Pros and Cons of Eating Chocolate

My husband asked me if I had one selfish wish, what would it be. I responded, ” Make chocolate, healthy. Not only small amounts healthy but broccoli healthy!”

My family and I love chocolate! Chocolate milk, chocolate cake, chocolate cookies, candy bars, and on and on. There are very few people that don’t like chocolate that I know of. So for everyone’s sake, what are the pros and cons of eating it?

Pros of Eating Chocolate

1. It tastes so good! Most people would agree that chocolate just tastes good and that is why most of us eat it. Who would turn down triple chocolate, triple-layer, chocolate cake? Not me for sure!
2. It is something that you can treat yourself with. I love setting goals. One way I reward myself is having a small Dove chocolate after finishing a task. It may sound counterproductive, but a piece of chocolate is a motivator to get up early and exercise. It is worth it trust me! 
3. Dark chocolate has health benefits. Most of us have heard about the health benefits of dark chocolate. If you think about it, chocolate comes from a bean. Beans generally have a lot of proteins, vitamins, and nutrients. So by eating chocolate you are getting all of that! The only problem is the sugar that is added in the process of turning the cocoa bean into chocolate.
4. There are so many choices of chocolate to eat. Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate! After google searching how many different chocolate desserts there are, I was surprised to find 598,000,000 was the number of related searches. WOW! 
5. Chocolate has a lot of nostalgic memories in almost everyone’s lives. History has so many good memories of chocolate bringing the family closer together. What are some of your favorite memories? One of my favorite Sunday memories of my grandma was going to her house in the evenings and eating big pieces of Chocolate Bunt Cake. Nothing can replace those memories, and that is what is so great about Chocolate!
6. Chocolate can bring you together as a family or friends. As mentioned above there are so many good memories of eating chocolate. Have you ever thought about running something chocolate over to a family member or old friend that has grown distant? In doing one simple gesture Chocolate will once again melt hearts and improve relationships. 
7. Chocolate making gives thousands of workers jobs every year. During one of our family vacations, we decided to tour a chocolate-making factory. It was so much fun to watch the workers dipping individual chocolates. It was weirdly satisfying as the chocolate dried with pretty waves of chocolate on top. There is chocolate making! But also there are shipping jobs, coco field jobs, selling jobs, marketing jobs, cleaning jobs, machinery maintenance jobs, and hundreds of others.

Cons of Eating Chocolate

1. Tons of calories. I know that it is hard to enjoy a candy bar if I look at the calorie count before eating it. I dare you to track your calories then, try and squeeze a chocolate dessert in. It is really hard! 
2. You can feel sick if you eat too much chocolate. I love sugar, so I haven’t gotten to this point in a long time but if I cut back then have a lot of chocolate in one day my tummy feels like a bulldozer was born in my insides!
3. It can become an addiction. When my little boy was born, I went from 8 hours of sleep to maybe 3 hours a night for the first year. To cope I turned to chocolate. I soon found myself eating a bag of chocolate every 3 days. All of a sudden my anxiety went sky high, I had a really hard time sleeping, and I had massive headaches. This could be attached to the lack of sleep but when I cut down on my chocolate intake by 90% all of my symptoms decreased  
4. Costs more than other sweet treats. When someone helps us out my husband and I like to think of people with a sweet treat. Walking down the candy aisle my eyes bug out when I look at the prices of chocolate compared to gummy candy. It is literally the price of gold! haha
5. It can turn into something that you stress eat. Just today I was in Walmart when I passed a girl talking to her friend about eating a whole cake by herself because she was sad. This is very common in women and girls. The smallest, upset happens and you find a carton of chocolate ice cream and eat the whole thing in one sitting. This is very unhealthy and an addictive Band-Aid for our society.
6. Chocolate workers can have terrible work conditions. If you look up coco field workers, they have terrible working conditions. Children work long terrible hours with very little pay. So as you eat chocolate, think of what it took for that chocolate to get to you.
7. Chocolate can be expensive. You can eat more healthy for less cost.

How much more do Milky Ways cost/ pound vs. produce?