The healing powers of chocolate.

Julie Pech ate chocolate every day for 18 months, all in the name of health research. She compared brands, one after another, as many varieties and brands from around the world as possible. She stocked her Littleton home with high-octane chocolate, up to 50 pounds stashed in cupboards: cacao beans and cocoa nibs--raw-chocolate chips--Ghirardelli and Dagoba and Valor, always testing and tasting. Now she's a self-described chocolate therapist, dispensing recommendations on how chocolate can help a variety of ills through her book, The Chocolate Therapist: A User's Guide to the Extraordinary Health Benefits of Chocolate (Trafford Publishing) ... Trend-watchers are focused on the healing powers of chocolate, according to a market research report on the premium chocolate industry released in March ... These experts predict the next big growth area will be cocoa and drinking chocolate. And why not? A mug of natural cocoa has nearly twice the antioxidants of a glass of red wine, two to three times more than green tea, and up to five times that of black tea ... but, like good and bad cholesterol, there's good and bad chocolate. The nutritional value is in the cocoa, so the healthy stuff is dark chocolate with a minimum of 50 percent cocoa solids ... Her [Pech] mission, she says, is education. "I'm not saying eat chocolate cake, candy bars and cookies, pigging out on chocolate all day long," she says. "You have to control it. One good thing about eating quality chocolate, when you eat the good stuff you don't need a lot of it to satisfy your craving."

--Colleen O'Connor, Denver Post 05/26/2007