BODY AND SOUL
Ever since the overwrought guesswork in the fifteenth century, chocolate has suffered from extreme prejudice. Common wisdom still has it wrong: it makes you fat; it gives you pimples; it corrodes your dental work. But modern science is clear, nutritionally, psychologically, and pharmacologically. Chocolate is not bad for you. In fact, strong evidence suggests it may be very good for you.
Candy bars are not necessarily part of the deal. The sugar and God knows what else in each particular product make their impact on the body, for better or worse. But the food of the gods is also happily suitable for mortals.
Recent findings come as no surprise to specialists who have watched a sizable shelf of evidence build over the generations. In a weighty tome published by the International Cocoa Organization and the International Cocoa Research and Education Foundation, twenty-nine specialists delve into every component of T. cacao. The book—Chocolate and Cocoa: Health and Nutrition—looks at cardiovascular effects, diabetes, allergic reactions, gastrointestinal functions, psychological aspects, and just about everything in between.
John R. Lupien of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in
Rome summed up the findings in an overview. “From a nutritional perspective, chocolate, like every other food, is neither good nor bad per se,” he concluded. “In general, when consumed as part of a balanced and varied diet, chocolate can be both a source of nutrients as well as pleasure, and can be considered as being part of a healthful, wholesome diet. This is especially true in light of the contribution that the enjoyment of one’s food makes to overall well-being.”
Beyond question, Lupien declared, “cocoa is a veritable storehouse of natural minerals, more so than almost any other food item.” He added some examples. Chocolate is a major source of copper in the North American diet. Its antioxidants protect against low-density lipoprotein (LDL) oxidation in cholesterol and help to alleviate stress. Allergies to chocolate are rare.
Some naturally occurring phytochemicals may excite the brain, he wrote, but the amounts are small. For the appeal of chocolate, Lupien offered an overriding opinion among researchers: “The most plausible explanation is in its sensory characteristics. It simply provides a unique and wonderful sensory experience, extending far beyond taste. Not only that, it somehow has the ability to provide an overall feeling of well-being, which in itself is beneficial to the consumer.”
Poring over the various findings, I saw old myths exploding, one after the other. Although cocoa butter is fat, it is one-third stearic acid, which does not boost cholesterol; one-third oleic acid, the same monounsaturated compound found in olive oil; and one-third palmitic oil, which does not raise cholesterol. Cocoa has some caffeine, but a cup of it comes to 20 milligrams or less, half as much as tea. Coffee has 115 milligrams.
Tooth decay is another bad rap. Plain chocolate, though sugary, clears out of the mouth too quickly to do much damage. Some substances in chocolate may actually slow the bacterial growth that causes plaque and cavities. This is not necessarily true for, say, a sticky Baby Ruth.
David Benton, a University of Wales psychology professor, contributed a paper to the book entitled “Chocolate Craving: Biological or Psychological Phenomenon?” He started out with a respectful whack
at a book by Debra Waterhouse, Why Women Need Chocolate, which invoked the effects of serotonins and endorphins, along with phenylethylamine, theobromine, and magnesium.
“In reality,” Benton wrote, “any certainty concerning the basis of chocolate’s popularity is unjustified; it has been subject to relatively little scientific attention.” And later, like Dr. Chantal Favre-Bismuth in Paris, he noted: “This review has produced little, if any, evidence to support the suggestion that chocolate craving reflects a biological need that is satisfied, in a drug-like manner, by some constituent of chocolate.” That is, it is not addictive.
Benton’s summary seems to suggest that Waterhouse may not be wrong. Chocolate is by far the most commonly craved food, he noted, particularly by women before menstruation. He offered two explanations. One is the pleasant taste. The other is that chocolate triggers physiological mechanisms, which may include increased serotonin production, released endorphins, and the action of methylxanthines, phenylethylamines, and magnesium.
Louise Burke, a nutrition specialist at the Australian Institute of Sport in Bruce, Australia, confirmed what just about any athlete seems to know instinctively: Chocolate bars are an excellent way to fuel up before, and during, intense activity. Afterward, the fast clean hit of carbohydrates in chocolate helps the body to restore itself. But, Burke cautions, eating chocolate is not such a great idea during hot summer sports. The stuff melts all over the place.
