Is Dark Chocolate Good for Weight Loss? | ZOE Science and Nutrition | Episode 2

[Music] welcome to zoe science and nutrition where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health this plant has been used by human beings for thousands of years with samples found in 5 thousand year old pottery discovered in the upper amazon the mayans considered it a gift from the gods and used it in their sacred ceremonies where it was believed to have mystical healing powers for the aztecs it was worth more than gold and given to their victorious warriors today this plant fills shelves around the world we gift it to our loved ones to express our feelings or help ourselves through hard times i'm talking of course about chocolate even though our relationship with chocolate spans thousands of years we still can't agree about it it seems obvious that something so delicious must be bad for us can there be any truth to the claims that chocolate can improve our mood our health and even our libido well today we looked at the latest science to find out i'm joined by tim spector my scientific co-founder at zoe and one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world and spencer hyman one of the world's leading chocolate experts and founder of the kraft chocolate business coco runners so wonderful to have you both so just to kick off i thought we'd try and do something different which we haven't done before because there's a lot of myths and stories about chocolate and so i thought we could try and uh you know hit a whole bunch of them very fast with a lightning round of true uh or false answers and if you're just each uh answer to that and we'll go around and kick this off so first question chocolate causes acne true or false close false i've never seen any studies for that all right so tim and spencer say no well we'll start with tim first maybe said that you're not too overly polite so next one chocolate is high in caffeine false there is a small trace element it's theobromine which chocolate has in it yes it's green there you go so we already established uh spencer's expertise in chocolate that's good dark chocolate is healthier than milk chocolate i'm going to sit on the first smell because it depends how you do your milk chocolate there's something called dark milk chocolate which actually has no added sugar to it so you can actually have less added sugar to that than you can to some dark chocolates so fascinating come back to this one milk chocolate is that healthy brilliant and uh next one chocolate is bad for your heart false definitely false unless it's got lots of sugar in it which is another issue yeah correct yeah depends on the type of chocolate but uh the good chocolates it's it's it's not bad for your heart we can talk about the unit a bit later that great tribe of people who sort of have this extraordinary ability to drink like 17 cups of chocolate a day eat fish and have amazingly healthy hearts as a consequence which is where a lot of the stuff sort of comes from but yeah chocolate causes headaches false there is a small study um that shows that one of the things inside chocolate is something called pea and there is a tiny bit of evidence well there's a few studies which suggest that for people who can't break down pea that may be the case but it's a real exception there's only been like two or three studies done on it as a general rule of thumb it to timmy's right again tim possibly a personalized response in some people or you just don't believe it well there's always exceptions to rules uh so i'm sure you never say never but um as a general rule there is a general myth that chocolates cause migraine and uh generally they do not studies have disproven that myth doesn't mean anyone can't get a headache with any particular food or product but i don't think there's any general risk of chocolate and migraine for example or really bad headaches got it there might be a whole bunch of other foods but other people that gives you a migraine so the idea that chocolate in general is a problem they've done placebo-controlled studies and uh there's no difference in those in those studies to provoke uh migraines and people who thought they were sensitive to it so i think it's just good for your business yeah it is good it's just literally anybody who can't break down pea will but as you say that will occur with lots of other foods but it is specifically people who have a problem with pea who do have a problem with chocolate because chocolate's got lots of pa now brilliant next question you can eat as much dark chocolate as you want without worrying about it i would say that's not true actually you always worry about eating unlimited amounts of anything uh because you need to have a balanced diet and uh eat something else as well so uh i'm interesting spencer thinks you can live forever on just chocolate but i think that'll be unlikely i think you would be right that you need a bit of variety too i mean maybe one of the next questions is going to be is chocolate addictive and that the sign for this is that it's almost impossible for people to actually eat enough chocolate for it to become addictive so i don't i don't think you can eat too much chocolate but um for example to become addicted but you you definitely you would not want to just eat chocolate that would not be a good idea a little bit of chocolate has other advantages brilliant and last question in this lightning round is it true that your gut bacteria like chocolate yes i think tim's like they generally do like chocolate if it's good quality and uh is uh has lots of uh cocoa and not so many of the other ingredients they mostly average chocolates i think they probably wouldn't like uh but they they going to like high quality chocolate it's full of great nutrients and polyphenols and other things which your gut will love um but if it's mass-produced chocolate it's getting unfortunately full of sugar which is not necessarily the best thing for your gut so tim talk talk a bit more i think we just started talking something i think which is really interesting right which is who you're already saying um both there's lots of different types of chocolate which i think will come on too but also like how it relates to these microbes in your in your gut can you talk a bit more about why certain chocolates might might be good what's going on with these gut microbes yeah so you we we forget exactly what chocolate's made of but you know it it all comes back from a plant that is fermented to give it great complexity so it's it's a mixture of fiber and protein and lots of essential nutrients and these defense