![]() That equates to about four or five cups of coffee. The key? Try to stick to under 400 milligrams per day. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration reports that caffeine, in the right quantities, can be a part of a healthy diet. Luckily, your standard chocolate bar likely doesn’t contain enough caffeine to cause you to feel jittery or anxious, and it certainly doesn’t contain enough to elicit any serious health concerns. We’d recommend steering clear of sugary milk or white chocolates with lots of added sugar that could cause you to crash.Ĭaffeine, Like Chocolate, Is Good in Moderation If you’d like to take advantage of this natural energy boost, make sure to choose dark chocolates with a higher concentration of cacao solids. Some people also believe that theobromine has the power to lessen the intensity of caffeine, creating a more sustainable uptick of energy. Theobromine is a natural energy booster, but instead of the steep rise and hard fall associated with caffeine, it presents a more mellow, long-lasting energy boost. But why is it that we feel slightly energized yet not jittery or anxious after raiding the kids’ trick-or-treat haul? It all comes down to theobromine, another natural stimulant found in the cacao plant. Indeed, chocolate does contain caffeine, but usually not enough to make us feel hyper. Try our Choco Latté, which is made with organic coffee beans from Blue Bottle Coffee to give you a bit of a kick. If you want a bit of a midday pick-me-up and aren’t in the mood for a cup of Joe, you can still get a boost with chocolate. That means you’d have to eat about five 3.5-ounce milk chocolate bars to get the same quantity of caffeine as you would in a cup of coffee. In contrast, the same size bar of milk chocolate only contains roughly 21 milligrams of caffeine. With that said, there are roughly 80 milligrams of caffeine in a 3.5-ounce bar of very dark chocolate containing 70 to 85 percent cocoa. Because it varies so widely based on variety, cacao concentration and the region in which the beans were grown, it’s a bit tougher to measure how much caffeine is in your average chocolate bar. ![]() You get about 96 milligrams of caffeine in a cup of coffee. ![]() Unsurprisingly, bean for bean, coffee contains more caffeine than cocoa. That means that dark chocolate and baking chocolate, which have between 55 and 100 percent cacao solids, will have more caffeine than milk chocolate. In short, the more cacao solids in your chocolate, the higher the caffeine. So now that we know that chocolate contains a bit of this natural stimulant, we’ve got to ask - what’s the damage? It really comes down to the amount of cacao in the chocolate you’re eating. That means that if you’re consuming high-cacao content chocolate, you’re likely consuming at least a small amount of caffeine. As it turns out, both also contain compounds such as antioxidants, micronutrients and, yes, caffeine. Most notably, both present complex, bitter flavor profiles. Īlthough they’re used for very different purposes and come from completely different plants, coffee and cacao beans share some similarities. There’s also a bit of caffeine in your favorite chocolate bars. But the coffee bean isn’t the only plant we consume that contains a kick of caffeine. Indeed, caffeine - the naturally occurring stimulant that makes you feel perky first thing in the morning - is found in high concentrations in your morning cup of Joe. If you get the jitters from a cup of coffee, you may have considered cutting back on your caffeine consumption.
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