Surprised? Many people are. That’s because they forget that chocolate is a plant-based food.

“The main ingredient in chocolate is cocoa beans – the seeds of the fruit of the cacao tree,” said Debra Miller, Ph.D., Senior Nutrition Scientist with the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition, who has studied chocolate’s health benefits extensively. “Because of modern manufacturing and the common form of the ‘chocolate bar’, most people today don’t associate chocolate with its natural beginnings, but chocolate is essentially food of the earth.”