Guess what will?
What's that mango?
So? You know I love spicy food, right, and I love chocolate, but I don't really love this trend of spicy and chocolate.
I am one hundred percent with you on this because I love spicy food and I love chocolate too, but I don't want any chili powder like in my hot chocolate or chocolate or any of that stuff.
I know, why why are people always mixing those flavors? But I was looking into it and I found possibly the worst example of super spicy chocolate.
Oh yeah, there's a.
Company that spared up in twenty sixteen called pepper bomb your mom.
Like an insult?
Yeah, I mean it was I guess a joke that you could play on people where you'd buy a chocolate coated Carolina Reaper for nine to ninety nine and then send it to a loved one, or I guess the opposite.
I was gonna say, that is not something you want to send to a loved one.
I know, Carolina reapers are so spicy.
Actually, we've talked about these before. Aren't they even spicier than like ghost peppers? Yeah?
They are, so I'm not sure if it's like the threat of lawsuits that close this business, or the fact that too many moms complained about it. But uh, pepperbomb, your mom sadly doesn't send out pepper bombs anymore. Sadly, I do want to get into the more tempting part of that recipe, which is the chocolate, why humans are so obsessed with it, whether it's really as healthy as all these reports would have us believe, and why doesn't taste more like tropical custard the way the beans do.
Let's dig in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good friend mang show Ticketer. And on the other side of the soundproof glass munching his way through a Whitman sampler, that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Actually, by the way, that sampler looks like it's meant for more than one person, wouldn't you say?
Mango?
Yeah, yeah, definitely, it's gotta be.
Like thirty forty ounces chocolate sitting there.
I know.
I actually tried to grab a piece earlier and Tristan slapped my hand away. Apparently he's busy branking all the different chocolates for his blog.
Oh really his blog. Well that's at least that's something to look forward too, so I'll leave it be there.
So you know what's funny is right before a hurricane Sandy, the night before the storm hit, like Lizzie sent me to a convenience store to get some last minute supplies, and we were pretty stocked up, but just in case, I went to pick up some like extra toilet paper and water and I think batteries. But the weather was bad, so like there were only two other guys in the store in line, and the first guy had the shopping
cart filled with beer and condom, that's all. Yeah. And then I was there with like tpee and water in my hands, and and then this other guy had this shopping cart that was just filled with chocolate, just like bags and bags of candy. And I remember like glancing around and like being a little confused and thinking, well, we all have different definitions of being prepared.
Like everybody was ready for very different nights. That's pretty great, all right. Well, I know we're going to get into the ancient history of chocolate, but it is kind of amazing that chocolate is the world's favorite candy. In fact, chocolate based candies far out sell fruit based candies in almost every country on the planet. Now, Denmark's love of harribogummies makes it one of the few exceptions to the rule in and I have to respect that they're pretty good.
But this year alone, nearly eight million tons of chocolate is expected to be sold and consumed worldwide. Now that amounts to over one hundred billion dollars in revenue for one year.
That's crazy. So how much of that as thanks to like American chocoholics.
Actually not as much as you might think. So even though the average American eats about ten pounds of chocolate every year, we actually only ranked twentieth in terms of national chocolate consumption. And that's according to data released by euro Monitor. You know euro Monitor, Yeah, I.
Get their newsletter.
So we consume our own body weight and chocolate every ten years or so, and that's still only good enough for twentieth place. Yep, that's really confusing. How much chocolate are these other countries eating.
Well, it's probably no surprise that Switzerland ranks number one, and each person there consumes on average about twenty pounds of chocolate every year, and so that's twice as much as the average American, and then Germany and Austria are tied for second. They have about I don't know, say seventeen to eighteen pounds per year. England and Ireland come
in right after those. And then you go to the other end of the spectrum, and these are places where chocolate really doesn't dominate the sweet market, and China is an example of that. So the average Chinese citizen eats less than half a pound of chocolate a year, So that means people in Switzerland eat forty times as much chocolate as those in China. That's amazing.
