This news is a bit old, but it still cracks me up whenever I think about it. Some researchers in England recently published the results of their study comparing the stimulative effect on the human brain of eating chocolate, as compared with “a passionate kiss”. It was written up in an article on the BBC News web site.

Couples had their heart rates and brains monitored whilst they first melted chocolate in their mouths and then kissed…chocolate caused a more intense and longer lasting “buzz” than kissing.

Yaaawn, right? What I find amusing is not what they studied, but what they obviously wanted to study, but were too cowardly to actually try.

An anonymous source within the research team confirms my suspicions, saying this about their original concept:

We wanted to take it further, you know? Really push the limits. We wanted to go beyond Last Tango in Paris.

Oops. That wasn’t really one of the researchers; that was Mickey Rourke talking about some stupid movie he did back in the 80′s. But my point is this: They probably won’t admit it, but we all know that’s what they were thinking! Who cares about comparing chocolate to a kiss? Nobody. They spent their time and someone’s money to answer a little question that nobody was asking, while ignoring the big one. Come on scientists! Ask yourselves, “What would Madame Curie have done?!”

In their defense, though, imagine the meeting where they’re presenting their research proposal:

Researcher: We’d like to hook people up to the hospital’s astonishingly expensive brain imaging equipment and have other people perform sex acts on them. Then we’ll give them candy.

Boss: …

Researcher: Uhm. OK. How about if the people aren’t necessarily the Dallas Cowboy Cheer Leaders?

Boss: …

Researcher: Well, then. I see you have some reservations. Second base? No nudity?

Boss: …

Researcher: Aww maaan! OK, OK, OK then. Just kissing.

Boss: And they have to be married!   To each other!

Thus does humanity remain in a fog of ignorance and superstition. Someday, perhaps in a more enlightened age, science will settle the question of whether chocolate is better than sex. But in the mean time, I suggest we all conduct our own experiments.

Sure, go ahead. Try this at home!

That title has equal numbers of vowels and consonants. Does that seem a bit demented to you? Well, I’m not suffering from dementia yet and I have a plan to avoid it even when I get really, really old (which I also plan to do). The key to my new scheme is epicatechin. Epicatechin is a nutrient contained in – you guessed it – the cacao bean and thereby (some) chocolate.

You see, there are these people called the Kuna, who live in Panama. Other people couldn’t help but notice that, besides their groovy outfits and pleasant demeanor, the Kuna people tend to live for a long time. (Check out the photo below of  an 86 year-old Kuna woman!)

OK, she's not really 86 years old. But I bet she'll still be cute when she is.

In addition they have extremely low rates of dementia, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. One scientist, a dude named Dr. Norman Hollenberg, of Harvard Medical School, posits that the source of this astounding good health is likely the fact that they drink as many as 40 cups per week of cocoa. Wow, imagine how many marshmallows the local Walmart must sell!

More about epicatechin:

• a type of flavinoid
• its antioxidant properties may help prevent cancer
• thought to increase nitric oxide in the blood,  improving circulation
• some teas, wine, fruits, and vegetables also contain epicatechin

Epicatechin has a bitter taste, so it’s often removed when processing cacao beans into chocolate or cocoa powder. The Mars company (maker of M&Ms) say they’ve developed a method for preserving the favanoids in the manufacture of chocolate. They apparently mark their flavinoid-preserved products with a “Cocoapro” logo. Interesting… Here’s what their website says about it:

Cocoa flavanols can be easily destroyed during normal cocoa and chocolate processing.  Building off of nearly two decades of research, Mars, Incorporated scientists have perfected a process to reduce the cocoa bean’s exposure to high temperatures, helping to protect the cocoa extract.  This proprietary, patented Cocoapro® process guarantees that the cocoa extract in CocoaVia™ has consistent levels of flavanols.

So it sounds like it’s heat that destroys the flavinol. I seem to recall a mention of drying the cacao beans at lower temperature in the video in this post.

I was in a shop the other day drooling over their selection of gourmet chocolate (I really should take a bib with me). Looking at the ingredient lists on the backs of the packages I noticed that many, including some of the supposedly high-grade, expensive stuff have “soya lecithin” listed as an ingredient. OMGWTF, I thought – surely it signals the end of the world (The Chocpocalypse!) when even the supposedly top class chocolate makers are debasing their product with the same kind of stuff you find in a Twinky!