chemicals that are in the plant called polyphenols and by fermenting it with microbes when it's laid out after you know where in these hot tropical areas this breaks down the plant in lots of chemicals and these these protective chemicals polyphenols are retained in the chocolate and so when you eat them are then liberated in your gut and these are like rocket fuel for your gut microbes so until we just remind everybody what fermentation is because you talked about that being a critical bit and i'm sure that we'll have spencer fermentation yeah sure the fermentation is a very general word that's used widely but it means really food that is broken down by microbes to produce other types of food or chemicals and so this happens when you make cheese or uh you're making beer or wine or and it also happens within our own guts all the time so and so this is happening with chocolate which is i guess less you know people think about that for cheese but but i think most of us don't think about that um with chocolate indeed yeah most people aren't really aware where chocolate comes from or how it's exactly it's made uh i thought from the grocery store i have to admit that's probably most people think it grows on trees but it it does actually but yeah it's um yeah so the process is very str it's very strange and this very complex way of actually making chocolate by which it's dried and which you know we can discuss more about um but microbes break it down and produce much more complexity than people think and so all the flavors and are produced from these complex chemicals of the interaction between microbes in the forest or wherever the the pods are left to ferment uh getting into the the cocoa and then that stays in that product in in artisan chocolate at least uh and those polyphenols these defense chemicals which are the same ones you find in how other healthy foods like nuts and seeds generally are retained in the in the chocolate and then when you eat it they are go all the way down to the lower intestine and they will then meet um your gut microbes and that interaction between uh the fiber that's still left in the in the chocolate and there is fiber in there plus these polyphenols make microbes happy they interact with it to produce other chemicals which we believe are generally good for your body for your immune system uh for your digestion your mental health um etc etc so it's it's that complex interplay between the very complex chemistry of what actually is in chocolate and also the complex things that are going on in your own gut that create this healthy effect if you've got a greater proportion of the healthy things in chocolate compared to the unhealthy parts of the highly manufactured processed chocolates so it's it's getting that balance right because on the other hand if you if you go and get highly processed chocolates uh mass-produced ones they will add in all kinds of extra chemicals to bind it together flavoring sweeteners and we know now that artificial sweeteners so-called emulsifiers which like a glue to keep things together are bad for your gut microbes and will actually counteract any of the benefits that you might have been seeing so it's all about not just thinking about chocolate as one thing but realizing that it's a whole spectrum of uh different qualities that have different effects on your body not only just not only just the percentage of sugar but also all the other ingredients that go into to making lots of mass-produced chocolates whereas as spencer will tell you you know good chocolate has the least number of ingredients so eating glue is bad that makes a lot of sense um i guess i hadn't really thought about chocolate spinach being glue um yeah what what's the line and how much of the chocolate that we might see in the grocery store is good chocolate how much is bad how do we actually figure that out so i think the simple answer to that is that there's a if you compare it to coffee it's very easy in the case of coffee to tell the difference between instant coffee and a roasted bean and you can get there's a different process going on similarly if you look at a chicken nugget and you look at a roast chicken most people can tell the difference when you look at two bars of chocolate it's actually a little bit harder and you have to do it in a slightly different way but to get to the answer to your question which is is most chocolate sold in supermarkets going to be good for you unfortunately the answer is no it's not going to be good for you because it's going to be mass processed it will be hydrolyzed in most cases it will have been fermented because otherwise you can't get any of the flavor out of it but it would have been not very well fermented and then it would have been roasted in such a way basically they take the shells off before they roast and that means that it won't have any flavor because a lot of the para zones are able to develop and consequently you need to add lots of additives to it and then above all the way that most people sort of get you interested in chocolate to use a euphemism is they add lots of sugar they have lots of fats they have lots of additives and they're trying to get you to scoff it rather than to savor it so does that mean at the end of the day like the amount of like real chocolate that's left in this thing is really small it's a bit like other processed foods we might think about where it's been smashed to pieces reflect there's very little left that is processed yeah it's ultra processed i mean most chocolate is ultra processed so what will happen in fact most chocolate is made you know the same way that a chicken nugget is made in the sense that the chocolate maker actually doesn't get the beans he basically buys in something which has already been ready made and it would have been highly pulverized and processed um and it would have at every step of the process whether you know whether it be the fermentation whether it be the drying whether it be the roasting whether it be the conchain it will be done for efficiency and scale not for flavor because what you're going to do is use additives later to create that so as tim said the most important thing to do when you buy a bar or chocolate is actually look at the list of ingredients and if it's got stuff which is not you know recognizable by your grandmother um even if it's something like vanilla and if it's a dark chocolate bar be skeptical because they're using that to actually cover up the fact that there isn't much flavor otherwise how do we figure out a bit more what these differences in chocolate are at a high level um what's the