a genuine lift in that regard because it has the phenylethylalanine compound that helps us feel good. Chocolate can be a great comfort food and it is a legitimate comfort food.

Chocolate also contains a number of important nutrients that are beneficial to woman for example it is one of the best natural sources of iron in the diet and also a good source of magnesium which helps our body synthesize another hormone called dopamine. When we have sufficient levels of the compound dopamine we generally feel less stressed and at times when we are feeling stressed again, chocolate can be a good top up food to help us relive that stress. A lady wrote a book some time ago called 'Hand Over the Chocolates and No One Will Get Hurt' (laughing) and there is quite a lot of truth in that.
We have attempted in the The Chocolate Diet to demystify some of the controversy over chocolate and explain how good quality chocolate is actually very good for us and that we don't need to eat a lot, we just need it in small amounts. I was speaking with a lady the other day who has researched general health and she said that in the afternoon, when she needs a bit of a pick up she has a little square of dark chocolate and it's brilliant. The secret is to just have a square or two especially because chocolate can reduce the craving for other foods such as carbohydrates. Again, having a little bit of chocolate after meals can help us to have less desire for some of the other unhealthy foods.


Interview by Brooke Hunter