So I went on a mini quest to get to the bottom of this (possible) outrage against humanity. Here’s what I found out:

• soy lecithin extracted from the oil of the soy bean
• it’s a natural emulsifier – emulsifier is like a thinner, makes a thick flow more freely
• they use it in chocolate to help prevent the cocoa-solids separating from the cocoa butter
• using lecithin allows the manufacturer to get by with less cocoa butter
• soy lecithin is used as a nutritional supplement because it contains choline, which is good for the heart and aids brain development
• some (but not all) people with soy protein allergies also have reactions to soy lecithin

Conclusion: Sounds like corner-cutting to me. I’d prefer not to have this in my chocolate, but since I’m not allergic to soy it won’t stop me from eating it as long as the chocolate still tastes good. But if you have a soy allergy, you might want to look at the ingredients before buying and stick to the lecithin-free varieties.

It’s surely a sad commentary on the state of our society when you need an excuse to do something as essential as eating chocolate. But if excuses are necessary, then it’s nice to know that Science is there to provide them. There are actually far more than I’ll write in this post, but I’m a bit short on time so here are three good reasons to reach for the choco, in no particular order.

Reason # 1: Chocolate is good for your teeth.

You may have noticed that I’ve switched to calling them “reasons” now, rather than “excuses”. Sounds more scientific.

So, forging ahead all scientific-like, chocolate is good for your teeth. No, really, I read it on the Internet. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, chocolate (cocoa, actually) contains a substance that helps prevent tooth decay. The magical element in question is called theobromine. According to research, theobromine helps to kill off a type of cavity-causing bacteria called streptococcus mutans. Ergo, eating chocolate prevents tooth decay. Of course, the sugar in chocolate has more or less the opposite effect, but nothing a quick brushing can’t take care of, right? Right?  So repeat after me: “Chocolate today keeps the drill away”. Lame, yes, but I promised rationalizations, not poetry…

Reason # 2: Chocolate Lowers Your Cholestrol And Blood Pressure
Studies say that (what DON’T studies say? But as long as they’re telling us something we want to hear, let’s not be doubters, eh?), consumption of dark chocolate has been proven to help lower elevated blood pressure. Actually, my own blood pressure is low anyway, so this isn’t much good for me, but I’m sure some readers can use this one.

Also on the cardio-vascular front, eating dark chocolate regularly, has been shown in more than one scientific study to reduce LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) by as much as 10%. Cool.

I couldn’t find out anything about exactly how much chocolate is required to get these benefits, so better to eat as much as possible, just to be on the safe side.

Reason # 3: Chocolate will make you happy
Well, duh. Surely, eveyone here knew that already. But it’s nice to have some scientific evidence to validate our subjective experience, and here it is. Serotonin is a natural anti-depressant and you get a nice dose of that when you eat chocolate. In addition, eating some chocolate right now will quickly increase your body’s production of endorphins, thereby producing feelings of pleasure and euphoria.

If it feels good, eat it!

Not only does chocolate work fast, it lasts longer. “Longer than what?”, you ask. Well, a recent study, featured on the BBC news, compared the pleasure produced by eating chocolate to that produced by passionately kissing one’s significant other (no word on how it compares to kissing that hot stranger you were fantasizing about on the way home from work the other day). In this study, chocolate came out on top (ahemm), in that the pleasure lasted significantly longer with the chocolate than with the kiss. I think I’ll have to write more about this particular bit of scientific research later.

The point? If it feels good, eat it! Words to live by…

Stay tuned for more chocolate-flavored rationalizations in a later post.

In an earlier post I mentioned the amounts of cocoa solids and cocoa butter contained in different types of chocolate (dark, milk, white).  In that post, I was going on about this stuff as if I had any idea what the hell I was talking about. I didn’t then, but now I do, because I looked it all up in order to write this post. So that you too can be an expert and look down on the lesser person who doesn’t know his cocoa solids from his BUTTer, I will share this new knowledge with you now:

Cocoa Solids

Basically, this is plain cocoa. No sugar. No fat. Tastes very bitter on its own. Most of the chocolate flavor, as well as the stuff in chocolate that’s good for you – i.e. antioxidants – is in the cocoa solids. So if you’re interested in chocolate as a health food, best get the kind with high cocoa (cocoa solids) density.  Just because this is too simple, there’s a variant of this called “Dutch Process Chocolate” which was developed by the van Houten family – they who make that delicious cocoa you buy in a tin. Their process makes the cocoa milder, less bitter, and easier to dissolve (good for making hot chocolate).

