Chocolate. I love it. I know very few people who don’t. It’s awesome stuff. In fact, the average American consumes nearly 11 pounds of it every year and global demand for cacao has been growing by 3% for the last 100 years! Lately we’ve been hearing that it’s GOOD for us too! Cool! But now it’s in that hopper of revolving opinions from nutritionists that change every few years. So we can’t take them TOO seriously. (Get your OAT BRAN! Cut out the SODIUM! OK keep the sodium and CUT OUT ALL FAT! OK some fat is important, just make sure it’s OMEGA 3s!!) It’s all so darn solemn. But when red wine and chocolate get put in the GOOD column, they will be hard-to-budge.

So what’s the story with chocolate?

It really IS a spectacular food in its raw form; the cacao bean. It has more antioxidants than any other food by weight. (Antioxidants are those compounds –often the pigments —that track down the free radical nasties that can cause cancer and other degenerative conditions.) Apparently, raw cacao has ten times the antioxidants of blueberries. Even processed cocoa powder has twice the antioxident punch as red wine and three times that of green tea. All forms of cacao and chocolate also seem to harbor an array of brain-stimulating bliss chemicals. (As if that’s news.)

Have you ever tasted unsweetened cocoa powder though? Bleagch. Hardcore raw foodies eat cacao nibs by the handful. “Nibs” are pieces of the raw cacao bean, still with their 40% cocoa butter fat content. Eating those is like chewing on bitter acorn tops. Yum! I bought some just to try them. There is only the faintest hint of a relationship to chocolate, but some nice character comes out when you mix them with something. I put them in a smoothie. My smoothie became “toothsome” with the faintly chocolatey grit. I ate them with goji berries, and that was actually pretty good.

Apparently the Mayans used to drink hot cacao ceremonially, mixed with maize, chili, vanilla and honey. (That makes my smoothie look good!) They also only let the men drink it, thinking it was too toxic for women. Both the Mayans and the Aztecs also used cocao pods as currency and apparently a turkey was worth 200 cacao beans in 1545. (I was wondering that!)

Once this edible money made it to Europe, it didn’t take long for the nobility of Europe to plant their own cacao trees in their tropical colonies. Now, although cacao is native to the Amazon Basin in South America, 70% of the worlds cacao now comes from West Africa. The rest comes from Indonesia and Central and South America. Cacao trees will only grow within 20˚ of the equator and they apparently prefer to be shaded under taller trees in a forest. The tremendous, steadily growing global demand for chocolate has therefore spawned a Fair Trade market (much like coffee) where funds from Fair Trade purchases support efforts of environmental and cultural preservation.

Has learning all this changed how I eat chocolate? It actually has. I used to eat any old chocolate that happened to travel within my grasp. I used to think dark chocolate was yucky and I’d go for milk chocolate. Apparently though, it’s often the milk and the sugar (as well as the thickeners and other crap they mix into chocolate) that negate its beneficial properties (maybe even neutralize the antioxidants.)

So what’s a girl to do? Buy the best chocolate available. Go for the good stuff. It’s expensive, so you may eat less of it, (or maybe not!) but aim for a dark chocolate with cacao nibs that is satisfying enough that you’ll make it your habit and get the antioxidant POW. That way you can have your chocolate and eat it too!

Filed under: 1