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We've all heard that red wine is good for you, and most of us would like to believe that chocolate is too. But are we kidding ourselves?
Both dark chocolate and red wine have one very healthy ingredient in common: antioxidants. Antioxidants are dietary substances that can prevent damage to your body's cells or repair damage that has been done.
We met with Dr Phillip Norrie, or as he calls himself, the "Wine Doctor". Dr Norrie has dedicated half a lifetime to his favourite elixir, turning a hobby into a vocation.
So what makes red wine so good? Dr Norrie says that red wine contains resveratrol, the "Rolls-Royce of antioxidants". Red wine has more resveratrol in it than any other liquid or food and though no long-term human trials have been conducted, studies on mice have shown this wonder ingredient has positive effects on longevity, obesity and cardio-vascular disease.
So Dr Norrie is now bottling his own resveratrol-enhanced wine.
"There's been a lot of publicity about resveratrol so what I did was to get resveratrol concentrate from the grape skins and put it back into the wine," Dr Norrie said. "A normal red would have three to six milligrams per litre of resveratrol; we add 100mg per litre".
But does Dr Norrie's wine really have more antioxidants than a standard bottle of red? We sent it off to a Southern Cross University lab in Lismore to find out.
Tests found the resveratrol levels in Dr Norrie's wine were definitely higher, but the overall antioxidant activity in both bottles of red wine were fairly similar.
"Interestingly both red wines exhibited quite high antioxidant activity — despite the large difference in the concentration of resveratrol," a spokesperson from the lab said. "What it means is that apart from resveratrol there are many other chemicals in red wine that have an antioxidant effect."
So a glass of red in moderation is no doubt a good thing. But does the same go for chocolate and what sort of chocolate has the highest antioxidant levels?
It's all about the cocoa content because that's where the antioxidants are found. We had three different chocolates tested at the lab, two dark and one milk chocolate.
Both dark chocolate samples had very similar oxygen radical absorbance capacity values, which correlates quite closely to the concentration of cocoa solids present.
In a nutshelll, milk chocolate might taste great but it's not the best for us. It is made up of mainly sugar and only 2 percent real chocolate. It contains a much higher concentration of milk solids and a lower concentration of cocoa solids. As a result of this the antioxidant activity of dairy milk chocolate is much lower.
Dark chocolate contains about 60 percent cocoa and the higher the cocoa content the more bitter the flavour. But the more cocoa there is, the more antioxidants there are, so dark chocolate is the best pick. As far as white chocolate is concerned, it's not really chocolate at all because there is no cocoa in it.
What about if we compare wine and chocolate? What has the highest levels of antioxidants? Based on a normal serve of one glass of red wine versus two pieces of chocolate, red wine comes out on top for antioxidant activity. So for grown-ups it would be fair to say that red wine is preferable. But for those under 18 we'd tend to suggest chocolate — but not too much.
Conculsion
So the good news is red wine and dark chocolate are good for us, but moderation is the key. Adults should have only one or two glasses of wine a night, and one square of chocolate is a healthy portion.
For more information, visit www.winedoctor.info.
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