I enjoyed, and agree with, many of the sentiments expressed in this entertaining article.

Warning: Contains language some might find offensive.

 

Dark Chocolate Is Not Good for You, and Also Sucks.
                    by James Fell

Fuck dark chocolate.

For about a decade, the sales of dark chocolate have soared, regardless of the fact that it tastes like someone melted down a bunch of brown crayons, mixed it with charcoal and then let it solidify into bar form. Why the boost? As a senior VP from Hershey said in 2006 of the 37% spike in sales of their Special Dark, “There are underlying benefits with the consumption of cocoa that give consumers the permission to enjoy chocolate.”

Wait. “Permission to enjoy chocolate”? Just… fuck you.

When I was a kid treats were rare. Cinnamon toast was considered decadent. I remember raiding the cupboards for something sweet and finding dark chocolate and thinking jackpot! But my sister said, “Don’t bother. It says ‘chocolate,’ but it’s really not.”

Milk chocolate tastes like diabetes, which is why it’s awesome. Dark chocolate tastes like you’re being punished for only shoveling half the driveway. If someone put dark chocolate in your candy bag at Halloween it was considered a crime akin to giving you a toothbrush, and you would egg the bastard’s house, as was only right and proper.

But a while back someone came up with an idea to market health claims around dark chocolate to drive sales, and now we have scantily-clad, coconut-water drinking Crossfit junkies “treating” themselves with one or two squares of paleo-approved dark chocolate after they do their dehydrated and well-lit butt-thrusted Instagram selfies, because of antioxidants, or something. And how many cheesy health websites have written listicles about “7 Ways that Dark Chocolate Shrink Tumors/Alleviates Adrenal Fatigue/Eases PMS/Cures Ebola”? Too many. It’s almost as annoying as kale or quinoa.

One thing eating dark chocolate can’t cure is sanctimonious proselytizing.

“Oh, your dark chocolate only has 70% cacao? You poor thing. I only eat 97% cacao fair trade raw vegan organic helper monkey picked chocolate that’s been through the digestive system of a spotted African cat.”

These people exist. They love to obsess over their meager ration of dark chocolate and feel all holier than Hershey-eating thou because it’s a “healthy” treat, even though it tastes like a bag of smashed badger asses and the heaps of sugar and fat somehow don’t get factored into the health-washing. It’s not too guilty a pleasure because it’s dark. Pair it with a glass of red wine for the resveratrol and you’re bulletproof.

If you genuinely like dark chocolate, fine. Move alon...

The video below is an easy way to learn more about the issue of insulin resistance or high insulin levels. The first three-fourths of the video contains information on scientific research with some interesting charts and graphs.

When considering insulin levels, it is important to remember that a high insulin level can exist within a body even without a high blood glucose level.

Below is a transcript of the final one-fourth of the 32 minute video which encapsulates “Butter Bob’s” own personal viewpoint of the solution to the fat dilemma.

“Fat, your body fat is there around your middle, because your body thinks it is in a fed state all the time. And if your insulin pattern is like these we’ve looked at, you probably are in that fed state most of the hours of the day, everyday.

There’s only one way of getting this fat off. If the body believes that fat needs to be stored and held onto because there’s plenty of food, and it does believe this if insulin remains high, then it is waiting for something.

What is it waiting for?

It’s waiting for the signal that food is not available, that’s what it’s waiting for.


What is that signal? Low insulin levels is that signal.

As soon as you give it that signal, that food is not available, it will start releasing the fat. It just will, the work of George Cahill has shown us that.

That’s why so many different diets work, any diet that restricts your calories, makes your calories really low, therefore lowing your insulin levels, is going to send that signal, because it lowers your insulin level and this sends the signal to release the fat.


The problem is sustainability, in a world where food is everywhere, it’s hard to sustain a low calorie diet. Is it impossible? No. People have done it, many people have done it.


A Low Carb – High Fat diet (the diet I used to lose 150 pounds) is a diet hack, it’s a trick. It’s an imitation of fasting, an imitation of starvation. Starvation itself is a situation where circulating fat is high and insulin is low, a LCHF diet is also a situation where circulating fat is high and insulin is low.


So what’s the trick? We are restricting carbs, and we’re keeping our protein fairly low, not low enough to make us sick, but low, because protein has an effect on insulin that is about half that of carbs. That’s right, when you eat protein, especially some low fat lean protein, you are actually raising your insulin about half as much as eating carbohydrates.


We feed our body fat for a reason, firstly, so we can have something to eat, which makes this diet sustainable. You know trying to go without food long enough to make a difference is extremely hard to do. But this way of eating allows you to eat.


This sustainable fat diet allows us to eat, which makes the diet easy and the high fat part of this diet sends the signal to the body that we’re not eating, you see it’s a trick, because if the body has a lot of fat circulating around inside, fat from the diet, the body thinks it’s in starvation mode already, because if it was actually going without food, the body itself would be releasing fat.


So if we eat fat, when we do eat, it’s sending the SAME signal that the body would get if it was ...