Chocolate Keeps You Fit

Cromwell Argus, Volume LXVIII, Issue 3472, 24 May 1937, Page 2

Chocolate Keeps You Fit

USED IN BALANCED PROPORTION.

Because of its high sugar content, many mothers believe that chocolate is injurious to teeth and allow their children only a negligible ration of this delectable foodstuff. Their ban is ill-founded. Sugar is not, in the light of modern medical research, detrimental to teeth. Much more radical causes lie at the root of a child’s dental troubles. A deficiency in calcium is the most common. Mothers well supplied with this vital bone-forming constituent throughout their pre-natal and nursing days will inevitably transmit good teeth to their children. Actually, sugar is one reason for chocolate's vitality-producing power. According to Dr. William Brady, noted authority on health and hygiene, sugar Is the best fuel for energy. Quickly digested and easily oxidised in the body, it yields immediate energy. “By energy,” he says, “we mean ■work, muscle work, whether play, labor, athletic contest or running away from danger. The healthy young child, growing and playing hard as a healthy young child must, needs and should have plenty of sugar. Sugar is not only food for muscle energy. It sustains the heart. The heart is also a muscle.” Thus, to keep your children fit, especially during winter’s rigours, give them plenty of wholesome chocolate. Recollect its exceptionally high nutritive value. One pound of milk chocolate, for example, represents a food value of 2,615 calories, compared with 214 of milk, 594 of eggs, and 960 of beef steak.

Only a crazy trencherman would, with any relish, sit down to a breakfast of seven eggs, but a quarter of a pound of milk-chocolate, which is more than their equivalent in calories, lies within everyone’s compass. Backed by medical opinion, the Air Ministry now advises those taking part in long-distance flights to include chocolates in their stores; in the Army milk chocolate has displaced pemmican and bully beef as emergency rations; and mountaineers, explorers, and athletes likewise vote it indispensable.

Nor need you fear that chocolate will stimulate fatness. This widelyprevalent fattening mjfth rises because many people eat chocolate immoderately without taking any exercise to dispose of the energy it affords them.

But eaten in balanced proportion to other foods, and accompanied by proper exercise, it cannot fail to build up stamina and may even have a slimming effect by ridding the body of surplus fats.