Food Focus on Chocolate for Runners
Everyone loves a sweet treat and runners are no exception. Our aim is to help you find a way of enjoying “dark chocolate” as well as adding some nutritional benefits to your food plan. Also, worth mentioning dark chocolate is an acquired taste but once your taste buds have adapted, you’ll love it. The flavour is so intense that you’ll find you don’t over eat as it’s so satisfying.
Our discussion will cover:
1. KEY nutritional properties in chocolate and how they can support a runner.
2. We’ll share some recipe ideas using chocolate.
3. How to choose a good quality chocolate and some of our favourite brands.
To clarify, we are talking about DARK Chocolate – chocolate made from Cacao beans – not the highly refined sugary commercialised brands.
SHOW NOTES
(01:47)
A little about cacao!
· Cacao, is the dried and fully fermented fatty seed of the fruit of the cocoa tree, Theobroma cacao.
· Cocao liquor is the paste made from ground, roasted, shelled, and fermented cocao beans, called nibs. It contains both non-fat cocao solids and cocao butter. Cocao liquor is what is referred to as ‘‘percent cacao’’ on food packaging.
· Powder is made by removing some of the cocao butter from the liquor.
· Chocolate is a solid food made by combining cocao liquor with cocoa butter and sugar. The proportion of cocao liquor in the final product determines how dark the chocolate is.
(06:25)
Nutritional Properties of Cacao and potential health and performance benefits to runners:
Polyphenols
Cacao beans contain a high level of polyphenols of which there is a subset of nutrients called flavanoids – flavan-3-ols in particular, cacao contains epicatechin, catechin, and procyanidin. Research shows that flavonoids may contribute to cacao’s cardioprotective effects and anti-oxidant effects.
Increase vasodilation and blood flow to working muscles
Flavanoids also promote bio availability of Nitric Oxide which naturally increases the flow of blood and oxygen to working muscles. A greater supply of oxygen to the working muscles results in boosts to strength and endurance performance important for runners.
Increase Your Aerobic Capacity
A study in 2016 looked at “Beneficial effects of dark chocolate on exercise capacity in sedentary people”. It was a small study of 17 participants who consumed 20 g of dark chocolate daily for 3 months – at end of study they had experienced a 17% increase in their VO2 max i.e how efficiently you use oxygen.
The researchers believe that epicatechin, can help the mitochondria—or the powerhouse of your cells—function more efficiently.
One study which looked at 9 endurance trained cyclists consuming a chocolate milk drink as a recovery aid following interval work outs on 3 separate day. They compared performance with Choc Milk against a fluid replacement drink and a carbohydrate replacement drink and found …
Time to Exhaustion (TTE) and Total Work (WT) were significantly greater for chocolate milk and Fluid Replacement (FR trials) compared to Carbohydrate Replacement (CR) trial. The results of this study suggest that chocolate milk is an effective recovery aid between two exhausting exercise bouts.
Can anti-oxidant properties of flavonoids in cacao reduce inflammation?
Endurance running is a contributor to acute inflammation in the muscles and joints, so it’s thought that eating good quality dark chocolate before or after a training run may help reduce the inflammation.
However, a review in 2019 looked at the...
