Dark Chocolate for Kids? A Great Afterschool Treat

Posted by: Lauren Young on September 05

This is written by Savita Iyer-Ahrestani, a freelance financial journalist now living in The Netherlands who guest blogs for Working Parents every other Friday.

It was by total accident that I got my children to both taste and like dark chocolate.

I had run out of the Kinder Schokolade they, like many European kids, always eat, and the only thing I had on hand was a bar of dark chocolate, diabetic at that, left in my fridge by my father, who’s a Type 2 patient. My kids were game to try so I gave them a couple of squares each.

Bingo: Since that moment, it’s the only kind of chocolate they like.

Personally, I only like dark chocolate and in recent years, I even prefer the diabetic kind my father has over regular black chocolate.

The brand is “Stella,” it’s made in Germany, has a high cocoa content and is fairly bitter. The kind I like has tiny flecks of nuts in it. It’s definitely worth trying for any dark chocolate aficionado.

But I was still quite surprised that my children liked it so much. Was there any particular reason for this, I wondered?

Professor Mary Engler, a director in the cardiovascular and genomics graduate program at the University of California, San Francisco, who has done extensive research on the benefits of dark chocolate, couldn’t really think of an explanation. But, Engler says, dark chocolate offers children the same benefits it gives adults, because of the higher amount of cocoa flavanols and the lower amounts of sugar and calories it has compared to regular chocolate.

“I have recommended 70% cocoa content (manufacturers are now putting the cocoa content on chocolate bar labels) due to the higher amount of flavonoids and better taste but dark, even at 60% is better than milk chocolate,” Engler says. “The cocoa content is a good indicator of the amount of flavonoids found in the chocolate. Typically, dark chocolate contains two to three times as many cocoa flavonoids as milk chocolate.”

It’s true that most other chocolate can be cloying after one gets used to the taste of dark chocolate. After a few days, I did stock up on Kinder bars but my children didn’t want them anymore.

For children, of course, any kind of chocolate has to be given in limitation, and Engler doesn’t think it’s wise to recommend a daily dose of even dark chocolate. Rather, children should be encouraged to eat other kinds of food that contain flavanols, with dark – or any other kind of chocolate – kept for an occasional treat.

But I’m from the school of thought that believes a couple squares of chocolate a day is fine. I was raised among kids whose “goutee,” or after-school snack, was a slice of crusty bread and two squares of chocolate, and I have kept up that tradition. Our flavor of the moment is dark, but if it goes back to Kinder, that’s okay, too.

P.S. Another great dark chocolate is the one made by Favarger, a family company located in the Geneva suburb I grew up in.

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