"Chocolate: aphrodisiac and food of the gods"

Using memes, Justin Lytle, assistant professor of chemistry, shows that
not even Success Kid or  Morgan Freeman would eat bad chocolate.

Roughly 40 chocolate lovers gathered in Leraas Lecture Hall the day before Valentine’s Day for the lecture “For the love of chocolate, aphrodisiac and food of the gods.”

“When there’s free chocolate, you get a larger crowd,” Justin Lytle, assistant professor of chemistry, said as he showed the group the four chocolates they would later eat.

A reoccurring theme throughout the lecture was the best foods are rotten. This includes cheese, yogurt, wine, and best of all, chocolate.

“Chocolate is like wine, something many [students] don’t know legally about,” Lytle said. The flavor or chocolate depends on where the cacao plant is grown and how it is processed.

There may be health benefits from the rotten delicacy. Dark chocolate has more antioxidants than apples per 100 grams. But, when the calories of chocolate are taken into consideration, apples are probably the better way to go.

Another health benefit proven by research funded by Mars, a candy company that earns $30 billion annually, showed that chocolate actually lowers cholesterol.

Despite these claims that chocolates are healthy, they are not the reason we eat chocolate – It’s delicious. At least the real chocolates are delicious.

There are three types of chocolate according to Lytle: dark chocolate, milk chocolate and mockolate. Dark chocolate has ground cacao, sugar and cacao butter and vanilla. Add powdered milk and it becomes milk chocolate. Lytle said that the cheap chocolates like Hershey’s and Nestlé’s are mockolate.

“I really, really love chocolate,” Lytle said. “I like the chocolate that when I eat it, I say ‘wow.’”