A thoughtful study by Nicholas Jardine delves deeply into molecular structures in a paper entitled “Phytochemicals and Phenolics.” As a staff member of Nestlé’s research and development center in York, England, Jardine has an interest in finding good news. But as a careful scientist, in the end he came up with more questions than answers.
Jardine dealt at length with flavonoids, naturally occurring antioxidants. A number of these appear in cacao. In fermented cacao, the flavonoid found in greatest concentration is epicatechin, which other research has shown to have a possible role in preventing cancer. And that is just for starters. With diagrams and formulas, he showed how
other flavonoids in cacao work to fortify the circulatory and central nervous systems.
“Underlying the pathologies of many human diseases are metabolisms which depend on oxidative reactions,” Jardine said in his summary. “On the other hand there is also considerable epidemiological evidence that plant materials have protective effects against many of these diseases … It may be speculated that plant materials that are rich in antioxidants are also beneficial to human health.”
Because of what he called “large and tantalizing gaps in our knowledge,” it was too soon to draw irrefutable conclusions. But he ended with promise: “Yet we know already from early work with cocoa—raw and fermented—that it has a high content of antioxidants. Cocoa is conceivably a treasure chest of compounds with potentially beneficial effects on human health.”
Scattered research points toward the same thing. During 2003, a German study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association divided thirteen adults with untreated, mildly high blood pressure into two groups. One group ate a daily three-ounce bar of dark chocolate, which is rich in polyphenols, as is red wine. The other group had white chocolate—that is, cocoa butter with no ground nibs. After two weeks, doctors noted a marked drop in blood pressure among the group that ate dark chocolate.
As I sought out data on chocolate, similar sorts of studies began to pile high on my shelves. The most comprehensive was a doctoral thesis by Myriam Chapelin of the University of Montpellier in France with the supporting stamp of the Cacao Program at the prestigious French International Center for Agricultural Research and Development, CIRAD. She entitled her work “Cacao, Chocolate and Derivative Products: Nutritional and Pharmacological Aspects.”
I examined its five hundred pages after a two-hour talk with her adviser, Émile Cros of CIRAD. Of all the savants I encountered on the chocolate trail, Cros was the master guide. Gruff, sardonic, and perfectly happy to wear old khaki shorts to a fancy French office, he exuded confidence. Equally at home in Venezuelan rain forests, American laboratories, or French dining rooms, he had a wide perspective.
And, both independently funded and fiercely attached to scientific objectivity, he had nothing to sell.
“It’s all here,” Cros said, handing me Chapelin’s five-pound document, as detailed as a space shuttle owner’s manual.
In a review of American and European research, Chapelin adds perspective to well-trod ground. Cacao is an antioxidant on the order of red wine and green tea, as well as a source of vitamins and minerals. Its fats are easily digestible. Although it is regarded as a possible source of food allergy, instances are rare; in France, the allergy affects 15,000 people, mostly children, in a population of 60 million.
Chapelin also examines intriguing new evidence. She reports, for instance, that doctors at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children in Perth, Australia, have perfected a “chocuhaler” for young asthma suf ferers. Not only do xanthines in cacao have a dilating effect on bronchial passages, according to data she cites, but the microdroplets of milk chocolate taste good.
Chapelin’s conclusion makes no sweeping catchall statement. Instead, she lists each of the known components of chocolate and examines its effect on the brain and the body. She goes on for pages, examining molecular change reactions, hormone receptors, and neurological function. In a balanced approach, she cautions against exaggerating positive effects.
To conclude, she cites a three-hundred-year-old treatise by a doctor she identifies only as M. Duncan, whom she quotes as saying (in my retranslation of Chapelin’s French): “The good and bad testimony rendered over chocolate is based on healthful effects for those who use it well and harmful effects for those who use it badly … Those who assign themselves the task of decrying it are no more balanced than those who praise it too well, and they charge it with many evils of which it is innocent.”
I later found extracts from the book by Dr. David Duncan, published in 1705, with the catchy title Wholesome Advice Against the Abuse of Hot Liquors, Particularly Coffee, Chocolate, Tea, Brandy and Strong Waters. In it, Duncan indeed stresses the salutary effects of chocolate. But, he warns, Satan lulls people into believing it can do no harm.
