Domin Munnely

Back in my days as a University student studying Sports Science I was trying to nail down a topic for my final year dissertation. I used to love going to the libary to study but half the time I ended up reading unrelated research papers just because they sounded interesting or presented new information that was not being discussed. It’s from these geek filled evenings that I settled on spending six months doing a lit review of all the available papers relating to caffeine and sports performance.

What I will present here are six reasons why you should eat chocolate and drink coffee. I am putting these two highly rewarding foods together as they are quite often seen as ‘bad’, which is true if your idea of enjoying chocolate is to eat a bar that contains more sugar than there is actual chocolate or drink seven cups of watered down coffee per day just to keep you going.

They go together nicely - espresso and a square of dark chocolate.

1. Coffee works wonders – in the six months I spent researching caffeine and sports performance (I know thats not the same as coffee and sporting performance but there were plenty of studies that used coffee as opposed to caffeine tablets) I noticed that as long as you used it correctly then caffeine helped improve performance in almost every type of sport e.g. explosive sports, distance running, interval based sports etc. Possibly the single best review of ALL sporting nutrition comes from The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition in it’s 2010 paper Sports Nutrition – Research and Recommendations

2. A fat loss product that actually works – I have covered the benefits of caffeine/coffee previously in my article Fat Loss Products – what really works so have a quick read through that plus it is mentioned in the paper from ISSN above.

3. Chocolate is off the charts – In my 2009 article on ORAC values (a method to measure the antioxidant capacity of different foods) titled Superfoods I should really have emphasised the obvious benefits of raw or dark chocolate for optimal health above almost any other food e.g. berries, veg etc. Raw coco nibs (from iherb and use my code for discount – DOM130) and 70%+ dark chocolate would be the best starting point for many people if you wanted to tap into their amazingly high ORAC value which is over ten times higher than black or blueberries.

4. Back off the coffee intake – What? You might be saying because just a minute ago I said it is beneficial for everything, what the.. Well it still is but with all caffeine containing products e.g. tea, there is familiarization i.e. you just get used to it so you can end up taking more to get the same ‘hit’. This is why you might see some people you know (maybe it’s you) drinking gallons of coffee every day to keep them going or those that need two double espresso’s in the morning to give them an early jolt. This is NOT the way to go about even enjoying coffee as it just becomes a substance that you abuse which can lead to poor sleep habits and long term chronic fatigue. The trick is to have days of your week in which you consume no coffee so familiarization does not happen. This might take the form of 3 days on two days off. I highly recommend that you drink high quality coffee from the likes of www.hasbean.co.uk and stick to a nice espresso or americano as opposed to a calorific caffeine milk shake also know as a latte.

5. Here’s Jonny – below is a nice and short video by Dr Jonny Bowden on the benefits of chocolate.

6. Enjoy – A phrase I often hear is ‘I enjoy my food too much to drop weight’, to which I would suggest that if you ‘enjoyed’ your food so much then why do you overeat to the point of bursting or gorge on foods that you know are harming you? Appreciation of food means that you can be happy with an adequate amount and don’t feel the need to end up in a  Christmas dinner induced food coma at every meal. Yes coffee and chocolate are massively enjoyable and rewarding but please stick to high quality versions of these foods so you are less likely to go overboard on them. This is something my wife covers in her fantastic blog -

http://oliveoilandlemon.wordpress.com/

Be sure to pester her through commenting on her blog on any help you need with putting together healthy paleo/primal meals. There are lots of ideas detailed already so you have no excuse to prepare foods that will boost energy and help with fat loss.