1. Health experts
You are totally dedicated to making sure that our nation stays healthy. Your mission is to persuade people that eating chocolate is harmful to their health and they should stop eating it now!
To accomplish your mission you need to answer these questions:
What is the nutritional value of chocolate? (What ingredients are in different sorts of chocolate and what do they each add to our diet?)
Chocolate is high in sugar. What are the problems of eating too much sugar?
Chocolate is high in fat. What are the problems of eating too much fat?
How much chocolate do we eat in Britain? (Compare this with the past and with other countries.)
Then you need to do this:
Use the evidence you have found in answering those questions to put together a convincing argument to persuade the British people to stop eating chocolate!
Where can you find information?:
Your group has access to an information pack and a computer so that you can do extended research. You will also have access to atlases.
Lower School Information Pack

2. What are the ingredients in chocolate and how is it made?
What is the nutritional value of chocolate?
What ingredients are in different sorts of chocolate?
Cocoa beans roasting Making cocoa liquor cocoa butter sugar
What are the ingredients in chocolate and how is it made?
Cocoa beans are roasted and ground up very finely to make cocoa liquor. This smooth, liquid paste contains about 50% cocoa butter (a sort of fat). Cocoa Liquor is one of the ingredients in both plain and milk chocolate. Chocolate recipes are all different but there are three main types:-
Dark Chocolate - contains about 35% cocoa liquor, 35% cocoa butter, 29% sugar and 1% other ingredients such as Lethicin (an emulsifier) and Vanilla. 
Milk Chocolate - contains about 10% cocoa liquor, 30% cocoa butter, 20% milk powder and 38% sugar and 2% other ingredients such as Lethicin (an emulsifier) and Vanilla.
‘White chocolate’ - contains no cocoa liquor. It has about 32% cocoa butter and 18% milk powder, 49% sugar and 1% other ingredients such as Lethicin (an emulsifier) and Vanilla. 
You could: show on a diagram or pie chart how much cocoa liquor, milk and other ingredients (sugar and cocoa butter) go into different sorts of chocolate.
Mixing cocoa liquor, cocoa butter and sugar (and sometimes milk) to make chocolate.
Lower School Information Pack

3. Lower school information pack
What is the nutritional value of chocolate? What do the ingredients add to our diet?
Nutritional content of dark, milk and white chocolate (100g bar)
Your body uses protein for growth and repair
Component
DARK Chocolate
MILK Chocolate
WHITE Chocolate
Protein 3g 8g
Fats
34g
32 g
37g
Carbohydrate (mostly sugar in chocolate)
60g
57g
52g
Other
Energy (kJ)
2080
2160
2260
Your body uses fat and sugar for energy
Most of this will be sugar.
Nutritional value.
‘Nutrition’ is in food. Some foods are more valuable (useful to help your body stay healthy) than others.
Your body needs all sorts of things to stay healthy.
It needs fibre to keep your digestive system healthy. There is no fibre in chocolate.
It needs protein to make and replace the cells in your body. Your body is made of lots of different proteins. You need about 50g of protein each day. How much protein is in chocolate?
It needs some sugars (about 90g each day) and starches for energy to stay warm and move about. It needs some fats (about 70g fat each day) for energy to stay warm and move about and also to make some cells in your body e.g. nerve cells and fat storage cells. How much sugar and fat is in chocolate?
Sugar and fat can give you lots of energy (calories) but, if you eat too much energy (calories), you will get fat.
Men need about 2500 Calories each day; women about 2000.
Your body also needs small amounts of many different sorts of vitamins and minerals to stay healthy.
You need to be able to tell people about the nutrients in chocolate.
Is there too much of some nutrients? Too little of others?
Lower school information pack 3

