Easter is coming, and the shops are bulging with Easter eggs.  Chocolate is a traditional celebratory treat associated with the end of Lent (in case you'd forgotten), birthdays, anniversaries and Valentines Day.  We tend to think of chocolate as being a bit 'naughty', and certainly as not being good for one's health, but research over the past five years or so has put a different complexion on that.

Five hundred years ago, cocoa was diluted into a drink, and given to people with fever, liver diseases and kidney disorders, and, mixed with resin, it was prescribed for dysentery.  Cocoa drinks were reputed to help with weight gain (how right they were), especially when mixed with ground maize, and hot chocolate was prescribed to aid digestion.

By the early 1600s, European researchers were reporting that chocolate can affect mood.  One treatise from the Spanish doctor Antonio de Ledesma opined that chocolate makes people 'amiable and incited consumers to lovemaking'.  It was also reported that it may help women conceive, smooth their labour and delivery and strengthen the brain and womb.  It was supposed to boost the production of breast milk and chocolate oil could help heal a lactating mothers cracked nipples.  In fact, few conditions were not able to be alleviated by chocolate, including TB, toothache, ulcers, haemorrhoids and parasites.

By the end of that century, chocolate was reputed to strengthen the heart.  Recently, this has found to be the case, in a way.  Chocolate and cocoa are high in a substance called flavonoids.  These are compounds found in plants that promote healthy cellular tissue throughout the body, and seem to act as anti