In 2004, fresh findings heaped yet more authority on upbeat conclusions. Researchers at the National Academy of Sciences’ 2004 Cocoa Symposium in Washington spent a day discussing the ways in which chocolate has—or might have—beneficial effects on the human body.
Dr. Norman Hollenberg, professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and director of physiological research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, reported on years of work among isolated Kuna Indians on the San Blas Islands off Panama. Sixty years ago, a physician in the Canal Zone noticed that age did not raise blood pressure among the Kuna and that hypertension was very rare. Yet the people there ate more salt than most people do. Hollenberg found this was still true. He attributed the phenomenon to a local flavonoid-rich cacao the Kuna drink in quantity.
“These flavonoids are the same as those in red wine, tea, and onions—all of which have been claimed to display cardiovascular protection,” he said. “In vitro, these flavonoids mimic the actions of acetylcholine on isolated strips of vascular smooth muscle, inducing vasorelaxation.”
Hollenberg wrote about his work in the December 2003 issue of Journal of Hypertension. At the seminar, he focused on evidence that cacao with a flavonoid called flavanol can help increase blood flow to the brain and extremities. This, obviously enough, suggests good news for the elderly and the diabetic.
In Panama, Hollenberg observed twenty-seven healthy Kuna, aged eighteen to seventy-two, for five days. Each consumed a cacao drink containing nine hundred milligrams of flavanols. With a finger cuff, he measured their blood pressure on the first and last days. On the fifth day, he reported, the subjects showed “significant improvement” in the blood flow as well as in the endothelial cells, which line blood vessels.
His preliminary finding was that flavanols helped to regulate the synthesis of nitric oxide, a compound that aids in maintaining blood
pressure and flow in the endothelial cells. Flavanols might also help dilate vessels and prevent platelets from impeding blood flow.
When Kuna moved to cities and switched to commercial chocolate, Hollenberg found, their blood pressure tended to rise. Commercial processing lowers the flavonoid content.
If most chocolate now on the market could not be called a health food, he told the seminar, a change seemed imminent. “We are well beyond the beginning of this, but we are nowhere near the end,” he said. “It’s coming.”
Hollenberg, who spent seventeen years as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, is a giant in his field, not given to exaggeration. And in the abstract of his paper, he concluded: “The range of disease candidates for examination is extraordinary. Atherosclerosis, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, vascular dementias, preeclampsia, and progressive renal disease all leap to mind. The next several years promise to be very exciting.”
The National Academy of Sciences seminar was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the University of California campuses at Davis and Santa Cruz. It was heavily underwritten by Mars, Inc., which has pumped money into research for more than a decade. Mars began focusing on flavonoids after a study two years earlier suggested that the chocolate in a bar of its Dove brand showed promise in improving blood function.
Harold Schmitz, director of science at Mars, said research shows that controlled growing, fermenting, roasting, and processing could produce a more healthful chocolate. He said Mars had spent well into the seven figures to support research; he did not specify how much. As a private company, he explained, Mars need not justify its research costs to investors.
Mars patented a cocoa-making process, Cocoapro, which the company supplied to Hollenberg’s study. The company was testing the use of Cocoapro in such products as Dove bars and M&M’s, as well as Cocoa Via, which was offered initially only via the Internet.
Consumer groups are often skeptical of research sponsored by industries and companies, but Mars-backed findings have been published widely in scientific journals.
Dr. Carl Keen, who chairs the nutrition department at the University of California at Davis, has reported in several studies that certain cacao could supply important amounts of flavanols, with healthful effects on the heart.
In 2002, Keen wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association of his study among eighteen volunteers who ate twenty-five grams of flavanol-rich dark chocolate. Blood tests before and after showed the chocolate substantially reduced platelet reactivity. As blood components became less sticky and less prone to adhere to vessel walls, Keen reported, the risk of blood clots was reduced and blood could flow freely through the circulatory system.
Hollenberg added a cautionary note in his remarks to the seminar. Like vitamins, he said, these experimental chocolates are likely to have differing effects on individuals. What is good is not always good, he said. “It depends on who you are.”
A range of papers explained other studies which pointed toward the healthful benefits of cacao. But Philippe Petithuguenin, the director of France’s CIRAD, added a final thought to the conference: “I hope we do not solve all the mystery; we need a little mystery in life.”