4. 2 - Chocolate is high in sugar
2 - Chocolate is high in sugar. What are the problems of eating too much sugar?
Chocolate is high in sugar.
Sugar contains lots of calories (energy).
Sugar does NOT contain any other important nutrients.
It has no health benefit except to provide energy.
Many people in Britain eat more calories than they need.
If you eat a diet high in calories, you have to do masses of exercise to use up the extra energy or you will definitely gain weight.
Obesity – when people are very fat, they are said to be obese.
In Britain, 1/4 (25%) of adults are obese and 1/5 (20%) of children aged are obese.
Sugar is a big contributor to a high calorie diet.
People can get addicted to the sweet taste of sugar. Sugar causes the brain to produce dopamine in the reward centre of our brain. This makes us feel good and it is why we can become addicted to sugary foods.
If you are addicted to something, it is very hard to stop taking it.
Sugar does not make us feel full and satisfied when we eat it. So people can eats lots sugar without feeling full.
Sugar is included in many foods, even some that we think are ‘good for us’ such as fruit juice and yoghurt.
Why doesn’t sugar make us feel full?
Starchy foods such as bread and potatoes contain starch.
Starch is a big particle made of lots of chains of a sugar called glucose.
Starch makes us feel full. The glucose in starch helps us to feel full because it lowers our ‘hunger hormone’, ghrelin.
The sugar in chocolate is called sucrose. This is a much smaller particle made out of glucose and fructose.
Fructose does not lower the hunger hormone, so we can eat lots of sucrose and fructose without feeling full.
This encourages us to over eat and get fat.
Eating too much sugar will make you fat!

5. Too much sugar can contribute to Type 2 diabetes.
2 - Chocolate is high in sugar. What are the problems of eating too much sugar?
Eating too much sugar can make your teeth go bad
Sugar is strongly linked with tooth decay.
When we eat sugary foods the bacteria in our mouths thrive using the energy from the sugar to grow and reproduce.
The bacteria produce acid which breaks down the enamel on our teeth and rots them.
In 2012 some UK research found out that one quarter (25%) of five year olds had some tooth decay.
Sugary food and drink should only be drunk at meal times to reduce the risk of tooth decay but 66% of chocolate is eaten between meals!
Too much sugar can contribute to Type 2 diabetes.
Insulin is a hormone which tells our cells to break down and digest sugar.
When we eat too much sugar our bodies can become ‘insulin resistant’ which stops our body breaking down sugar efficiently.
Our blood can become very high in sugar which is not good for us.
The more ‘insulin resistant’ our cells become, the more our body tries to produce insulin to cope with the excess sugar in our blood
When our body can no longer cope with the extra sugar in our blood we can develop a condition known as Type 2 Diabetes.
In the UK today type 2 Diabetes is massively increasing.
The increase in Type 2 diabetes is due to more people eating too much fat and sugar and getting too fat.
In England 3.1 million people over 16 are affected by diabetes and this figure is steadily rising.

6. 3 - Chocolate is high in fat
3 - Chocolate is high in fat. What are the problems of eating too much fat?
There are 2 main types of fat: saturated fat and unsaturated fat.
Saturated fat is the least healthy. It has been linked with many health problems.
Chocolate is rich in saturated fat!
It is rich in the fat our bodies use to make cholesterol.
What are the dangers of having high amounts of cholesterol in our bodies?
Cholesterol is a fat which circulates in the blood and coats the inside of our artery walls. Arteries are the tubes along which our blood flows.
If cholesterol coats the inside of our arteries it makes the artery narrower. This restricts the flow of blood. In the worst cases a build up of cholesterol can block the artery.
All the organs and cell of your body need a good supply of blood. When blood does not flow freely the cells do not get enough oxygen and they can die.
If you have a blood clot in your heart, this is called a heart attack.
Stroke is serious
If you have a blood clot in your brain, this is called a stroke.
As different parts of your brain control different parts of your body, the symptoms depend on the part of the brain affected and how bad the damage is.
Symptoms begin suddenly. The face may drop on one side, the person may not be able to smile or their mouth or eye may droop. The person with a stroke may not be able to lift their arms. Their speech may be slurred, or they might not be able to talk at all.
Other symptoms might include:
paralysis of one side of the body
sudden loss or blurring of vision
dizziness
confusion
problems with balance and co-ordination
a sudden and blinding headache worse than anything experienced before
unconsciousness
If someone has a heart attack or a stroke you must Dial 999 for an ambulance.

