Good news, chocoholics: Scientists have found a way to not only make chocolate more nutritious, but also to enhance its taste. Praise science!

By making a couple of simple adjustments to the earliest processing steps, researchers found that they could boost the content of health-promoting compounds in cocoa beans and also improve the resulting chocolate's flavor, making it sweeter. The work was presented at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society and published in African Journals Online.

Humans have been gobbling cocoa for thousands of years, but it is only relatively recently that scientists have demonstrated that dark chocolate and cocoa could actually be beneficial to our health due to the fact that they are rich in biologically active compounds known as polyphenols. These chemicals are known to have a variety of desirable properties, such as antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, and their consumption has been linked to various positive health effects, such as a reduction in blood pressure and reduced incidence of stroke and cardiovascular diseases.