Cocoa – Infinite Unknown

Those substances are only bioactive in their raw & natural form, same with enzymes in fruits and vegetables, which are even more heat sensitive.

So don’t kill (cook) all of your food.

All those commercially available cacao products give you a lot of health destroying refined white sugar and very little (pretty much worthless) cocoa.

Those scientists always want to isolate some compound or create an extract that can be patented, so that Big Pharma can make a lot of money, but nature doesn’t work that way.

And scientists know this for at least 100 years now.

Eat organic fruits and vegetables in their natural form and you get tons of vital nutrients that work in concert for your health and well-being, rather than taking one expensive and most of the time ineffective ‘soloist’ substance produced by a corporation.

Most methods of processing cocoa remove many of the flavanols found in the raw plant

– ?Cup of cocoa a day keeps memory loss away – scientists (RT, Oct 27, 2014):

A tasty drink may give a typical 60-year-old the memory as of a person 20 to 30 years younger. A US study has revealed that cocoa contains bioactive ingredients that reverse age-related memory decline.

Scientists at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) published the results of a dietary experiment, based on the effects of flavanols, extracted from cocoa beans, on the aging human brain in the journal Nature Neuroscience on Sunday.

A group of 37 healthy volunteers aged from 50 to 69 was randomly divided in two. Each day for three months, they had a specially-prepared cocoa drink, which is not available commercially. One group consumed the drink with 900mg of flavanols, and the other with only 10mg of these compounds.

“If a participant had the memory of a typical 60-year-old at the beginning of the study, after three months that person on average had the memory of a typical 30- or 40-year-old,” said senior author Scott Small in a press-release.

Read moreCocoa’s Bioactive Ingredients Keep Memory Loss Away – Scientists

Cocoa Consuming Countries

Source: UNCTAD based on the data from International Cocoa Organization, quaterly bulletin of cocoa statistics

With the intention of flooding 70% of the global cocoa supply with genetically modified (GMO) cocoa tree hybrids, a collaboration involving Mars, USDA and IBM is accelerating this process.

With primary funding from US chocolate producer Mars, the partnership includes scientists based at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the US Department of Agriculture and Science as well as researchers working at IBM’s Thomas J Watson Research Center.

The scientists are determined to finalize gene sequencing of the cocoa genome which they say will “benefit” the chocolate industry and cocoa growers in West Africa where 70 percent of the world’s cocoa is produced, and in other tropical zones.

According to the global head of plant science and research at the confectionery firm, Howard-Yana Shapiro, the sequence is of great importance.

“As plant breeders, we’re always looking after the golden traits: pest and disease resistant, drought tolerance, the ability to adapt to climate change, tree architecture, yield quality, etc,” said Dr Shapiro.

The researchers including ARS based molecular biologist David Kuhn and geneticist Raymond Schnell said that they released the findings of sequencing into the public domain in order to assist scientists to begin applying the findings immediately.

The results have been published on the Cacao Genome Database website.