Despite popular belief and much debate, “white chocolate” isn’t actually chocolate at all. The only ties to the chocolate we know and love is the cocoa butter that makes up a large portion of the paler variation. Sugar and other milk solids make up the rest of its composition and give it its trademark appearance.
All good things in moderation
As much as the day might encourage you to gorge on cocoa to your heart’s content, doctors warn you to be careful. Chocolate contains theobromine, an alkaloid that can cause extreme side effects when someone eats too much of it, including seizures, heart arrhythmia and internal bleeding. A lethal dose for a human is about 22 pounds, or 40 full Hershey bars. The doses are dramatically lower for pets, so be sure to never give your cat or dog chocolate to eat.
Got a cough? Chocolate can help you soothe it
Believe it or not, a study conducted by researchers in the United Kingdom in 2004 showed chocolate can help ward off a persistent cough, even better than cough syrup. Participants in the study were given a tablet containing codeine (the ingredient in cough syrup that stops coughing), one containing theobromine and a placebo, and were then asked to inhale an irritant. The people who took the cocoa-based tablets needed one-third more of the irritant before their cough came on full force, and had none of the side effects that come with traditional cough medicine. Consult a doctor before you switch to a chocolate-based health routine, though.
A true chocolate paradise
Unsurprisingly, Belgium is one of the world’s biggest chocolate-selling countries, producing over 220,000 pounds of processed chocolate every year, with the Brussels Airport selling most of it to tourists of the chocolate-famous nation. What may catch you off guard is that most of the world’s cocoa — 70 percent, in fact — is actually grown in Africa. The country of Cote d’Ivorie alone is responsible for about 40 percent of the world’s chocolate crop.
A real chocolate discovery
Even in the South Pole, chocolate has a place. More than 60 years after his initial trek to the South Pole, researchers who dug up a cache left by Admiral Richard Byrd found a Hershey’s chocolate bar among his belongings. The surprising thing? Since it had been frozen for all those years, it was still edible.
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