# Cacao ## Cacao trees - Cacao trees have been around for 10 million years. - Each tree can live for hundreds of years. Trees planted 400 years ago by the Spaniars in Central America are still around producing cacao fruits. - The tree grows “babies” on itself to regenerate. If you cut the new branches, you will prevent the tree from regenerating. Then its lifespan (on its current branch) would be around 200 years. If you don’t do that, it’s not clear if the cacao trees have a maximum lifespan or not.  - The cacao trees don’t need much, and grow well under a canopy of trees. - Each tree can produce 100 fruits a year, or 4 kg of dried cacao beans (then sold for 5 USD per kilo by farmers in Costa Rica in 2024). The farmer we met had around 2,500 trees. - The pollination of the cacao flowers is made by mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, male and female, feed on the sugar from cacao flowers. Side note: if we were to eradicate mosquitoes, because the female mosquito bites to hatch eggs, it would have unwanted consequences. ## History and present of cacao in Central America & the world - According to this costarican farmer, the myth around the cacao tree is that it’s an old “sassy” lady, where the cacao beans are its breasts. There is a legend that it comes from a young girl that was turned into a cacao tree after treating a god in an old human form with respect. - The beans used to be treated as currency by the indigenous people, which is why when the Spaniards came to Central America in the 16th century, they planted many trees to “print currency”. - When a fungi (monilia or Moniliophthora roreri) attacked the plantations in the 19th century, the indigenous saw it as a curse and sold their land to the foreigners and focused on other crops. - Today, the fungi are still around. The way farmers fight them is by cutting branches from other trees around to have more air circulating inside the canopy making it a less ideal place for the fungi to spread. - Cacao industry nowadays: - Much comes from Africa (mainly Ivory Coast and Ghana), where labor is much cheaper than in Costa Rica which explains why the price of chocolate in Costa Rica is several times more expensive than in Europe. - 93% of all chocolate beans in the world come from small farms (<2 hectares). - There is also the problem of child labor in Africa, either from farmers employing their family, but more importantly, children being transported from Mali and Burkina Faso to Ivory Coast and Ghana. ## Cacao fruits - Cacao fruits are edible, and are high in antioxidants. The fruit is sweet and citrusy, it’s part of the same family as durian and cotton. - Cacao fruits are still used as snacks by kids in Central America’s schools. - The seed inside it is very bitter and purple. There are around 40 seeds (or beans) in each fruit. - A cacao fruit takes 6 months to grow, and be ready to be harvested. If the fruit is not harvested, it doesn’t fall on the ground, it rots. ## Beans’ properties - '5 cacao beans' is the equivalent of a cup of espresso. Enough to wake you up. - It also widens the blood vessels which helps with blood pressure. Studies have found that it clears the brain of harmful buildups (amyloid-beta and tau). # Chocolate ## The process for making chocolate 1. **Harvest** the fruits 2. **Break the shell** of the fruits. 3. **Double fermentation:** Once the fruits are open, they ferment it with banana leaves for the yeast for 3 days. This is when alcohol is produced. The process then continues to another fermentation with bacteria. This means that coca goes through a double fermentation (kombucha also has a double fermentation). Women naturally have yeasty skin, thus are preferred to do this stage of the process. 4. **Roasting:** Fermented beans give “raw cacao”. The process usually continues with the roasting of the beans, which is where most of the antioxidants are usually lost. Roasting uniformizes the different tastes of the beans. Some people skip the roasting step, and make chocolate from ‘raw cacao’ and go directly to grounding, to have higher antioxidants in the chocolate. 