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Comment by Tarsul | Hacker News Reader

Dark chocolate cannot have more sugar than 100% minus how much cacao is inside. And usually if we're talking dark chocolate then we're talking 60%+ chocolate. My personal suggestion is to go for nothing less than 80-85% chocolate, which certainly does not trigger my sugar addiction (meaning it suffices to eat one or two pieces); even more it appears to reduce my appetite (similar to tea). And also makes me feel happy (there are articles about these effects, but I don't know how good the studies behind it are, but certainly worth a mention!). Truly a gift.

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It's usually almost exactly the amount of sugar that is not cacao if you look at the label. Milk chocolate is like over half sugar by weight.

There sad reality is that cacao is extremely bitter, so every gram of sugar is sorely needed to balance it out. I've settled on 70% cacao (so like 29% sugar) as a good balance of being dark for the endorphins and still enjoyable to even eat. Over 90% it stops even being the consistency of chocolate and starts to approach something resembling a brick of raw cocoa.

I tried a 99% Lindt bar once. Took me 6 months to finish it

The manufacturers are being dishonest. They will call it dark chocolate when in reality it is high sugar. Sometimes food coloring is used to make it look darker.

Dark chocolate is great, but check the label carefully!

It isn't food coloring, it's Dutch process - mixing cocoa powder with alkali makes the cocoa powder darker, and repeating the process makes it darker and darker until it's black. It alters the taste too, making it less bitter - Oreo cookies are an example of Dutched chocolate. It's possible to have an 80% light-brown chocolate bar, but the cocoa is more bitter than the darker dutched cocoa, so you don't see lighter-colored chocolate bars at 80%. Milk chocolate is typically not made with dutched cocoa powder, and it appears lighter in color, and has more sugar and milk to compensate for the more bitter flavor of the non-dutched cocoa powder.

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