Candy Professor

The Chocolate Cure

September 25, 2009 at 7:23 am Leave a comment

One hundred years ago, Americans had very different ideas about body image and health. Nutritional experts were worried that people were underfed and undernourished.

It was an easier time for candy lovers. Consider this account of the German “Chocolate Cure,” which ran in a 1914 journal:

In an obscure but picturesque little village of Germany there is a place called “The Chocolate Cure,” where thin people go to become stout; the patients eat and drink cocoa and chocolate all the time, while they rest, admire the scenery, gossip and grow fatter every day. The true secret of the great success of this treatment is the happy way chocolate has of fattening just the right places, settling in the hands, the neck and shoulders, making the fair patient prettier and plumper all the time. The really effective part of the cure may be tried at home by persevering women, and the medicine is so palatable and the methods so simple that there is actually, it seems, no reason why all should not be at least the desired weight.

That sound SO much more pleasurable than today’s version of the chocolate cure, which promises all the benefits of the phytochemicals and antioxidants found in abundance in chocolate, but only if you eat super-bitter 80% cacao in very small quantities, and promise not to enjoy it.

Source: “The Chocolate Cure,” Confectioners Journal Jan 1914, p. 97.

Entry filed under: 1890 to WW I, Chocolate, Health, Medicine. Tags: body image, Chocolate, cure, fat, Germany, Health, nutrition, spa, thin, weight.