Cocoa Butter

Cocoa Butter

Cocoa butter is the fat extracted directly from the coca bean or from chocolate liquor (more about that in a sec).  Add some milk, sugar, and a bit of vanilla and you’ve got white chocolate.  It’s what gives dark and milk chocolates their richness. It also has the magical property of melting at around 35 degrees C, which means it doesn’t melt at room temperature, but does melt in your mouth. Another convenient truth about cocoa butter is that it takes a ling time rancid. This not only helps give chocolate its long shelf life; it also means that cocoa butter is used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals like creams and soaps (and some other less appetizing medicine delivery vehicles.)

Chocolate Liquor

Not an alcoholic beverage in this, sorry. Chocolate liquor is what you (well not you - chocolate makers) get when you process  raw cocoa beans. By process we mean ferment, roast, shell, grind, then melt. Baking chocolate is made directly from the chocolate liquor. For eating chocolate, the stuff gets mixed with other ingredients or else separated into cocoa solids and cocoa butter, then re-combined in varied proportions.

So now we know. Feel smarter? I do.

A friend of mine is a bit of a food snob. Very nice guy, but tends to have pretty strong opinions about anything culinary. I’ll refer to him as Count Snobula (he’d find that funny rather than insulting, believe me) In a recent conversation he scoffed (yes, a genuine scoff – he’s British), at my preference for milk chocolate over dark chocolate. After I helped him up off the pavement, we started talking about whether there is a clear dividing line between darkness and light,  chocolate-ly speaking.

So I looked it up on the Internet, where everything you read is guaranteed to be true. And here is what I found.

The Dark Side
To be officially dark, chocolate must satisfy two main conditions: Firstly, it contains no milk. Simple and clear enough. The second condition seems to be a little less clear, but basically dark chocolate has to contain a lot of cocoa. As far as I can find out, the “official” minimum percentage of cocoa solids in dark chocolate is 35%, of which 18% must be cocoa butter. 35% seems kind of low to me. I’m sure I’ve seen and tasted up to 88%. Which, frankly was a bit of a chore to eat. Because, of course, the high cocoa content makes it bitter. Count Snobula would say that I don’t appreciate the high-cocoa dark chocolate, “because you’re a philistine from a place that culture has never even heard of, much less visited. Which is no doubt true, but it still tasteslike a dried mud pie to me.

Into the Light
On to light, or milk chocolate. With milk chocolate, there’s a bit less of the cocoa solids, and they are replaced by milk solids. Chocolatiers usually use dried or condensed milk for this. In Europe, there are two competing standards regarding what can officially be sold as milk chocolate. On the continent, milk chocolate needs to have at least 24% cocoa solids and 14% milk solids. The milk part has to have at least 3.5% milk fats – you’ll find no skimmed milk in your Belgian chocolate.

In Britain the standards are a bit more slack on the cocoa. I’ve read somewhere that the lower standards were introduced after World War II, when there were restrictions on food imports (i.e. cocoa). There, the minimum cocoa content is 20%. On the other hand milk chocolate in Britain must have 20% milk solids containing at least 5% dairy fat. So you end up with a more milky milk chocolate in jolly old England.

So, to summarize it simply, milk chocolate has some of its cocoa replaced by milk.

White Chocolate
The official chocolate powers that be appear to agree with my friend that white chocolate isn’t “really” chocolate at all. So the question is, “Then why is it called white chocolate?” First, the reason that white chocolate is technically not chocolate: no cocoa solids. Second, the reason why this non-chocolate is called chocolate: it contains lots of cocoa butter. To pass official muster, white chocolate needs to contain a minimum of 14% milk solids with said milk solids containing 3.5% or more dairy fat.

Does that settle it? Not really. Now I need to find out exactly what “cocoa solids” and “cocoa butter” are, and what the difference is. I can guess one thing though – it must be the cocoa solids that give chocolate its chocolaty color.