So this is completely off topic, but I can't stop thinking about it. Did you realize that cacao beans are related to okra and actually to durian as well. That's super smelly fruit, Like they're all from the same family. And I kind of want to tell my kids, like, I'm so sorry I couldn't pick you up any chocolate from the store, but I got its cousin a bag of okra for you. But you were talking about chocolate consumption, where do the actual cacau producing countries fall on that list?
Actually, just to go back to that, that would mean that chocolate is technically a vegetable then, right, Yeah, that's true. All right, So the actual cacaw producing countries, Africa and South American countries account for the vast majority of the world's cacao production, and that's the type of seed pod that's used to make chocolate. But despite being the first and most crucial link in the chocolate supply chain, these
countries actually don't consume very much chocolate at all. In fact, the highest chocolate consumption rate in all of South America is actually in Chili, and the average person there eats less than four pounds of chocolate per year, and the numbers there are even lower in Africa, so the entire continent consumes fewer than four percent of all the chocolate sold worldwide.
Wow. And so I'm guessing the low consumption rate in these countries isn't due to like cultural preferences like it is in China, right, I mean, ancient civilizations in South America are pretty much invented chocolate, So it's not like the people there don't have.
A taste for it. Yeah, that's that's really not what it is. I mean, it comes down to the low average income of several of these countries, And what do you think about it? If you're living on a few dollars or even less than a dollar a day, then it just doesn't make sense in the budget to spend on a luxury item like chocolate. Sure.
So, I actually saw this report from Oxfam about the economics of the chocolate trade and how skewed it is, especially for Cocow farmers.
And apparently if you divide up the cost.
Of producing a chocolate bar from start to finish, the farmer who cultivated the rock Cocow only gets about three percent. Meanwhile, about forty three percent of the price we pay for a chocolate bar is profit for the retailer.
Wow. All right, So so three percent of the people who actually grow it and harvest it and you know, kind of provide that main ingredient for chocolate, and then forty three percent to those who sell the final product. Is that what you're saying? Wow, that does seem pretty skewed.
Yeah. So, I actually remember this video that made the rounds a few years ago where this reporter for this international news site visits some Cocow farmers on the Ivory Coast, and the Ivory Coast is the world's largest producer of coco beans. It turns out roughly, I want to say, like one point five million tons of it every year. But processed chocolate isn't really available, so when you do find it, it's really exorbitant. Like I think a bar costs about a third of what the average worker makes
in a single day. Wow, which means that many farmers who cultivate cocao have actually never tasted the final product.
I mean it kind of makes you want to go there and give them a taste of this stuff. Yeah.
And so the video right, like this reporter gives a chocolate bar to a local farmer named Alphons, and he takes his first bite and you see his face just light up. He's like, I didn't know cacao was so yummy. And then he and the reporter hop on a motorbike to share the chocolate with other farmers, and when he passes the chocolate bar around, Alphons tells the other farmers, this is why white people are so healthy.
Wow. Well, I know there's more we wanted to cover about cacao production and some of the other challenges that it involves, But since you brought up these health benefits of chocolate, I do think we should take a few minutes to do I don't know, some kind of a true false breakdown of what there it actually is good for your health.
Yeah, I mean, chocolate's one of those things like red wine, that you always hear about has all these surprising health benefits, but then you never get good sense of how much of that is backed by science and how much is just wishful thinking by people who really want to eat
a lot of chocolate. I mean, like, I feel like I usually hear that dark chocolate is healthier because it has less sugar and more caca than milk chocolate, and you know, that makes a lot of sense, but at the end of the day, it's still just a comparison between two kinds of chocolate, so you're still kind of left wondering.
Is chocolate itself healthy. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that distinction between dark and milk chocolate, because that difference in sugar and cacaws is really where these claims about chocolate's health benefits kind of live or die. And that's because cacao products contain a high amount of plant derived flavonols.
So I think you should explain what flavanols are.
