Raw Cacao Vs Cooked Chocolate

2:18 am - May 11, 2010 | Posted By Linda in Raw Foods for Beauty, Super Good Super Foods

What is so good that can make you shout out “Fantastic!” right in the heart of your kitchen?

Yes - Raw Organic Cacao!

Long hailed in ancient traditions as the beauty food (and even a Holy food in the Mayan tribes!), Cacao has been a long-kept secret from Nature. When consumed in its full glory and in the right quantities, Cacao contains naturally occurring chemicals which can boost metabolism, increase energy and stamina, and reverse aging!

Chocolate’s super qualities are only effective provided it is eaten in its raw, unheated and untreated state. The moment it goes through heat processing, all key nutrition and psychoactive properties are gone! And not only so, conventional processing adds in processed sugar, colorings, preservatives, coagulants and many other artificial chemicals to prolong shelf life.

How is conventional chocolate produced?

For a start, let’s just look at Cocoa powder. After harvesting, Cacao beans are roasted at about 120 to 130 degrees Celsius, after which they are cooled and passed through mega-rollers to remove the cacao skin from the cacao meat - ie Cacao Nibs.

Due to the intense heat, the cacao nibs become a paste form (called Cacao Liquer) which is then further processed to separate the oils (Cacao Butter). What we have remaining is the Cacao solids - which are to be made into the conventional cocoa powder available in stores. These are processed into powder and potassium carbonate is added to enable to solubility in water (so that these cocoa powder can be made into drinks by consumer).

This is also the main ingredient which chocolate manufacturers use to start their chocolates production.

Cocoa powder is one of the simplest forms of cacao we can get available from the stores - and yet it has so many processing procedures behind it. Imagine what happens with those beautifully wrapped ones?

The moment a cacao bean is heated above 47 degrees Celsius, most of the good is gone, as with all other quality fresh foods. Go above a 100 degrees, and we are looking at more harm than good.

Conventional dark chocolate may still have some health effects - as I discovered over the years. This is because the original Cacao bean is so mighty that some of its anti-oxidants made it to that final bar on the shelf.

But the moment I tasted Raw Cacao, everything else became a cheap imitation! You see - when we eat quality Raw Cacao, we don’t need alot of it to feel the benefits. Just a small amount contains enough health-boosting properties to keep me going for the day.

Read more about benefits of Raw Cacao here:

The Magical Raw Cacao!
And the taste is…man, out of this world!