difference between dark chocolate and milk chocolate what do we actually see you know on the grocery store you know what's the reality out there the first thing is that most of the chocolates on sale in the us and the uk and english bean countries are milk chocolates and what people often don't realize is how little cocoa bean is actually in those products and best selling uh product in the in sort of canada the uk australia is cadbury's dairy milk which has something around 23 24 cocoa content and was nearly made to be refused status as a chocolate a few years ago by the european union because it didn't meet standards because below 30 i think was what they were considering uh you couldn't call it a chocolate um and and something like hershey's hershey's is around 12 percent i think it does vary with the different types but it it's even less than that and and spencer just remind me about uh bourneville do you want to tell them about uh bourneville plain which was um one of the uh first so-called dark chocolates um brought to the english market uh spencer tell us about bourneville that's less than 40 cocoa and that's mainly cocoa solids very little cocoa butter is added to it so um we can go back into what those ones are later but yeah i mean technically to be called chocolate in europe it needs to have at least 20 chocolate whether it's a milk or a dark chocolate in the states that's actually 10 so that's where it sort of goes from and most confectionary will have way less than 30 or 40 chocolate inside it's amazing really right so if i bought milk i'd be pretty disappointed if it was only 20 milk or if i bought steak it's all it's 30 steak i would feel um entirely cheated but that is pretty shocking um why is that and at what point what about the other end you know when we start to think about dark chocolate um when does it start to become classified as dark chocolate and indeed what's the difference between dark chocolate and milk chocolate so sort of taking that last question first technically the difference is that um milk chocolate has milk in it um slightly confusingly a number of dark chocolates also have milk um you have to look at the ingredient list to check that because often dark chocolates will have a bulk or a filling agent like whey powder in it so they're not suitable for vegans but but in theory dark chocolate should not have milk in it but milk chocolate should have milk um so i think though that that what you want to look for is the list of ingredients and as tim said it should be less is more but i think your questions as to why is there so much stuff added to chocolate is part of the problem that chocolate has which is that on the one hand chocolate is an amazing set of flavors in and of itself it has more complexity of flavor and taste and texture than just about anything on the planet including red wine on the other hand it's also an extraordinary good vector for other flavors in fact arguably it was the first bliss point food so by this point you know you guys all know this because your food experts but the idea that you know if you combine sugar salt and fat we all suddenly become unable to resist it really the first product to do that was in many ways milk chocolate with nestle and daniel peter back in the 19th century and that's what really made chocolate take off but if you look at what i mostly so that is basically just coming back to it that's hence these like low fraction of chocolate um in the in the bar lots of milk lots of sugar it gives you this combination of some of the chocolate taste but then so the sugar and the fat which just triggers all of these um things that make you want to eat more uh in a way which is you know very rarely found in um in nature is that is that what you're saying with the the bliss point yeah exactly um and chocolate is an extremely good vector for other flavors and tastes and sensations so that's what it's become used for um and you know and not only is it the chocolate bar which is used in that with but chocolate is added to other products like ice cream or like cakes etc because it works so well they're carrying other flavors let's talk a little bit about the dark chocolate end right so i think a lot of people are like okay so i understand that probably hershey's um or dairy milk might not be the thing i should be eating but you know i like chocolate cause by the way i really like chocolate um let's talk about the dark chocolate um you know tim at what point does this dark chocolate start to be good for us and i mean we talk a little bit about personalized uh responses because i think we both um this is one of the zoe scores that we definitely look at carefully as we're figuring out uh whether we can do this yeah so there's no real consensus about you know what level of cocoa it starts to be healthy but it seems to have fallen into this general area above 70 percent uh is where most people seem to do that line but i'm not sure there's much science about saying 65 is bad and uh 75 is good um but certainly the more you've got uh coco it means you know generally the better the more more fiber and the more polyphenols the more good stuff you've got in there so in general uh you want to be getting up towards that that high percentage uh if you can particularly if you are having chocolate on a regular basis and as as we've all learned you know you can train yourself very easily uh to move up from cadbury's dairy milk to darker chocolates progressively even if you know when you make that first switch it seems quite hard so i think everyone's aspiration should be to try and get their coco percentage up and work out where their own personal threshold is because everyone will taste things differently and so will have their own sort of personal bliss point if you like but i think that's what people should aim for um obviously there are some exceptions because if it's got nuts in it or other ingredients it makes it quite hard to work out what the total um coco content is so uh spencer might know how to advise people on whether once you add start adding in nuts into it for example whether that invalidates all the percentage scores uh although i would say that adding nuts i particularly do like nut chocolate i know spencer doesn't agree with me on that one but um uh and nuts maybe it's good from a health perspective but as a kind of sir perhaps that's a different perspective right i i think it's well the nut chocolate specifically is whether or not that gets in the way of appreciating some of the other nurses the chocolate but on the other hand nuts and chocolate is an amazing combination because you get