It's just a word I made up, just sound good of it. Now for real that they're actually the biological compounds that occur in some foods. It's not not just chocolate, but unprocessed cacao is an example of that. And since flavonol's possess you know, antioxidant and blood vessel relaxing and these anti inflammatory qualities, they're they're often associated with markers of good health like you know, balance cholesterol or blood pressure or various other measures like this.
So all those reports about how eating chocolate promotes heart health, that's basically because of the flavonols.
Yeah, that's where that comes from. But again, the blanket statement that chocolate is good for your health is a little misleading, you know. But because of his higher flavon all count cacow has a much better case for being healthy than chocolate does, I guess. But you know, even then, it's not like a cow is the only source of
plant derived flavonols or even the best one really. In fact, you can usually find more flavonols in tea or grape juice or wine, and you know, several other fruits than you would and say cacal say cocw.
Have you seen the Brooklyn nine nine where that guy Terry starts eating CaCO nibs now and because there's so much healthier for you than chocolate, And then he keeps heatium keeps he um, and suddenly he's like floated by the middle from the cacw. Okay, So there may be some indirect health benefits for eating chocolate, but you'd basically get the same or better results from other foods.
Right, Yeah, And in most cases the results probably would be better with tea or berries than it would with chocolate. And that's largely because the heating process involved in standard chocolate manufacturing it actually burns away much of the flavonol concentration that you would find in those fresh cacao seeds.
So you know, if you want to eat the healthiest chocolate that you can find, you should go for the dark chocolate with at least seventy or eighty percent cacal, and the flavanol concentration will be much higher than in any milk chocolate bar, which contains about fifteen percent cacao or less, but twenty to twenty five percent fat and forty to fifty percent sugar.
Well, I usually prefer the bitter taste of dark chocolate to like the overly sweet taste of milk chocolate. But I'm kind of surprised there isn't more of a middle ground, like something that melts in your mouth like milk chocolate does, but also tastes less sugary.
Well, I have to say, as a fan of milk chocolate, all of this kind of disappointing to me. But I do have good news for you, though, Mango, because researchers out of Temple University in Philly have actually found a new way to cut the fat content from chocolate by using nothing other than electricity, Like.
They shock the fat away with one of those crazy exercise belts.
I kind of wish that that was what they were doing, but now it's not not exactly that. So you do remember Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory and they're walking alongside the chocolate river and they're all those industrial pipes sucking up the chocolate.
Right, Definitely, Augustus Gloop falls in.
It's pretty funny. You like that movie, right, Yeah? I loved it, man, It's such a great movie. Well, it's actually there's something we can learn from that because the chocolate makers really are dependent on this pipe system to move liquid chocolate from one stage of production to the next. And the problem is that the thicker and more viscous a liquid is, the higher the chance it'll clog up
the pipes a la Augustus gloop. And since cutting the fat content results in a denser and less smooth chocolate, producing low fat chocolate typically leads to a lot of blockages.
So explain how electricity helps with that.
Well, there's this phenomenon called electroreology, and it's basically when an electric field is used to turn a semi solid like jello into a liquid state or vice versa. So in the case of chocolate, the field from the electrified pipes causes its chunky CaCO particles and milk solids to really to line up in these chains and this makes
the chocolate flow through the pipes much more easily. So not only will the new process lead to fewer clogs, it'll actually allow chocolate tears to use ten to twenty percent less butter per batch. And the best part is that, according to the authors of the study, the resulting chocolate delivers a stronger cacal flavor and significantly less.
Fat, which sounds like a dream come true.
Not to me, to be honest with you, I kind of want the more butter.
But you know, there are a few health benefits to chocolate that go beyond the physicals. So, for one thing, chocolate contains caffeine, which obviously has a stimulating effect on the brain, but there are also these other feel good chemicals in there too. There's phenol ethylemium, which is a stimulant that raises the endorphin level in the brain. And there's also something called nandimide, which is similar to one of the active chemicals in marijuana.
