BEFORE WILLY WONKA GOT COOKING
Historically, cacao is considered a medicinal food of divine origin. It was even valued as a source of currency by ancient civilizations.
Can I lose weight and eat chocolate? Everyone loves Chocolate! But, when it comes to thinking of healthy foods, Chocolate has long been thought of as a sinful indulgence, loaded with sugar, calories and unhealthy fats. Jumping to modern day science, there are 25,000 studies that overwhelmingly celebrate the many virtues of raw unprocessed cacao and its wide range of health benefits.
The USDA ranks unprocessed cacao at the top of the list of high antioxidant foods. Unprocessed cacao is often referred to as a “Super Food”. It’s time to “rediscover” the most healthy antioxidant food God put on the earth!
Americans consume on average fourteen pounds of chocolate a year. So, why aren’t we seeing a positive difference in our health? Well, it’s because there is a difference between chocolate candy and a cold pressed chocolate which maintains the nutrients of unprocessed cacao.
Americans suffer from heart disease, cancer, Type II Diabetes and chronic auto-immune deficiency. There’s something going on in our bodies, it’s called “aging”. Free Radicals are effectively “rusting” us from the inside out. Studies show that over two-hundred degenerative diseases are based on and begin with chronic inflammation at the cellular level. Our healthy cells are constantly being attacked by free radicals at a rate of 10,000 times every hour.
Natural foods with antioxidants offer a solution to this. Antioxidants pair up with free radicals to neutralize them and promote prevention of disease, maximize healing and reverse the process of aging. The bottom line is that we age prematurely, fatigue easily and our body systems weaken if there are not enough antioxidants in our bodies. Antioxidants to the rescue! Raw chocolate contains a wealth of over four-hundred different compounds. Cacao flavanols and flavonoids inhibited reactive nitrogen species (RNS) and formed nitrous derivatives, which inhibit cancer cell growth.
ALL CHOCOLATE IS NOT CREATED EQUAL!
Most commercial processing of chocolate reduces its antioxidant properties. The benefits of this natural God-given bean are magnified when cacao is unprocessed. Xocai Healthy Chocolate is a cold pressed (unprocessed) chocolate. This Belgium Dark Chocolate has the highest antioxidant scoring classification available by Brunswick Labs, an independent lab that tests foods for their antioxidant content. Foods high in antioxidants are scored by their ORAC (oxygen radical absorption capacity) values. One piece of a Xocai Healthy Chocolate nugget is rated at 25,000 ORAC and is equivalent in antioxidant content to a half pound of spinach. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) states that we should be consuming 7-10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. This brand of chocolate can help you meet these recommendations.