7. Fat contains 9 Calories per gram.
3 - Chocolate is high in fat. What are the problems of eating too much fat?
Chocolate is very high in fat and fat is very high in Calories (energy).
Fat contains 9 Calories per gram.
Protein and carbohydrate both contain only 4 Calories per gram.
Fat is the most energy dense of all foods.
Obesity – what are the health risks?
Obesity is being very overweight.
The number of people with obesity in the UK has more than trebled since Doctors are very worried. Why?
Being very overweight (obese) is linked with many health problems, including:
Diabetes
Heart disease -
High blood pressure – this increases the chance of having a stroke or heart attack
Arthritis – a painful condition of the joints
Some cancers (e.g. breast cancer, prostate cancer)
Snoring and stopping breathing during sleep
Stress, anxiety, and depression
Infertility – being unable to have babies
Gallstones
School age children need between 1600 and 2000 Calories (energy) each day.
Chocolate is very high in Calories.
A small 50g bar of chocolate contains more than 250 Calories
A 100g bar of milk chocolate contains more than 500 Calories.
Even a small bar of chocolate uses up lots of our daily Calorie allowance. By eating chocolate regularly we risk eating far too many Calories and gaining weight .
In UK 1 in 5 10 – 11 year old are obese (very overweight).
 Obesity could be responsible for even more ill health than smoking!
You need to persuade people to eat less chocolate for their health!
You could: work out the percentage of our daily calories that a 100g bar of chocolate uses up.
You could: find out more about some of the diseases that obesity can cause.

8. Lower school information pack
4 - How much chocolate do we eat in Britain?
Compare this with how much is eaten in other countries
Country
Amount of Chocolate (Kg) consumed per head of population per year
% of population considered obese (obese means very fat)
United Kingdom 10 23
Belgium 12
Austria 7 9
Italy
2.75
8.5
Australia
5.5 22
USA 5 31
Canada 3 14
Brazil
1.38
 --
Japan
1.82
3.2
China
0.12
You could use this data to make a graph
Can you see any patterns?
Is there a link between how much chocolate people eat and how obese (fat) people in that country are?
More information
The average person in Britain eats around 10 kilograms of chocolate each a year…
That’s about 180 bars of chocolate.
Britain guzzles 50 Kit-Kats every second!
People in Britain spend £3 billion on chocolate based confectionery.
Many European countries (but not all) eat a lot of chocolate: e.g. 12 kg eaten per person in Ireland, 4.5 kg in France but only 1 kg in Poland.
Europe ate 2.5 million tons of chocolate products in That’s about half the chocolate eaten world-wide.
In countries like Japan and China, they eat far less chocolate. The people there are not as fat as Europeans.
Although Americans have a very high number of really fat people, the population as a whole eats half the amount of chocolate that British people eat.
It’s important to remember that these number are averages.
Not everyone in a country will eat the same amount of chocolate.
Some will eat an awful lot and others will eat very little.
Health experts
Lower school information pack 8

9. Chocolate rationing ended in 1953.
4 - How much chocolate do we eat in Britain?
How has the amount of chocolate we eat changed over time?
Before the 16th century, no one in Europe ever ate or drank chocolate. It came from Central America, where the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans lived. They mixed ground cacao seeds with seasonings to make a spicy, frothy drink called chocolatl, meaning ‘warm liquid’. In 1519, Emperor Montezuma, served chocolatl to his Spanish guests (the European explorer Hernando Cortez and his men) in golden goblets. Montezuma's chocolatl was very bitter, and the Spanish did not like the taste. They added sugar to sweeten the Aztec Chocolate. Cortez brought cocoa beans to Spain in 1528 and the fashion for drinking chocolate gradually spread through Europe.
Until 1800 or so, it was only ever taken as a drink.
Aztec god of chocolate
Early European chocolate drinkers
In 1847 Fry and Son in France made the first chocolate bar.
In 1875 Nestle, a Swiss company, added milk to their chocolate and made the first milk chocolate.
In 1905 Cadbury launched their first milk chocolate bar and called it Dairy Milk.
The popularity of chocolate grew and grew as chocolate became less expensive.
A bar of Edwardian chocolate
Chocolate rationing ended in 1953.
After that, there was a rapid increase in the amount of chocolate eaten in the UK.
People in Britain now eat, on average, about 10kg of chocolate per person per year.
Advertising:
In the 1970s there was a huge growth in the sale of chocolate due to some very clever advertising on TV.
You could: find out more about how people have been persuaded to eat more chocolate through advertising.
World War 2
From 1939 to 1945, there was a terrible war (World War 2).
Food was rationed during the war. Rationing for sweets and chocolate started in July 1942.
Each British person was allowed 200g of either sweets OR chocolate each month during the war.
Because of the war, chocolate makers could not get the raw materials they needed to make chocolate (cocoa beans, sugar and fresh milk) so they made far less.
Cadbury introduced a special Ration Chocolate which was made from skimmed milk.
During the war chocolate consumption was very low indeed.
Chocolate rationing only ended in 1953.
You could: work out how much chocolate per year a British person was allowed to eat during war rationing and compare it with how much we eat now and with how much chocolate we ate before 1800.