About Me and Why I Created My Health Benefits of Dark Chocolate Site

Use this search box to find the info you're looking for!

Hi, my name is Bettye Wineland and I'm a dark chocoholic.

No, you haven't stumbled across a 12-step program cyber-meeting. I just wanted to make it clear from the beginning that I'm a dark chocoholic and proud of it.

But I haven't always been one. Once, many years ago, I didn't know much about dark chocolate so I made a terrible mistake. I ate baking chocolate.

I was just a kid, what did I know? It looked delicious. Boy, was I ever surprised! That extreme bitter taste turned me off dark chocolate...precious years were wasted eating milk chocolate.

Then when I was about 11, my grandmother made a batch of chocolate chip cookies with semisweet chips. I loved them. But I was clueless, I didn't even know there was more than one type of chocolate chip.

That is until I tasted my sister's batch of chocolate chip cookies a few days later. I couldn't figure out why the chocolate tasted so funny, so sweet. She had used milk chocolate chips as usual.

It was then that I realized they just didn't satisfy me anymore. I had fallen under the spell of dark chocolate. No more of that milky, sweet junk for me! So began my love affair with the dark stuff.

Now that I was old enough to cook/bake I began to experiment. I took my mother's chocolate fudge icing recipe and increased the cocoa content. I baked cookies, brownies, and cakes.

If it was made with cocoa, I tried to make it darker!

Eventually, I became the family expert on chocolate. I even spent six months working in the pastry section of the local Luby's cafeteria. I just kept learning and baking.

Then one day in 2005, my mother gave me a book about dark chocolate. A chapter was devoted to the health benefits.

I was truly amazed to find that something I loved, that tasted so good, was actually healthy! I had to know more, so I began to do research.

My Mission?

That got me to thinking. Could this be my mission in life? Could I save all those misguided milk chocolate lovers?

Yes, I would show them that they too could learn to love dark chocolate. I'd convince them that those health benefits are worth a little work.

So I started my health benefits of dark chocolate web site. I wanted to share what I had learned (sometimes the hard way) about dark chocolate. Not only the benefits but also the drawbacks of eating dark chocolate, everything I could find on the subject!

Since family obligations keep me around the house a lot, it was the perfect way to share my love of dark chocolate and earn a few dollars. Now I can do both.

What Else Do I Like to Do?

Fish, garden, ride my bicycle, walk, spend time with my family, and observe the local wildlife. It's that last one that tends to distract me more than it should!

That's me, sitting on the pier looking at the birds, not working on my website.

I tend to forget about chocolate (temporarily) when I see an osprey, or hawk soaring overhead. Watching a pelican crash dive for a fish or a hummingbird visting my garden is just too much to ignore. So I've learned to work at night!

Where Am I?

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas.

Now I'm lucky enough to live on the San Bernard River about 7 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. It's the perfect place to live.

Well, almost perfect, if you can tolerate the hordes of pesky mosquitoes and the occasional hurricane!

Return to Health Benefits of Dark Chocolate Home Page