lots of texture from it it is very healthy for you and as well different nuts can bring out different flavors but i think i mean the main advice is that whenever you buy a bar of chocolate if the first ingredient is not to do with cocoa be very skeptical whether it be a milk chocolate whether it be a dark chocolate and i think the second one which is try and train yourself to savor rather than to scoff because to my mind the reason why i think you know we should get your perspective jonathan and tim's on is the reason why i think chocolate is a good thing to eat is that i think for most people after a meal they actually want something sweet there is this sort of wonderful idea of what the japanese called satsubara or second stomach and what it seems to suggest is that even when we are quite full we've had a whole meal our bodies actually like having something a little bit sweet like some chocolate whether it be dark or milk because it actually aids digestion and you can actually see if you take an mri of somebody after they've had a meal and they're saying that they're very full if you show them some chocolate or a bit of chocolate cake they will actually you'll actually sort of see their stomach move a bit so they can digest a bit more but i think the trick there is not to entertain my kids have always argued that they have a second stomach for dessert so i love the idea that there actually is a scientific second stomach for for dessert as found by mri and i'm fascinated by who managed to uh you know get the grass no it's been done it's been done live on japanese tv and and what most people find is if you savor a little bit of chocolate it does sage and it does fill you up very nicely and that that to me is one of the strong health arguments for chocolate which is it's much better to have that than just to get a scoff some sort of you know like low fat vanilla yogurt which is actually got seven times the amount of sugar in it that a chocolate bar will have so i have to let him say he's looking slightly skeptical in the second stomach so i i definitely wanted to have a chance to oh i'm a big believer in the mr creosote effect i think it was the wafer thin mint at the end of the big meal that it doesn't always work but no i think variety is the thing that or produces um increased appetite so that's where humans are always looking to get variety into our our taste buds so that's probably that's the other reason yeah that's really interesting mother's milk we always come back to it yeah and so we were sort of talking about sort of personalized responses you talked a lot about um the way that you're getting over 70 you're starting to get you know all these uh polyphenols and everything that really supports your microbes i think this is one of these things we also saw a lot of variety in response when we were doing the um the sort of zoe predict studies right tim and we see this also in uh in our own personal scores i managed to just squeak 50 out of 100 for for dark sugar for dark chocolate which is great news because 50 and above means i'm allowed to eat regularly whereas my uh my score for milk chocolate is only 34. so significantly lower and this is one of those things that made me think okay so dark chocolate is almost the only sort of bad thing that i'm still allowed to do um tim how did how did you turn out well i'm disappointingly worse than you jonathan so i only scored 44 on uh dark chocolate and 22 on milk chocolate so uh i have to be really careful it really means that milk chocolate which i i've virtually given it up apart from rare tastings with spencer um and so go for dark chocolate and i because that that score was for an average between uh 70 and 85 percent i reckon if i go more towards the 80 percent i can get my score up a little bit and have that that makes sense and there's lots of people with much higher scores for the dark chocolate as well i think both of us um have quite sugar control right and so this is one of the big challenges with chocolate is the sugar that's mixed in with it um as well as also if you have you know there's quite a lot of fat so if you have more issues with fat control so that we see very wide variety in response but i think in all cases the dark chocolate being a lot better than the milk for the reasons 10 that you were you were explaining yeah so i think i'm at the worst end of the spectrum so i think most people will be doing uh probably better than both of us jonathan i think so yeah well but your microphone as always um i think you know we're starting to touch a lot on chocolate i know spencer is keen to talk more about what's going on uh i thought it might be fun actually to start with the end product of chocolate before all the boring technical stuff about how it how it happens and since we're lucky enough to have spencer here uh he could actually tell us how to taste chocolate and so i thought that this was how great was it i had a job where i actually had an excuse to eat chocolate in the middle of the day so i actually brought some chocolate and of course i brought some chocolate from spencer because spencer's the man who got me addicted to chocolate uh over the last decade uh uh you know for those of you don't know spencer's sort of like a chocolate pusher um uh so whenever you meet him he takes out of his rucksack uh like a bar of chocolate and presses it on you and you think it's just he's really generous but what you realize is it's just gateway drug it's sort of like a drug dealer you know starting you off and you're like oh i don't even know if i like it this much we tried a bit no it's okay and then after uh after a few months you start to you know what i really start to like this uh and then you're addicted so um you have to be careful if uh if spencer offers you chocolate talk us through i've got some here um uh tim and spencer do you have some chocolate that you can uh yeah we can maybe taste together yeah we've got some we could also do it in a slightly different way so one thing i would just sort of pick up on those i don't believe technically you can get addicted to chocolate i think you're addicted to the additives insiders and and we've done kind of there's been quite a lot of work done on that anyway here's how you should taste chocolate if you want to this is this is what this is what my drug pusher says to me as well isn't it yeah yeah no no no because the pure stuff you'll be all right that's right yeah no no no no just okay it's for two sets so for example you do get addicted to caffeine if you have like four large cups of coffee a day for four weeks at the end of that you will