As the children’s song goes, it’s the dic-, dic-, dictionary — not the choc-, choc-, chocolate confectionery — that’s very necessary. Even so, the average American eats 8 pounds of mostly milk chocolate a year by consuming products like Snickers, 3 Musketeers, and Hershey bars; Kit Kat and Twix wafers; and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

It makes you wonder how many pounds a year of milk chocolate a true chocoholic devours and also how much one of them eats today, Halloween day — and in the next week or so snacking on the celebratory remains. If you happen to be a chocoholic, or simply someone who enjoys one of the aforementioned items every now and then, you should also wonder to what degree this affects your health.

For all chocolate bars, even the dark chocolate ones that have been garnering good press lately, are calorically dense and mostly sugar and fat. But dark chocolate’s not as popular as milk chocolate, probably because it’s more bitter and also more expensive.

According to Target, the difference in price between the two if you shop there can be up to $1.50 per ounce. Which is why the trick-or-treaters coming home tonight with dark chocolate bars from Lindt, Ghirardelli, Hu, Pascha, and Taza in their bags are probably not going car trunk to car trunk in a Carbon County parking lot but apartment to apartment in a New York City high-rise.

Nonetheless, dark chocolate’s expense seems to be a suitable tradeoff if you have a hankering for good health as well as a sweet tooth, provided you consume it in moderation. For compared to milk chocolate, dark chocolate contains about five times more polyphenols and flavanols, two antioxidants that may help lower the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease, as well as notable amounts of iron, zinc, and magnesium.

But don’t forget that for a true chocoholic moderation lives in a row home right next door to impossible and that all chocolate bars, be they white or milk or dark, are calorically dense and mostly sugar and fat.

The granddaddy of them all, the typical 1.55-ounce Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar, contains 210 calories and 95 percent of them are sugar or fat. Surprisingly, the same amount of one of the better-selling dark-chocolate bars, Ghirardelli’s Intense Dark 72% (Twilight Delight), contains 30 more calories and is proportionally higher in sugar and fat.

So what’s a true chocoholic supposed to do?

Appease their addiction by adding cocoa powder to many of the things they already eat. That’s also solid advice for anyone not yet hooked on healthy eating but would like to be.

As well as the sort of advice you can’t be expected to take without an explanation. The first part of which is found in a study published in the journal Aging about 10 months ago that focuses on an alkaloid in cocoa, theobromine.

Studies on theobromine in the past have linked it to better heart health and reduced inflammation. This time, researchers compared the level of it in the blood to the blood-based epigenetic markers of biological aging in more than 1,600 adults by reviewing parts of two ongoing investigations, the TwinsUK project, an adult registry of twins in the United Kingdom, and the KORA study, a long-running prospective population-based cohort study in Germany.

Their work indicates that the previously “reported beneficial links” between theobromine intake on health and aging “extend to the molecular epigenetic level in humans,” for serum theobromine levels were “significantly associated with reduced epigenetic age acceleration” in them. In other words, the study suggests you can reduce the rate at which you age by increasing the amount of theobromine you receive from your diet.

Further explanation resides in this good-better-best scenario. That 100 grams of a typical milk chocolate bar contain about 200 milligrams of theobromine, 100 grams of a typical dark chocolate bars contain about 800 milligrams of the stuff, yet the same amount of unsweetened cocoa powder contains between 2,000 and 2,600 milligrams of theobromine.

That’s 250 times more than the dark chocolate that, in moderation, is so good for you — with absolutely no sugar and 500 times less fat.

That’s why you should become a chocoholic, albeit a very specific type. One who feeds their need by adding unsweetened cocoa to foods they already consume.

Like coffee.

While moderate coffee consumption generates its own long list of health benefits, in large part due to a high concentration of antioxidants, adding a tablespoon of cocoa to your brew increases the amount of antioxidants by 40 percent while only increasing the amount of caffeine by 10.

If coffee’s not your thing, you could always create your own healthy version of hot chocolate. Or add unsweetened cocoa to oatmeal, pancake or waffle batter, protein smoothies, or homemade — and suddenly healthier — baked goods.