Dairy-free chocolate

Dairy-free chocolate is high in sucrose because removing the milk leaves the sugar exactly where it was. This is the axis where chocolate is genuinely a problem - on the fructose axis it is not, because sucrose splits into equal halves. Here nothing splits it.

Dairy-free chocolate is high for the reason all chocolate is - the cocoa - and removing the milk removes none of it. These bars often raise the cocoa percentage to compensate for texture, which raises the nickel with it.

Dairy-free chocolate loses the one thing that helped: the milk calcium that bound part of the oxalate. It also tends to run at a higher cocoa percentage, because something has to replace the milk solids. Two changes, both in the same direction.

Dairy-free chocolate is a histamine question because of the cocoa, and removing the milk does nothing about that - it usually raises the cocoa percentage instead, because something has to replace the milk solids. A vegan bar is often darker than the milk chocolate it replaces, and darker is higher here.

Removing the milk does nothing on this axis — the salicylate is in the cocoa, and dairy-free bars often have a higher cocoa percentage, not a lower one.

Dairy-free chocolate is low in FODMAPs, which surprises people who have found chocolate hard to tolerate. Cocoa itself carries little. What does the damage in a bar is usually the milk - lactose, the D of the acronym - or the inulin added as fibre in a reduced-sugar version. It is worth reading which.

Dairy-free chocolate replaces the milk solids with rice, oat or almond powder - and oat is the one that matters here, because oats are cross-contaminated with wheat unless certified. A vegan bar can therefore be less gluten-safe than the milk chocolate it replaces.

Dairy-free chocolate replaces milk with rice, oat or coconut - and rice syrup in particular is glucose, not fructose. The substitution moves the lactose question, not this one.

Dairy-free chocolate is cocoa, sugar and fat, and it is low in tyramine for the same reason every other cocoa product is: chocolate came off the MAOI restriction lists when the two reviews narrowed them, and neither names cocoa among the foods that need restricting. Removing dairy changes nothing here, though it changes a good deal on the lactose axis.