get the jitters when you come off it similarly you do get addicted to sugar you definitely get addicted to all sorts of different you know class substances with chocolate you would actually have to eat the equivalent of about a kilogram of chocolate a day for 10 weeks to get any sort of the um withdrawal effects from theobromine so it's technically phenomenally hot you can definitely get adapted to the sugar in chocolate but theobromine which is the active ingredient inside chocolate is not as far as anybody's ever shown addictive so it's not the chocolate which is addictive it may be the sensations to it which it arises which is great pleasure and you know great flavors and other stuff but not that but anyway let's get back to tasting chocolate so truly addicted i just like it so much that i need to keep eating it it's not like alcohol it's not like alcohol it's it's you know it's okay so take a piece of chocolate uh and do look at it the most important thing to do with the piece of chocolate before you eat it is to actually snap it so if you snap a piece of chocolate i'm going to snap this in front of the microphone so you can hopefully hear that okay that was a pretty good snap so that snap is really really important because what it actually says is that the chocolate's been properly tempered and it's going to melt in your mouth and reduce all those aromas and volatiles and flavors and if you want to sort of practice of this a good trick is actually to hold your nose before you grab a piece of chocolate take a piece of chocolate and stick it on your tongue now this is what we make everybody do when they come to one of our chocolate tastings because it's a very good way of actually explaining the unique aspect of being human and actually being able to understand the difference between retro and asian ortho nasal flavors and old-fashioned if you take a piece of chocolate you put it on your mouth you can chew it a bit you could do whatever you want with it and what you will discover is that you don't get many sensations from it you may get a little bit of taste you may made a little bit of the sweetness make a little bit sinus etc but by the time it's melted what should happen when you release your nose is it melting for you all you is that suddenly when you breathe that through your mouth have you got a piece of chocolate in it what should suddenly happen is you should be accosted by a whole wave of aromas and flavors and what that's showing is that the amazing thing about chocolate is that when you put it in your mouth it melts that's because it's been properly tempered which goes back to the snap idea um and it's literally the only substance that we have which when we put it in our mouths melts i know you can say that ice cream does but it actually melts before you get it in your mouth so chocolate has this extraordinary ability thanks to cocoa butter to when it's tempered to crystal stretch five to melt and that releases all the flavor volatiles and because human beings can detect flavor not just through our noses but also through our mouths because of retro nasal olfaction chocolate is an amazing way of describing that um who aren't not everybody listening obviously is able to have the chocolate same time the first thing i can tell you is eating chocolate while holding your nose is very disappointing right tim there was really no pleasure from that experience agreed no it's a waste of time yeah and the second thing is very nice when you stop holding your nose um in general and even better because then suddenly you've got melted chocolate in your mouth that you can start to taste yeah and it would have that stage it would have melted in your mouth so you'll be reducing the volatiles and actually that is back to it back to tim's point about looking at the list sugar salt and fat sugar you know the sort of stuff that's in you know dairy milk or in a bournemouth or any of those other bars sugar basically will hit your nervous system in six tenths of a second so you will get the hit from those very quickly whereas with chocolate good chocolate bars it will take a lot longer five to ten to fifteen seconds so you need to train yourself to save that um so that that's sort of you know the first bit you should have a bit of fun with choco and then the second bit of advice is always have a couple of different chocolates on the go at any one time because the amazing thing about chocolate is that they good craft chocolate artisan chocolate they will all taste and have completely different flavors because it has more variety it's like you know it's what we love to do with wine which is have a couple of glasses of wine on the go at the same time but it's difficult with chocolate it's actually very easy you can just crack open a couple of hours share them with friends and then you can get into all those different flavors fantastic well i definitely enjoyed the taste of uh of that chocolate tim what is what we're smelling also linked to um what's going to go on when it hits the uh the gut and all those bacteria get all the good stuff or are these two sort of completely separate things well they're separate but related obviously the greater the complexity of the smells gives you a hint as to all the different chemicals you're getting and i think the the better the chocolate is made just like any food you get this complexity of smells rather than just one strong flavor which is often artificial you're getting this complex a bit like a fine wine that you is developing on the palate and that tells you that you're likely to be getting lots of good chemicals that will also reach your your gut microbes so i think that's you know they are they're broadly related and so uh it's a pretty good test of quality uh yeah and humans have evolved to actually have pretty good palettes if we if we take the time to use them yeah i think actually that point about sniffing a chocolate bar is actually a very important one because the way that most mass-produced chocolate is made is such that it is using tastes rather than flavors and you can't smell a taste so you know sweetness sugar actually doesn't have a smell um and what what what you're actually gonna get when you get a good dark chocolate or a good even good milk chocolate is you're gonna get lots of different aromas and interestingly chocolate unlike for example coffee um actually veterinary and authenticity you will tend to like the smell and like the flavor at the same time which isn't always the same thing with coffee lots of people like the smell of coffee but can't necessarily eat it but the other thing i would sort of say