Chocolate - the new Gatorade

The Denver Post has a fantastic article on hot chocolate, just in time for Valentine's Day. The article starts as a blind taste test of local and nationally available hot cocoas. Most rated poorly - even among the premium brands. The testers were not impressed with the chocolate content, claiming the drinks were "weak," "watery," "thin," and "fake chocolatey." Some of the brands tested were Peaberry Coffee, King Soopers, Starbucks Hot Chocolate, and Diedrichs. The one drink that stood above the rest? The Chantico, of course. But, the testers were not inclined to call it the same thing as an actual hot chocolate drink:

The heavily marketed Chantico, named for the Aztec goddess of hearth and fire, is really a dessert, not a beverage. While the tasters called it "the real deal," "wonderfully chocolatey," and "rich, bittersweet and pure," nobody could stomach more than a couple of sips. Or maybe four.

I would agree that there are very very very few places that make a decent hot chocolate (LA Burdicks and Mariebelle are my personal favorites and have always struck me as being in a class of their own), and if the article had been just about rating various hot chocolates and pointing out their deficiencies, I would've been happy enough. But the real news of the article, to me, was the last throwaway section of the article - which is the best distance running related news I've heard thus far in 2005:

As for regular hot chocolate and its potential as a health food, consider this: Researchers at the University of Indiana have discovered that chocolate milk (i.e. the cold version of hot chocolate) is the perfect post-workout beverage.

In tests of bicyclists and masters swimmers, they found that the athletes recovered as well after drinking chocolate milk as after drinking Gatorade, apparently because chocolate milk contains the optimum ratio of 1 gram of protein (supplied by the milk) to 3 grams of carbohydrates (supplied by the chocolate).

When I think of all the post workout consumption I've wasted on Gatorade... Heartbreaking.