After working below the radar on a cocoa farm deep in Brazil, and toiling for years over test tubes in food labs, scientists say they have developed a top-secret formula for an undisciplined candy lover's dream: a healthful chocolate bar.
Eating a couple of tiny slabs a day of this dark chocolate could lower cholesterol, relax your blood vessels and help ward off heart disease, they say.
Loaded with potent chemicals such as cocoa flavanols, plant sterols and soy -- and stamped with an icon that reads, "promotes a healthy heart" -- the CocoaVia line of chocolates has been available in select locations such as some Target, Walgreen's and Wild Oats stores since October 2005. Now they're going national. By April they'll be in mainstream grocery stores.
Don't look for these bars in the candy section: Possibly the first chocolates explicitly marketed as health foods, they will be over in the health aisle.
Mars Inc., which makes CocoaVia, says this is only the beginning. "There is a next generation of products in the pipeline," said Harold Schmitz, chief scientist for Mars, speaking from one of its chocolate factories in Elizabethtown, Pa., where he had just lunched on a CocoaVia bar plucked off the production line.
"We are investigating dozens and dozens of product formats," he added. "We are considering all possibilities."
But some nutritionists roll their eyes at the notion that eating chocolate -- even if it is made with a special patented recipe and supplemented with healthful ingredients -- is the best way to promote cardiovascular health.
"If someone is addicted to chocolate, this may be a better choice than other chocolate bars," said Mark Kantor, associate professor of nutrition at the University of Maryland.
"But to think that you are going to lower blood cholesterol levels, or chance of heart disease, by eating two of these a day -- that is just wishful thinking."
CocoaVia chocolate bars are made from a patented powder known as Cocoapro cocoa. Cocoa in its raw state is one of the best known sources of plant flavanols: a naturally occurring compound in plants found to a lesser extent in red wine, green tea and certain vegetables.
Cocoapro, Schmitz says, is a flavanol powerhouse, manufactured to be of consistently high quality, often containing many times more than other, run-of-the-mill cocoas.
A growing body of evidence suggests that these flavanols found in cocoa are good for you.