is that in kraft chocolate in artisan chocolate the way the sugar is used is very different so in a sort of cheap chocolate bar you're actually using the sugar as the main delight the main thing which is going to get you going whereas as tim points out in craft chocolate what's actually happening is that it's the different polyphenols it's the different para zones it's all the different aromas which cocoa has within it after it's been fermented and dried and roasted which actually give it all the fun and what you use sugar for is a little bit like you'd use salt on meat you can actually use sugar to bring out those flavors so if you actually get somebody to compare the same chocolate but with slightly different amounts of sugar they will have completely different flavor profiles because it's just bringing them out in a different way but if you're using you know a chocolate where the primary ingredient is sugar all you're really going to get is the sugar and let's get a little geeky for a minute because it's it's fun but spencer you can't spend an hour on this tell us a bit about like how this works so we were we were talking before i think uh about this idea that maybe 70 plus um actual cocoa is a sign that this is probably a good dark chocolate it's going to start to give you uh all this positive complexity that supports your microbiome that's fantastic but we've also said hey actually there's difference that all of this is processed but there's somehow difference between what's going to allow this to still be a product that that has got some um health benefits to sort of perhaps balance out some of um uh some of this this sugar and everything else but it but it sort of depends so talk us through a bit like how do you go from this plant in in the jungle right somewhere to something that is you know in all cases uh a bar that really doesn't look very much like a plant at all and um help us understand a bit about what what's going on there and therefore how we can figure out um not only by buying a product from you clearly but let's say you go to grocery store we've got to be practical what helps us to identify the sort of stuff that actually you know day to day we could be eating it is a um it's a nice treat i'm even if you say i'm not addicted i'm addicted um what's going on and and how can we we sort of recognize something that that we we should feel good about youtube so i think let's sell the last one which is how do you identify something good there are basically three things you should look at whenever you buy a chocolate bar the first thing is the ingredients and the first ingredient should not be sugar it should be chocolate and whether that's a milk chocolate or whether that's a dark chocolate even a white chocolate when we sell white chocolates the first ingredient is always going to be cocoa or cocoa butter the second and you don't want to have a bunch of additives and stuff that your grandmother wouldn't recognize and we'll come back onto that in a sec the second thing you'd really like to know is actually where do the beans come from because that's quite important because it has all sorts of flavor um implications as well as also having all sorts of socioeconomic implications which we maybe can touch on to say and then finally you want to know where it's made because as i said most chocolate is actually made rather like chicken nuggets not made uh like you know the way that you sort of make a roast chicken and this sort of i think so you want to know literally where is it being made so you know the bar that you have in front of you jonathan you know the beans there come from a small bit of colombia called alco and they are sailed over on a ship as you delight it to to mike longman at chocolate down in cornwall but but what they're trying to do is bring up the flame of the chocolate and i think you know i think you've covered in other aspects of the podcast what is ultra processed food and how does that work and in a way what you want to try and do is get to what we call craft chocolate which is not ultra processed and every step of the way those you know craft chocolate is different to mass-produced ultra-processed chocolate so the very first step is tim sort of said is you know remember chocolate is a fruit you know it does grow on trees it looks a bit strange so for those of you who can't see it at home i'm holding up something which looks like a small rugby football um and it's got lots of different colors on it and they are wonderful colors and when you open it up it tends to look uh rather like something like an alien i don't if you've ever seen this tim obviously because where he's been in costa rica but you have these sort of rather sort of strange white seeds covered in a pulp and as tim said at the beginning the magic of chocolate and those just described and they're like about an inch long three centimeters said about the yeah they're about an inch long maybe a little bit less you have about 25 to 50 of them in a you know you know in a pod which is about enough to make one chocolate bar and as an aside you actually need one and a half thousand to two thousand liters of water to grow one of these pots so you need a lot of it which is why chocolate if it involves deforestation is so disastrous but these seeds are incredibly bitter if you put one of these in your mouth and you try and eat it it is incredibly bitter and astringent but the magic is what tim described which is fermentation so the way chocolate works just and tim that is your polyphenols that you're talking about isn't it that you were talking about earlier i guess all that yes and the chemicals that give you that astringency that you know set that really quite bitter very bitter taste it are all these defense chemicals which are good for the plant uh and if you use them right good for us as well but they are defense chemicals and that's why yeah they are incredibly good astringents stop stop other insect insects eating them and other other plants eating them directly yeah and it's the magic of fermentation which turns these incredibly bitter and astringent seeds into cocoa beans because what happens is all the way through so the first thing happens is fermentation and that's a you know yeast-based reaction with the sugars in the pulp reacting to creating fermentation but all the way through whether you're fermenting whether you're drying those are the first two types that you have on the farm and what's actually happening is is that you're creating heat and what heat does is it basically breaks down the pyrozones are the polyphenols in the chocolate to start releasing