Want to learn how to buy a better chocolate bar? Grab a calculator.

Astute chocolate aficionados will have noticed that numerous U.S. chocolate makers recently have added boasts about cacao-content percentages to their package labeling. As in "72 percent cacao."

Why should you care? Because with a little grade school math, that number can help you find a better bar.

But to do that, you need a chocolate primer. Most chocolate is a blend of sugar and cacao (pronounced KA-cow), the latter being the blend of cocoa solids and cocoa butter, which are derived from the beans of the cacao tree and give chocolate its taste and texture. Milk chocolate also has dairy products.

The quality of a chocolate is determined in part by the ratios of those ingredients. Too much sugar and your chocolate is cloyingly sweet. Too much cocoa solids and the chocolate is bitter and chalky. Too much cocoa butter and you get a weak tasting chocolate.

Until recently, American chocolates rarely provided enough information for you to know what you were buying. That's changing. Now, if you buy a 72 percent dark chocolate bar, you can pretty much assume the other 28 percent is sugar.

But what if you want to know how much of the 72 percent is cocoa solids (from which chocolate flavor comes) and how much is cocoa butter (which adds fatty goodness, but no real flavor)?

That's what math is for. Here are a few simple equations that will let you dissect any chocolate bar, with or without cacao labeling.

Let's start with sugar. Flip over your chocolate bar and take a look at the nutrition facts box. Take the total amount of sugar in grams, divide it by the serving size in grams, then multiply by 100. The result is what percent of your bar is sugar.

The dark chocolate bar I'm eating as I type this, for example, has 9 grams of sugar. A serving size is 33 grams. So I divide 9 grams by 33 grams, multiply it by 100 and I get: 27 percent sugar.

That means 73 percent of the bar is cacao products. To figure out how much of that is cocoa butter, divide the total grams of fat by the grams per serving, then multiply by 100. For my dark chocolate bar (now half eaten), I get: 36 percent.

The rest (about 64 percent) is cocoa solids. But if you like to torture yourself with math, here's the equation. Add the total grams of sugar and fat (in my almost gone bar that's 21 grams), divide by grams per serving (33), and multiply by 100. I get 63 percent.

So what to do with this information? For starters, it tells you a lot about what you can expect from a bar -- how sweet, how lush in the mouth, how bitter, whether it's suitable for baking or eating (most people won't enjoy eating a bar above 70 percent cacao).

Or you could just do it the old fashioned way. Toss the calculator in the trash, tear open the bar and eat it.

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asap columnist J.M. Hirsch covers food, diet and nutrition for the AP. E-mail him at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

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