5. **Grounding:** After the roasting, the beans are ground and shaken next to a fan to separate the skin from the bean. They are then grounded again into a paste (cacao + cacao butter). The paste can be sold in a hard ball (that can be grated), but it’s preferable to sell as bars since it can be sold for higher. This is when flavors can be added, fruit… salt… spice etc… 6. **Tempering:** The sugar and tempered butter are added at 35 Celsius degrees. The temperature of the chocolate paste and tempered butter are the important ingredients to form the right crystal structure for our chocolate. These crystals will give the firmness and the shininess of the chocolate. Also, at this temperature, the crystals that will form will only melt later at a temperature that is close to the human body. - **Using tempered butter** helps the process because it already has the ‘ideal’ crystals we’re looking for. It will act as a model for the rest of the paste to crystalize with the right type of crystals. Quantity-wise, we use around 1/75th the quantity of the paste for the tempered butter we had. The tempered butter we add directly comes from the freezer, which allows to quickly lower the temperature and crystallize. - **Temperature of the paste** is really important here when adding the tempered butter, because if too high, the butter would just melt in the past without crystallizing the mix, and if too low, butter wouldn’t mix properly with the paste. - If you let the chocolate paste dry by itself (without tempered butter), it will crystallize in a way that will give it a bland taste and white deposit. The right temperature is important since it gives the crystals a special structure that gives a smooth and silky texture. | Crystal | Melting temp. | Notes | | ------- | ------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------- | | I | 17°C | Soft, crumbly, melts too easily | | II | 21°C | Soft, crumbly, melts too easily | | III | 26°C | Firm, poor snap, melts too easily | | IV | 28°C | Firm, good snap, melts too easily | | V | 34°C | Glossy, firm, best snap, melts near body temperature (37°C) | | VI | 36°C | Hard, takes weeks to form | (table from embassychocolate.com on the different chocolate crystals) ## Other interesting resources about chocolate - **Videos** - History of chocolate: [L'histoire du chocolat - Deanna Pucciarelli - TED - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibjUpk9Iagk) - A success story with slavery-free chocolate (and a lot of sugar): [We Accidentally Started A Chocolate Company — Now It Brings In $162 Million A Year - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUN9KQpUgzM) - Example of an industry process: [How Real Swiss Chocolate Is Made - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H0tglcIKsM) - Documentary on child trafficking in Ivory Coast’s cocoa industry: [Documentary. The Dark Side Of Chocolate - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vfbv6hNeng) - **Books** - The Secret Life of Chocolate, Marcos Patchett - The Chocolate Tree, A Natural History of Cacao, Allen M. Young - **Drinks** - **Chorote** is a typical Mayan drink of ground roasted beans + water + corn + chili (yin/yang philosophy, yin = cacao, corn = yang). # How to pick a healthy chocolate? ## Heavy metal levels in chocolate Heavy metals you can found in chocolate (in µg / 100g): | Heavy Metal | Common acceptable limits (in cacao powder) | | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------ | | **Lead (Pb)** | ≤ 10–50 µg/100g | | **Cadmium (Cd)** | ≤ 30 µg/100g | | **Arsenic (As)** | ≤ 10 µg/100g | | **Mercury (Hg)** | ≤ 5 µg/100g | - Bryan Johnson: [How Toxic Is Your Favorite Chocolate? (Ranked) - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzWWOQMLttE&ab_channel=BryanJohnson) - Bryan Johnson gives numbers in µg but doesn't say for which quantity. Let's assume 100g (usual weight for cocoa tablets). - Bryan Johnson's cocoa powder (which is not an apple to apple comparison because it's powder and not chocolate bars): - 537mg flavanols - 2.9µg heavy metal ![[2024-07 Toxicity ranking - Bryan Johnson.png]] ## 5 health levels for chocolate by Bryan Johnson - “**What is healthy chocolate? (what i use)** - **Level 1:** Chocolate is good for you. A snickers bar isn’t that bad! - **Level 2:** Any brand advertising “dark chocolate” - **Level 3:** Un-dutched dark chocolate - **Level 4:** Un-dutched dark chocolate, tested for heavy metals - **Level 5:** Un-dutched dark chocolate, tested for heavy metals and from specific regions of the world with the highest polyphenol density” - **Dutched chocolate vs un-dutched chocolate (or natural chocolate) :** - Dutched chocolate, also known as Dutch-processed chocolate, is treated with an alkalizing agent (usually potassium carbonate) to neutralize its acidity. The natural (or undutched) does not have this step. ## Going further: a level 6 - non roasted beans to maximize antioxidants? - Corentin - **Is there a level 6?