aromas which we can then detect later in the process so after the chocolate the cocoa seed has been fermented and then dried it will then generally get sorted and most of the time it will then get sent to a factory and this is where the first big differences start to occur because the mass-produced chocolate you don't really care about the fermentation or about the drying um because you're going to add flavor in later but for craft chocolate artisan chocolate you can create all sorts of different just as you can with wine you know the different fermentations you're going to have will make a huge difference as does the drying and then when it gets to the factory you have to make a decision and the first decision is are you going to go for efficiency and if you go for efficiency you take the skins off the nibs of the beans off and then roast it because it's a bit more efficient but if you do that you lose the ability to control much of the flavor so that's not what kraft chocolate does so what craft chocolate will do is it'll roast the beans for about 30 20 to 30 minutes and then again the heat to grain mild reactions it'll bring out more flavors then what you'll do is you'll take the shell off you'll do what's called winnowing and crunching which is to grind it into a paste into a smooth paste tim actually has he's trying actually what we call a stone ground chocolate which hasn't been conched but again it's heat which is being applied at this point and then you'll temper it and then you'll turn it into a bar now with mass processed chocolate they'll use a whole bunch of other technologies which you wouldn't be able to do at home again it's like ultra processed food like they'll hydrolyze it they will add a lot of other stuff to it that you wouldn't really want they'll often actually not add cocoa butter but what they'll do is they'll add vegetable fats and palm oils and stuff like pgprs and then we can also talk a little bit about you know lecithins and other glues which are definitely problematic but in the end what you'll have if you have a good artisan chocolate or you know a reasonable chocolate you will have hopefully some of the flavor of cacao coming through which is the great fun part too if you don't it'll still be a pleasant experience but what you'll basically be doing is using the chopper its mouth feel and its ability to basically be a great vector for other flavors and it won't necessarily be that great for you we couldn't cover this conversation without talking about the sugar right so i think most of us are not going to be eating 100 chocolate bar there is sugar um being added as and you you've talked about that already uh spent about the balance like how bad is is that how much should we um because you know i i've definitely heard people that well you know it's got chop it's got sugar added to it so this is like a terrible thing like how do we think about that so i think that that's a slight red herring and a bit misleading um because the amount of sugar in a 60 or 70 gram bar of chocolate which is 70 or 80 percent is one or two teaspoons and you're never going to eat a full chocolate bar in one sitting well you know i would suggest that you don't you don't need to if you savor it and you appreciate it i can manage it but all right i don't know if you'd eat a full chocolate bar very few people will actually take a good quality artisan chocolate bar and actually scoff it in one go unless they're incredibly hungry in which case it's probably not the ideal thing because it's something which you want to say but it's a bit like you know for most people you don't really drink a whole bottle of wine in one go and actually let's compare it to an american red wine a lot of american red wines you know the high alcohol ones will actually have more sugar than in them than a bar of chocolate certainly a low fat yoghurt a low fat than a yogurt has got like five or six times the amount of sugar that a dark chocolate bar will have and again and you're particularly talking about a dark chocolate here right because again just remind everybody well no it's nice chocolate so we actually chopped we have two balls right they tend to see higher sugar levels gone yes but there is a sort of slight twist on this which is that when you talk about milk chocolate and dark milk chocolate if they're good quality we sell a lot of milk chocolate bars but almost all of our chocolate bars are over 40 percent cacao and once you start getting above 55 60 actually they have less added sugar to them than a dark chocolate bar of 70 or 80 because actually the milk is being caramelized and becoming a sweetener we actually do some chocolate bars which are milk chocolate bars but have no added sugar so that you know 65 or 70 or even 80 cacao and the sweetener is milk now obviously as you caramelize the milk it does become a sugar but i'm just sort of encouraging you to think slightly differently about sugar what's really dangerous is if the chocolate doesn't have any flavor naturally and that's i think what tim was sort of saying so that's that is the important thing about you know the the great thing about food is if it has flavor then it's more much more likely to be natural and chocolate is an absolute perfect example of that the more flavor the chocolate naturally has the less processing that it's going to have had a less sort of you know ultra processing that it will have had with it but but i wouldn't worry too much about dark milk chocolates and good craft milk chocolates the only danger i think is that you tend to scoff more of them than a dark chocolate bar i think that's where it becomes trickier that a milk chocolate bar is much closer to a bliss point food than a dark chocolate bar and again this point is what you described earlier on when you combine sugar salt in fact human beings just don't have to stop eating brilliant so um we actually asked um our zoe members on uh instagram we said we were going to be doing this really fun podcast talking about chocolate and what were their key questions and a number of them we've we've already covered but um there are a number here that that we haven't and so i i want to make sure that we've um we've covered those one question was is fruit and nut milk chocolate healthier than dark chocolate so uh you know tim i can i can see you've been thinking about this what's the answer well it's always going to depend on which we were comparing but on average it would not it would be less healthy than dark chocolate just because the way they're made and generally fruit and nut chocolates tend to be made with very commercial milk chocolates