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Introduction to Chocolate Print E-mail


If you are like most of the people, you grew up loving chocolate, but feeling a bit guilty whenever you ate it. Chocolate was indescribably deliciousnobody argued with thatbut it was just somehow bad for you. Was it the fat? The sugar? The reasons were never entirely clear. What was clear, however, was that chocolate was a treat, something to be consumed only after you had eaten enough "good" food to offset the evil effects of the chocolate, whatever they were. You probably thought of chocolate as a guilty pleasure, a sinful indulgence.

But what you had no way of knowingwhat few people knew back thenwas that chocolate had been revered as a sacred, indispensable, and healthy food by the Maya and Aztecs for thousands of years.

Today, we know that the chocolate was bathing your brain in natural endorphins, just as it was for those Maya. Not only that, but it was keeping your heart, blood vessels, brain, and teeth healthy. This was undoubtedly part of the reason why the Maya held chocolate in such esteem. They lovingly tended groves of cacao in the rainforest, called it "the food of the gods," and used it in both their daily life and their most holy ceremonies. They would have been horrified to see the way Europeans took this natural health food and cut it with so much cream and sugar that it became famously naughty to eat.

You're skeptical. Chocolate? Good for us? Seems unlikely. Yet a host of recent studies shows that chocolate reduces our risk of heart disease and stroke, and may prevent cancers and other diseases, too. Scientists are still trying to determine exactly how chocolate does this, but it stems from the fact that chocolate is absolutely loaded with antioxidants, the same compounds that make fruit, red wine, and green tea good for you.

Because chocolate is made from the seeds of a fruit, it should be no surprise that it is full of antioxidants, as are most fruits. The seeds come in ten-inch-long, football-shaped pods that grow directly from the trunk of the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), which thrives only in tropical regions and probably originated in Mesoamerica. (Cacao refers to the plant, including the pods and seeds, in its natural form, while cocoa indicates the pure product derived from cacao beans, and chocolate refers to the final form, whether drink or solid.) Cacao is as natural and healthy as any fruit, and was consumed as an unsweetened drink for its culinary, stimulating, and healing properties by the Olmec, Maya, and Aztecs for thousands of years before it was ever discovered by Europeans, who also consumed chocolate almost exclusively in drink form until late in the nineteenth century.

But here's the rub. Notice that those early civilizations consumed chocolate as an unsweetened drink. The Maya's only sources of sweetener were honey or sap from the maguey cactus, and neither was in great supply. They drank their chocolate bitter and liked it that way. The Spanish saw things differently. They shared the dark, spicy drink with their New World hosts and thought, "Yeck! Needs cream and sugar." Since then, we've come to associate the taste of chocolate with the flavor of the sugar and milk invariably added to it, and that's the problem.


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