Tag: Chocolate
Chocolate Cake Breakfast Could Help You Lose Weight
I knew it!
Eating chocolate cake as part of a full breakfast can help you lose weight, say scientists.
It sounds too good to be true but new research says having dessert – along with the traditional fry up – burns off the pounds.
Morning is the best time to consume sweets because that’s when the body’s metabolism is most active – and we have the rest of the day to work off the calories, a new study shows.
Eating cookies or chocolate as part of breakfast that includes proteins and carbs also helps stem the craving for sweets later.
Researchers split 193 clinically obese, non-diabetic adults into two groups who consumed either a low-carb diet that included a 300-calorie breakfast or a balanced 600-calorie breakfast that included a chocolate cake dessert.Halfway through the 32-week study both groups had lost an average of 33 lbs per person. But in the second half of the study the low-carb group regained an average of 22 lbs per person – while the dessert gorgers lost another 15 lbs each.
A Chocolate Website
Sagres Preta Chocolate from diografic on Vimeo.
Video Description:
Sagres is Portugal’s leading beer brand. This year, Sagres brewed a new product: Sagres Preta Chocolate, a chocolate flavoured stout beer.
Without a TV campaign and very few print materials, Sagres challenged their digital agency to create an online activation for their new product. Using the website as the main promotional tool, Sagres needed to generate a lot of buzz with a new approach.
Given this challenge, the agency’s creative team believed that if Sagres made a chocolate beer, the perfect way to launch it was also to create a website made of chocolate.
This said, the first step was to find and hire the best Maître Chocolatier in Portugal. Mr. Victor Nunes, artistic director of Óbidos International Chocolate Festival, started sculpting the website live at this year’s venue. Later on, his artisan sculptor team finished it at their chocolate factory. The artists sculpted the entire website in chocolate pieces, moulding it according to the design provided by the agency.
Afterwards, at the agency’s studio, the chocolate frame and all the website components were shot in the different positions and stages.
These images became the raw materials for the website.
To invite consumers to try the new product, Sagres offered a piece of the chocolate website and a 6Pack of Sagres Preta Chocolate. Every day, during a specific hour, users can ask for a bite of the wesite.
The finished work can be seen here.
Chocolate
Chocolate is God’s way of reminding men how inadequate they are. I am vividly confronted with this fact every time my wife and I go out to a restaurant. When it gets to dessert, my wife usually orders the most chocolate-saturated dessert possible: It’s the one called “Unstoppable Double-Fudge Chocolate Mudslide Explosion” or some such thing. I always wonder why anyone would want to eat anything that promises a catastrophic natural disaster in your mouth.
The dark brown monstrosity arrives at the table, and my wife takes the first bite. Before the fork is even removed from her mouth, a small moan escapes her lips. Her eyes, previously perfectly aligned, first cross slightly and then faze completely, pupils dilating in pure chocolate pleasure before the eyelids clamp down in ecstasy. The hand not holding the fork clenches into a fist and starts pounding the table. The silverware rattles.
After about six minutes of this, she finally manages to swallow the bite, realign her eyes, and take the next shuttle back from whatever transcendental plane she’s been visiting. Slowly, her sphere of consciousness expands to include me, her husband, her life-long mate, her presumed partner in all things ecstatic.
“Hey, this is pretty good,” she’ll say. “You want some?”
No, I don’t. I want nothing to do with an object that does to my wife in one bite what I’ve worked for an entire relationship to achieve. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway. Men just don’t have the same relationship with chocolate that women do. It’s not even close. I wandered around the office today and asked men — “Chocolate. Your thoughts?” — and the result was always the same. First, a confused look as to why they’re being asked about something so trivial, and then some lame, obvious statement: “Uh…it’s brown?”
Ask women the same question, and you get responses like “The ONLY food group,” “ESSENTIAL to life as we know it,” and the ultimate casual swipe at every member of the Y-chromosome brigade, “better than sex.” Ouch. Some women will try to make up for that last one by quickly adding that chocolate is supposed to be an aphrodisiac. Uh-huh. Chocolate certainly increases desire; problem is the desire is usually for more chocolate. The best a guy can do is buy a box of chocolates and hope he’ll be considered somewhere between the cherry truffle and the strawberry nougat.
Don’t get me wrong. Guys like chocolate just fine; it’s just not essential to life as we know it. Respiration is essential to life as we know it; chocolate is simply one of those nice little bonuses you get. We won’t usually pass it up if it’s offered, but I don’t know too many guys who would get substantially worked up if it were to suddenly disappear from the face of the earth (ironic in a way, as back in the days of the Aztecs, only men were allowed to have the stuff). When I eat a chocolate dessert, I enjoy it, yes. My world view doesn’t narrow to include only the plate that it’s on.
Maybe we’re missing something. On the other hand, we don’t have to pick up our silverware from the floor after we’re done with our tiramisu. Life is about trade-offs like that. All I know is that come Valentine’s Day, chocolate will be among the things I offer my wife. I can’t truly appreciate it, but I can truly appreciate what it does for her. Which is close enough.
Written by John Scalzi
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