After everyone went home, I talked with Schmitz. He was—how else to put it?—jazzed. At thirty-eight, he had spent nearly eleven years doing research for Mars. It was his first job since earning his doctorate in plant science at North Carolina State. Every year, he said, the news got better and better.
“Look, I don’t think that chocolate is going to save the human race,” he said, “but it shows great promise for blood flow and function, for heart diseases which decrease the quality of life.” And, he added, who knows what else? Schmitz was thrilled to see the headline that the specialized periodical Science News put over an account of the seminar: “Prescription-Strength Chocolate?”
Like most scientists, he was careful to measure his words, and he injected notes of caution. But he has done a lot of different research into foods. This time, he said, the promise is almost palpable.
“Chocolate is one of the weirdest, most gratifying fields of research,” Schmitz said. “The usual course is that something looks good at the beginning, and then it falls on its face. Chocolate just keeps going from strength to strength. And I’m hopeful that will continue. Cocoa has had such a long history of use that I think we would know any negatives by now. I’m knocking on wood as I say this.”
The 2004 Cocoa Symposium also looked at ways to combat disease in cacao and to encourage new plantations in order to slow damage to tropical forests. Along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the World Bank, and the Smithsonian Institution, among others, private researchers are targeting pests, funguses, and viruses.
“Let’s be honest,” Schmitz said. “Nobody is going to do good here if the point is only to do good. Companies like us need a stable supply of cocoa. Chocolate is like other commodities, and you have to respond to the good old demand. But while coffee seems to stabilize, the demand for cocoa is increasing.”
The basic philosophy of Mars, Inc. echoes the smaller-scale ideas of Claudio Corallo: help producers to grow a better crop. And if the growers can earn more, everyone gains. “The focus before was always yield, yield, and yield,” Schmitz said. “Now people are realizing that conditions and quality are important, and there are new opportunities for public-private projects.”
Eager as he was to share his findings, Schmitz laughed off pointed questions. When asked about the “seven-figure” research, he said, “Well, seven figures, plural.” With that, he chuckled. “It’s true, we’re a secretive company,” he said. “But we found it is in everyone’s interest to work together when possible. We are behind at least seventy articles in scientific journals. If we didn’t attempt to interact, what would be the point?”
Within five or ten years, Schmitz said, he expected scientists to come up with new disease-resistant strains of criollo, trinitario, and nacional trees that would be able to bring back lost flavors from the past.
That is one direction, and there are others.
Late in 2001, a researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington looked at cacao from a new perspective. In the institute’s magazine, Worldwatch, Chris Bright argued that earthlings could satisfy their collective soul by saving rain forests that sustain their planet. His article was entitled “Chocolate Could Bring the Forest Back.”
One goal of scientists and marketers alike is to expand new production areas in Africa and Asia. But another is to rescue old cacao heartlands. Great biomes are threatened by the collapse of long-established plantations and so are the socioeconomic systems they once supported. And a principal concern is Brazil, where vast plantations were all but wiped out by the virulent fungus known as witches’-broom.
Bright went to Bahia, Brazil’s chocolate state, where 85 percent of the country’s cacao crop now grows. At its peak in the 1980s, Bahia alone produced nearly 400,000 tons, one-quarter of the world’s cacao. These days, a bit player, Bahia comes up with only 100,000 tons a year. That is below 4 percent of world production.
The problem dates back to colonial monocultures. Portuguese settlers cleared vast tracts of tropical forest and cut away secondary undergrowth to make room for cacao trees. When pests struck, they attacked with a vengeance. Wide unbroken expanses of the same variety of vulnerable plant are perfect targets for infestation.
Cacao trees were planted so densely in Bahia that they once touched each other. They covered many thousands of contiguous acres. Any fungal spore in the air quickly found susceptible tissue, either a young pod or a bud on any of millions of trees. An infected fruit pod is almost certainly ruined, its beans rotted inside. But in a bud, an ominous broom-like cancer grows, sapping strength from the tree. The broom dies, leaving a bouquet of pink flowerlike basidiocarps. And each of these will release up to 90 million new fungal spores.
Conscious of its vulnerability, Bahia enforced a strict quarantine on cacao from Amazonia. In 1989, fungus appeared on a Bahia farm. Authorities quickly isolated the outbreak, sprayed fungicide on a five-hundred-acre stand, and then burned the trees. But apparently workers had already cut branches from infected trees and thrown them in a
nearby river. When witches’-broom surfaced again at another farm, it was beyond anyone’s control.