of low you know cocoa quality and amount so you're mainly having sugar and dry fruits are a very high source of sugar as well so they're the only good bits you're getting there are a few nuts in that one so although i you know used to love um that was my favorite as a kid i think fruit and nut uh chocolate i i i now realize it's not a definitely not a health food so i'm afraid fruit and nut milk chocolate is um is out it sounds like um so next question um how much chocolate do you need for it to be beneficial so i love this question where the question is really am i eating enough chocolate in order to get the benefits which is a wonderful way to think about this so i think there's sort of a couple of different ways of answering this i think if you eat enough to stop you having a third slice of chocolate cake or you know a fifth piece of you know sort of black forest gato then that that's a good thing i mean i think what what i think chocolate is it's a great way of satisfying your cravings for sweetness at the end of the meal without having too much of it on the other end of it there is as tim was sort of saying that there is some evidence actually that that the polyphenols in chocolate actually can be very very beneficial for your heart and there is this tribe of people in in south america called the yuna and you know the fact they never have heart attacks is put down to the fact that they drink about 15 to 17 cups of chocolate every day so you know if that's what you're after you've got to consume an awful lot of it um and i'm not necessarily sure that most of us would be up for being able to sort of do that it's sort of like you know the way they drink it is definitely slightly differently to the way that we would consume it so i'd say quality not quantity is what people should be aiming at 20 to 25 grams a day which is you know a quarter of a bar which is what you'll get actually when you come to one of our tastings that's what people will eat they're amazed they're absolutely full by the end of it but they've literally had less than a you know quarter of a bar of chocolate but they'll have 10 different chocolates in about that amount brilliant so next next question um should i watch out for lecithins if i pronounce that right in chocolate lecithin is is an emulsifier uh which is the glue-like substances that bind things together so it's an indicator that whoever's making that chocolate is is trying to cut some corners and uh and stick some of these things together the there are many emulsifiers used in um in food processing and probably lecithin is one of the healthier ones of those because it is a natural product but it generally is a sign that someone is cutting corners with the process and so um and there's a question mark like where the leicester thing may be harmful for your gut microbes so yeah i mean it's probably not terrible but it's also a sign that uh you could do better in chocolate there are generally two methods less well there's three lecithins which you use one of which i'm going to ignore immediately which is pgpr because it's used as an alternative to vegetable fountain parlor and that is just really really bad that's just not a good thing the other two are sunflower lecithin and soilless of them of the two always look for sunflower and as tim said the reason why lecithin surrounded chocolate is because actually it helps people who are cooking with chocolate if they're trying to make you know some sort of great chocolate pudding where they want to glaze it makes it much easier to deal with but also because in hot countries which rarely make chocolate so most of the time actually where chocolate is grown it's not where it's made um but in those few cases like madagascar with someone like men a cow the machinery gums up if you don't add a bit of less of into it so you know for them it's the exception that proves the rule but but generally be really dubious about ingredients i mean i would be much more worried about um vanilla or vanillin especially in dark chocolates than i would be about lecithins but if you can yeah i mean you know less is more brilliant and um last question is eating uh half a bar of chocolate just before bed a bad idea this is this is an interesting one because actually one of the interesting things about drinking chocolate is that people have always had it before but often had it before then um because it does it has this it does help people sleep hot drink before you go to sleep and although chocolate does have trace elements of caffeine its main active ingredient is theobromine which has this sort of weird effect of on the one hand stimulating you but not sort of waking you up um i think that the argument about like having you know half a bar of dark chocolate the gain is going to be you know what sort of dark chocolate is it if it's a dark chocolate bar which is like you know 60 sugar then be a bit worried about it because sugar is going to keep you up um i'm not necessarily thinking that half a bar is necessarily good a couple of squares will definitely you know cause your second stomach to regurgitate in a very good way so that may help you sleep um but that i i you know i'm not sure that eating before you go to sleep is overall a great thing but tim you're the expert on this yeah in general uh i think you should be having your chocolate not just before you go to sleep have it just after your meal or just before a meal and you want to keep up there's a general idea that we want to put our eating times together and we have to a long time to for our gut to recover so uh i'm against uh late night snacking or early morning snacking give your gut a rest and uh let it enjoy the chocolate uh in its eating time and and not confuse it really i think that's a perfect place to stop this has been so much fun i think we could keep talking about chocolate for hours uh but we will we will stop thank you both tim and spencer for joining me on the zoe science podcast today uh we hope you liked today's episode uh please be sure to leave us a review and subscribe if you did if you're interested in learning more about zoe and the best foods for your body beyond chocolate you can head to joinzoe.com podcast and get 10 off your personalized nutrition program as always i'm your host jonathan wolfe the site the zoe science podcast is produced by rob heath with support from sharon feather and kirsten kade here at zone see you next time [Music] you

Channel: ZOE

Views: 49,485

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Id: fVAWXYdF9R4

Length: 51min 57sec (3117 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022