Byline: Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy
Chocolate for breakfast? These days it could be just what the doctor ordered.
Cathy Bouchard is a high-energy Naperville entrepreneur who's on a mission to spread the good word about the health benefits of dark chocolate. That's real dark chocolate (with ingredients of at least 70 percent cocoa or cocoa butter, both byproducts of the natural cacao bean).
Forget the milk chocolate, the highly sugared stuff, or the cheap imitations - they hold no health benefits.
'Dark is where the nutrients are,' Bouchard says.
Throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, Bouchard was an artist and designer, selling product lines through Disney World and Nordstrom, when she was stricken with fibromyalgia, a muscular disease that carries with it chronic, debilitating pain.
From 1992 to 2001, as the disease progressed, Bouchard's world got smaller and smaller, until finally there were days she couldn't leave her bedroom.
Unable to continue designing and selling, she spent hours reading. An interest in ancient civilizations led her to delve into the history of the Aztec and Mayan peoples and the cacao plants they cultivated.
That, in turn, led to the history of chocolate and its medicinal role in South America and Europe.
She began eating an ounce of dark chocolate every morning since because, historically, chocolate was a tonic taken in the morning.
'Ancient civilizations knew the healing quality of it, and mankind is just now re-discovering it,' Bouchard says.
Her health began to improve.
'My husband said, 'C'mon, Cath, you can't go telling people you've been cured by chocolate.' I said, 'I know what I know. I know this worked for me.' '
At that time, seven years ago, there was nothing in the media about chocolate's health benefits. Now, Bouchard says, you can go on the Internet and find enough to keep you reading for weeks.
'Plus, there's my own independent study of hundreds of people who've reported to me. It's working for them. Their doctors have taken them off their blood pressure medicine, anti-depressants, painkillers. People say it's helped their irritable bowel syndrome, heartburn, rheumatoid arthritis, migraines, knee and hip surgery recovery, cholesterol. Their doctors say, 'Whatever you're doing, just keep doing it.'
'It's not just me. It's changing something in people. It raises endorphins and serotonin. This cacao is incredibly powerful. It's a gift to us.'
In the early 2000s, though the link between dark, high-cacao chocolate and health had yet to be discovered, Bouchard's illness was receding.
'I knew in my heart there was something to it,' she said.
That was buttressed by her reading, which told her that 150 years ago, Europeans used chocolate as a health tonic, including for children and the elderly.
She decided to go back into business, but this time selling the chocolate she believed in.
With the fibromyalgia behind her, she says, 'I've either had my miracle and God heard my prayers, or there's something to this cacao. I think both. I used to say (about the illness) why me?'
Now she says her illness, and its chocolate-fueled recovery, have led her to help others leave pain behind.
Cacao has more trace minerals, such as potassium, magnesium, manganese, copper and zinc, than any other food, Bouchard says. With an ounce of high cocoa or cocoa-butter dark chocolate daily, consumers reap benefits.
'I eat my (ounce of dark) chocolate before noon on an empty stomach.'
Because it contains caffeine, Bouchard suggests regular consumption take place before 4 p.m.
Within a month you should see benefits, she says.
'At the very least, (chocolate's serotonin) will make you feel good.' She said.
A weight loss of a few pounds during the first six weeks is not uncommon, Bouchard says, because an ounce of dark chocolate daily keeps you from craving sugar and salt.
A 20-year Naperville resident, she opened her first chocolate shop at 5th Avenue and Mill Street three years ago. Last December, Le Chocolat moved and expanded to two floors at Jefferson and Washington streets in downtown Naperville.
Besides the obvious benefit of taste-testing chocolate from all over the world, Bouchard enjoys the retail side of interacting with people daily.
'I get to meet wonderful people - Naperville is full of great people,' she said.
'I used to be a chocoholic. Now I'm a chocolate connoisseur.'
- Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy, whose column appears in Neighbor every other Wednesday, sees no reason not to take a daily dose of chocolate. Email her at otbfence@@hotmail.com.