Bright’s intriguing thesis is complex, requiring large-scale action linking public funds with private marketers. But his main point is simple. Carefully placed cacao trees in the protective shelter of a high canopy of hardwoods could restore profitability to the rain forests. Instead of clearing the trees for beef ranches and farmland, the trees could be replanted and made to pay for themselves.
The argument offers intriguing possibilities all along the equator. Deforestation is a calamity almost beyond belief in Ivory Coast. For decades since independence, loggers have cut down and sold tropical hardwoods, leaving mostly scattered fringes in the cacao regions. In Asia, timber cutting, along with dramatic forest fires, threatens Borneo and other parts of Indonesia.
As Bright says, the crisis is at its worst in Brazil. If conservationists can protect rain forests with something as lovable as chocolate, he concludes, it would be a triumph for the human soul.
More than the soul, most researchers are at work to find ways cacao can comfort the body. From the earliest times, Europeans realized what cocoa butter can do for the human organism, inside and out. At first, chocolate was sold largely by pharmacists. In recent years, the modern-day trend has turned sharply toward using cacao in cosmetics.
A whiff of Coppertone on any beach attests to the popularity of cocoa butter in tanning lotions. The chocolate spa at Hotel Hershey in Pennsylvania is more than a tourist gimmick. Apart from what cocoa butter actually does, the familiar aroma and the pleasant thoughts that inspires add to its overall attraction. Beyond that, however, it is a chemical treasure trove. Cosmetics makers’ demand for cocoa butter is the principal reason for the European Union war over allowing cheaper substitutes for cocoa butter in chocolate making.
At the Salon du Chocolat in Paris, visitors beat a path to see a hot new line offered by The Body Shop. Cocoa butter starred in a full
range of products, from moisturizer, lipstick, and hand lotion to creamy body wash.
But that was just a start. Each year, the salon’s organizers issue a background paper on new trends in chocolate. For 2003, they summed it up with a favorite French term: le well-being. There were some novelties, such as various types of bags for carrying a day’s dose. Or Boucheron’s new line—a twist on Jean-Paul Hevin—of jewelry that looked like chocolate.
Mostly, there were chocolate body care and makeup products. A dozen different companies offered innovations. Biotherm’s Celluli-Choc, for example, a cacao-based gel, is supposed to help take off weight.
Dior came out with Bitter Chocolate lipstick. Peggy Sage has fingernail polish in rich cocoa-brown. And then there were hair products, lotions, massage oils, air-perfuming sprays, and eaux de toilette.
A few adventuresome cosmetics houses have toyed with perfumes. But I found no one who had managed to capture the essence. Mandy Aftel, a Berkeley diva of scents, tried to make some for Scharffen Berger and, her friends report, ended up wishing that she hadn’t. Perhaps the answer is simply eating enough chocolate so that its delicate nuances escape from the pores.
The more I researched, the more evidence I found to take me further along the same circular track. Yes, chocolate is good for us. Scientists, however, are still arguing about just how good for us it is. Answers will come slowly and steadily, as the chocolate industry realizes the commercial benefits of supporting laboratory research. But most likely, there will always be asterisks noting provisos and disclaimers in the findings.
I put the question to the family genius, my niece Randy Gollub, a brain researcher at Harvard. She referred me to J. K. Rowling. Sure enough, Harry Potter’s professors at Hogwarts Academy stuff him with chocolate, the only substance capable of warding off life-sucking Dementors.
For me, the concluding word came from Dr. Marion Nestle, former head of the department of nutrition at New York University. Her books on the politics and health effects of food are fundamental to the way serious-minded Americans look at their diet. She carefully monitors all the studies and compares findings to track new trends in thinking.
Nestle concurred with an evolving general belief. Yes, she said, chocolate was a source of antioxidants, among a lot of other things. I grilled her on the possible bad news. What about overindulgence? Were there negative aspects that industry-sponsored research failed to find? Finally she gave a short laugh and threw up her hands.
“Look, the truth is that the quantities involved are so small that you don’t take in enough chocolate to make a difference either way,” Dr. Nestle said. “What’s the point of overanalysis? Just eat the stuff and enjoy it.”