In the annals of furtive chocolate eating there is nothing nearly as liberating as a health message. Chocolate, we are reliably informed by a growing list of researchers, has one of the highest Orac scores of any food. Orac — oxygen radical absorbance capacity — is a measure of a food’s antioxidant, or power to fight free radicals.
At the Kalia Tower Spa, at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, a therapist will scrub your body with it. The cosmetics company Fresh markets an eau de parfum with chocolate “base notes” for olfactory stimulation. The Swiss incorporate it into skincare products such as Karin Herzog’s comfort cream.
Julie Cichocki, treatment development director at Herzog, explains: “Herzog has a patented oxygen therapy that increases the ability of oxygen to penetrate the skin, used by doctors and dermatologists for medicinal purposes. What we did about three years ago was to combine chocolate, the cocoa bean and its phenolics, calcium and potassium, with oxygen therapy to get those great boosts into the skin. It works.”
The world is alive to the love of chocolate.
Chefs from the Upper East Side to Canary Wharf now include it in their soup. Belgians drive for miles to the Wittamer chocolate shop on the Grand Sablon in Brussels city centre, though as every village has a good one, they don’t need to travel more than a few metres. But Wittamer is one of the best and worth burning a few carbon atoms to acquire.
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The Belgians, of course, distinguish themselves by regarding chocolate as both a luxury and an entitlement, so it is to be found in many more foods than just breakfast pastries.
The ingredients of a true Belgian chocolate are undeniably nourishing: fresh eggs (so a real Belgian chocolate won’t last longer than seven days), ground almonds (which have to be eaten quickly to avoid rancidity) and a high quotient of cocoa solids: protein, nutrients and taste.
Yet, Cichocki acknowledges, we still find chocolate hard to take without a hint of shame or guilt. Sheer pleasure and nutritional value sit uneasily next to the puritan soul, so the global confectioner Mars has just come up with the ultimate liberating chocolate bar — one that lowers your blood pressure, dilates the blood vessels and reduces platelet stickiness so that the blood can flow more freely. It also lowers low-density lipid (LDL) cholesterol. This is chocolate as medicine.
CocoaVia was launched in the US in October and is slowly making its way into the health food aisles in American supermarkets and health food shops. It is, says Marlene Machut, Mars’s director of health and nutrition communications, the result of 15 years’ scientific research. The sponsor of many of the studies that led to the heartening conclusion that chocolate is great for your health was Mars.
The initial research revealed that chocolate is a great antioxidant. “But we didn’t really know what that meant,” Machut says.
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“We don’t doubt that antioxidants have some benefit but they have never been linked to a clear clinical benefit. We couldn’t be clinically precise about it.”
So this was a route that Mars chose not to travel. While the spa and wellbeing industry emphasise the antioxidant, Mars is selling CocoaVia on specific health benefits, most particularly its potential to reduce heart disease.
CocoaVia, Mars claims, helps with the body’s nitric oxide production and that is what helps to relax bloods vessels, reduce platelet aggregation and maintain a health blood flow, giving it an affect similar to aspirin.
The only surprise is that the entrepreneurial confectioner overlooked this particular opportunity for so long.
Addicts drool and salivate over the product, or hide themselves in closets and consume it with guilt. It has a dependent and growing market. And now we know: you can have your chocolate cake and eat it.