BayouHealth: Warm Up with a Nice, Hot Cup of … Antioxidants?

BY SHANNON DAHLUM

You’ve probably heard of antioxidants before, right? Even if you don’t really know what they are, you most likely know that they’re good for you and are important to have in your diet. Antioxidants neutralize oxidation your body, which is responsible for damaging cells, speeding up the aging process, and increasing systemic inflammation, which precedes all modern lifestyle disease. Oxidation happens inside your body as a normal byproduct of metabolism, but it’s sped up by exposure to toxins in your environment, eating highly processed and chemical- laden foods, alcohol, sugar, chronic stress… basically by being an average American.

To keep modern lifestyle diseases at bay, it’s more important now than ever to be sure your diet is rich in antioxidants. If someone were to tell you in increase your intake of foods high in antioxidants, you’d probably think of blueberries or some other deeply colored berries. Maybe you’d think about spinach or broccoli. While you do typically get most of your antioxidants from fruits and vegetables, all parts of plants contain them, including the seeds, nuts, leaves, roots and bark. And the best news ever, in my opinion, is that the one of the highest antioxidant containing foods we have isn’t a vegetable at all, it’s chocolate!

The ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) scale is used to measure the antioxidant capacity of foods per 100 grams. The higher the ORAC value of an item, the richer it is in antioxidants. To give you some perspective, blueberries have an ORAC value of 2,400 and spinach comes in at 1,260. Raw cacao powder? Oh, no big deal, it just has an ORAC value of between 80,000 and 100,000. That’s not a typo; that’s eighty thousand to one hundred thousand!

Cacao seems to have first been used in southern Mexico as early as 1500 B.C. The cacao beans imparted a bitter flavor into many savory dishes. As a drink, they found it to be a mood enhancer and aphrodisiac and believed it had mystical qualities. Flavor enhancers like vanilla, chili, and cinnamon were often incorporated into cacao flavored foods and drinks, but it wasn’t sweetened until around 1500 A.D. by the Spaniards, after the Spanish conquistadors returned with chocolate instead of the gold and silver they sought.

As chocolate spread throughout Europe, it continued to be more heavily processed and sweetened. By the late 1800’s, creamy milk chocolate bars were being mass produced, and chocolate has been popular as a sweet treat ever since. Today, the average American consumes 12 pounds of chocolate per year, but unfortunately, this form of processed chocolate certainly isn’t doing our health any favors.

Cacao trees grow in tropical regions near the equator. The trees produce fruits, which are large pods, and within each of these pods are 20-30 seeds, or cacao beans. These beans are fermented, dried and cleaned, and go on to be processed in any number of ways. The beans are often roasted at high temperatures to become cocoa, but unfortunately, this process diminishes the antioxidant content of the beans, so not all chocolate products contain these benefits. In order to reap the antioxidant benefits in your cup of hot chocolate, it’s important to purchase a raw cacao powder, which has an ORAC value about 400% higher than the highest quality roasted cocoa powder. It’s easy to know whether an item has been roasted or is raw because of how it’s spelled; roasted beans are called “cocoa” while raw beans are “cacao.”

According to the package, an individual packet of your typical instant hot cocoa contains “sugar, corn syrup, modified whey, cocoa (processed with alkali), hydrogenated coconut oil, nonfat milk, calcium carbonate, less than 2% of: salt, dipotassium phosphate, mono- and diglycerides, artificial flavor”. There is nothing healthy about that at all. Why drink that version of cocoa, which contributes to oxidation in your body, when you can have a rich cup of cacao containing one of the most antioxidant rich foods on earth?

The traditional, unsweetened version of Mayan hot cacao is a bitter beverage that most Americans would find pretty unpalatable. The cinnamon and chili typically used, however, really punch up the flavor. I recommend trying the traditional recipe, but adding a small amount of natural sweetener, like pure maple syrup.

MAYAN HOT CACAOO
2 cups milk of choice
1/4 cup raw cacao powder
1 heaping teaspoon of cinnamon
Small pinch of pink Himalayan salt
Small pinch of cayenne pepper or chipotle chili powder pure maple syrup to taste
Puree all ingredients except maple syrup in a blender until smooth and then warm on the stove. Once heated, add maple syrup to taste.