1. The chocolate is a very calorific food which you must exclude from your diet but without diabolising it, because this caloric richness is worth many others much more toxic.

2. You have to know that a 100 G chocolate plate brings calories(528 cal) as many as 200g chip, a usual food for teenager, or 6 spoons with oil soup that any housewife incorporates in innocently in her family salad.

3. Chocolate, classified in the most sweetened food (especially plain chocolate), was for long time prohibited to the diabétics. Today, thanks to the discovery of its moderate index glycemic, it can, in reasonable quantity, be eaten occasionally, preferably at the end of a complete meal.

4. Chocolate, rich in grease(30%) only contains 17% of smoked fatty acids and only 13% of palmitic acids known as atherogenes. So it is not necessary to radically exclude it from the diet of a subject of standard weight that suffers from cardio- vascular risk. Pork-butcheries and full fat cheeses are differently more prejudicial to him. On the other hand, if it is not diabetic, the subject at the cardiovascular risk will have to choose its normal chocolate and to avoid the light which is to him, paradoxically, too fat.

5. Stimulative and euphoriant effects: chocolate is rich in phényléthylamine precursory of sérétonine implied in the regulation of mood. Thus it would have an euphoriant effect and a light antidépréssive action which would explain massive ingestions (500g/day) and daily at certain people prone to regular depressions.

On one hand, chocolate is probably the human food that holds the strongest sensory and emotional load, integrating in its composition of cocoa, whose bitterness would be unbearable without the very strong concentration of sugar, cocoa butter of extreme consistency which blocks the papillae to imprison there the savour, and finally salt which maintains a strong salivation, the unit constitutes a formidable symphony of feelings in mouth which reinforces its stimulative and euphoriant effects.

This remarkable combination of neurosensory effects explains why a growing number of vulnerable, stressed or weakened people such as women in premenstrual period, resort episodically to the chocolate as a gratifier and that some people fall sometimes into the chocolatomanie, true dependence to a soft drug : chocolate

Doctor Pierre Dukan.
Dictionary of dietetic and nutrition.