** - It seems to omit another key thing to maximize antioxidants. In the un-dutched vs dutched comparison, both are from roasted beans, not from raw beans (unless specified), which lowers the antioxidants (a lot of antioxidants are destroyed when roasting the beans). So, there might be a level 6: non roasted (raw) un-dutched dark chocolate tested for heavy metals and from specific regions of the world with the highest polyphenol density. - Also, Bryan Johnson always talks and writes about “cocoa” and I didn’t understand why he was not saying cacao. After a quick research on the difference between “cacao” vs “cocoa”, it shows again that Bryan is focused on roasted beans (again lower antioxidant) and not raw cacao beans: - “**Cacao vs. Cocoa**. While cacao refers to cacao beans that have not been roasted, what is called cocoa is made of beans that have been roasted. So, in turn, a product that is labeled cacao is the raw bean and is often packaged as vegan chocolate that has been minimally processed with no additives.” ([source](https://www.thespruceeats.com/difference-between-cocoa-and-cacao-3376438)) - **Antioxidants in cacao vs cocoa** - ORAC (Oxygen radical absorbance capacity) scale: - **Cacao bean fermented not roasted:** 62,500 - It looks like roasting removes ~50% of polyphenols: - [Comparison of the Total Polyphenol Content and Antioxidant Activity of Chocolate Obtained from Roasted and Unroasted Cocoa Beans from Different Regions of the World - PMC](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6720223/)(roasting techniques, temperatures, durations etc will have slightly different impacts) - **Less antioxidants in cocoa but higher polyphenol/calorie yield** - Cocoa (roasted) will typically have 3x less fat, and 2.5x less calories per gram than Cacao (non roasted). - Because the calorie reduction is higher than the polyphenol reduction, you get a higher polyphenol/calorie yield. - For a calorie restricted diet like Bryan's, that might be very important. - "Here’s a look at how 1 ounce (28 grams) of a few cacao products compares" ![[Calories - Cocoa Powder vs Cacao Nibs.png]] - Source: [Cacao vs Cocoa: What's the Difference?](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/cacao-vs-cocoa#nutrition) - **Outside of caloric restriction, it doesn't seem to make sense to favor cocoa vs cacao. TL;DR Outside of caloric restriction, cacao > cocoa.** - The number of polyphenols is divived by 2, but the total weight is divided by less than two. So cocoa means you have lower polyphenols per gram. - More readings on the topic: - [Longevity Chocolate: Science & Recommendations [2024]](https://pursueperformance.com/longevity-chocolate/) - [Effect of Cocoa Roasting on Chocolate Polyphenols Evolution](https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3921/12/2/469#) - [Impact of superheated steam roasting on changes in antioxidant and microstructure properties of raw and processed cocoa cotyledon - ScienceDirect](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1319562X23000074) - **After some research, there are ways to defat cacao without roasting, like cold hydraulic pressing (and other less used ways)** (sometimes called 'cacao maigre' but this term is not always used correctly), which seem to bring the best of both worlds (**higher polyphenols per gram & calorie**) (and be by far the best cacao powder). ## Good cacao powders available in the US & Europe - [NaturaleBio Poudre de Cacao Bio 1kg. Organic Powder. Non Sucré, Naturel et Pur à partir de Fèves Crues. Produit par la Plante Theobroma. - Amazon](https://www.amazon.fr/Organic-Theobroma-Magn%C3%A9sium-Mangan%C3%A8se-Phosphore/dp/B07DFPSNGJ?th=1) - 22.5€/kg - We don't have the level of flavanols, but seems like a safe bet. Press + no torrefaction + no dutching process + heavy metal analysis + beans from a country (Peru) with high flavanol average. - Heavy metal analysis below - [Poudre de cacao cru bio sans sucre qualité prémium 200g - Ethnoscience - Amazon.fr](https://www.amazon.fr/Poudre-cacao-sucre-qualit%C3%A9-pr%C3%A9mium/dp/B00RO2O1HU) - Another option more expensive (60€/kg) - From Ecuador, country with highest flavanol average - [Aduna Super Cacao: High-Flavanol Cacao Powder](https://aduna.com/products/cacao-powder-275g?_pos=1&_psq=cacao&_ss=e&_v=1.0) - Shipped from the UK - Cacao from Ghana (country with lower flavanol average) - Around 40€/kg ### Heavy metals analysis - NaturaleBio cacao powder - Analysis - [[2024-07 Naturale Bio - Cacao powder - Analysis.pdf]] - More precise analysis: [[2024-05 NaturaleBio - Heavy Metals Analysis.png]] - Total: 0,182mg/kg => 18µg/100g - Cadmium: 0,104mg/kg => 10,4µg/100g - Lead (Pb): 0,078mg/kg => 7,8µg/100g - It's much lower than the maximum authorized levels, but it seems higher than the chocolate bars Bryan Johnson compares. Unlike this cacao powder, these bars aren’t 100% cacao, so naturally the heavy metal ratio drops proportionally quickly.