At the start of 2024 I quit ultra-processed food to see what impact it would have on my health. You can read about that in more depth here but, in short, I lost weight and my body shape changed. I immediately went cold turkey on cutting out UPFs and haven't looked back in eight months.
And while I've generally not struggled to go without any particular food (in fact, I now actively don't want some things I used to eat) there is one food I have missed: chocolate. Most mass-produced chocolate you'll find in the supermarket is the very definition of ultra-processed food, which you can broadly categorise as being highly altered and typically containing a lot of added salt, sugar, fat and industrial chemical additives. This is the list of ingredients that goes into a Cadbury's Dairy Milk, for example (that's not singling out Dairy Milk, this is standard for this kind of product): Dark chocolate is a different product.
In some cases, this difference is only slight and the chocolate bar will still contain a similar list of ingredients and very obviously be a similarly ultra-processed product. But other dark chocolate will have a much smaller list of ingredients. The simplest way of identifying a chocolate bar with fewer ingredients is by the percentage of cocoa it contains.
The higher the percentage, the more of the bar is cocoa (a natural product) and the less is added sugar and other ingredients. 75% is not a bad starting point. At least you know there's more cocoa than anything e.