All right, So between its caffeine and those other feel good chemicals you mentioned, chocolate is clearly a mood enhancer, and this is real. There's even a study from Oxford that found that even just looking at a picture of chocolate was enough to trigger cravings and mood boost in some chocolate fiends.
And don't forget, eating chocolate is also a surefire way to restore a little happiness after about with the dementia, which is you know, at least the case in Harry Potter, I.
Thought you might figure out a way to put in a Harry Potter reference. That's a really helpful tip, though chocolate frogs. Well. Now that we've covered the health benefits of chocolate, both real and imaginary, I do feel like we should take a closer look at how humans became obsessed with the sweet stuff in the first place.
Absolutely, But before we dive in, let's take a quick break.
You're listening to part Time Genius and we're talking about the origins of mankind's love affair with chocolate. All right, Mengo, So I know you did some digging into the early years of chocolate. So do you want to walk us through what you found in the process.
Sure, So the best place to start is with the cacao tree and its beans. And for anyone who's wondering, cacao and cocoa are the same thing. You can use the terms interchangeably because they both refer to the same exact bean. But even though Africa is now the world's largest cocoa producer, the trees aren't native to the region. They were actually brought over as a cash crop to
aid the struggling region. And the true starting point of chocolate's long history is in Mexico, Central and South America. And that's where the equatorial climate provide the best place for the native cacao tree to thrive.
Or is it just another quick note on the terminology here. So the cacao beans that these trees produce, they're really seeds though, right, Yeah.
They're not actually beans in the same way that like coconut milk is in milk, So we're just gonna go with it. Yeah, But the trees produce these big yellowish seed pods that kind of look like nerf footballs, and each pod contains about forty beans, which are what's actually used to make chocolate. So once you crack open the pods they husk, the beans are released, along with this sweet, sticky pulp that supposedly tastes something between like a cross of lemonade and apple custard.
Actually sounds pretty good.
Yeah, But the beans and the pulp are left to ferment for a few days before being dried and roasted, and from there the cocoa beans can be ground up and then made into.
A chocolate beverage. All right, So if that's what was done first, who were the very first people to drink chocolate?
So most of the evidence points to the ancient Olemecs. They were actually the earliest known civilization to appear in Mexico, and archaeologists have found pieces of olemeck pots and vessels from around fifteen hundred BCE that contain traces of theobromine.
This is a stimulant found in chocolate, and in fact, the Latin name for the cacao tree is theobromine cacao, which translates to chocolate food of the gods, which actually ends up being a pretty fitting names since it's believed that the Omes use the ground beans to make a special drink for religious ceremonies.
It's always funny to think about the first people to discover something like chocolate, like, oh my god, this tastes so good. I gotta go tell everybody about this thing that I don't have a name for. But why is there uncertaint about who invented drinking chocolate? I mean, from what you've said, it sounds like the Olemes kind of have this wrapped up.
Yeah, But pottery with traces of cacao have been found in southern Ecuador as well, so those are believed to date back at least fifty five hundred years. So the Shuar Indians who lived in the region also have a potential claim to this chocolate drinking. The truth is there's tinted pottery in a lot of places, and that leaves a lot of room for interpretation, And since the Omes don't actually have any written history to go on, some
of the theories surrounding them could be off. For instance, some researchers think that the Olemes used only the tropical flavorcaw pulp to make the drink rather than the bitter beans.
Well, I can't say I blame I mean, when you say it tasted like what did you say, apple custard, lemonade or something like that, that sounds a lot better than like bitter bean water something.
Yeah, but bitter bean water. The gods right, right, right. But regardless of who came up with the idea, first, we do know for certain that the Mayans ran with it, like their written history includes numerous mentions of chocolate based drink made from the cacao seeds, and because Mayans had yet to develop a good roasting technique to mellow the flavors, it was probably pretty bitter.
So what was in it exactly was just ground beans and water or what.
Yeah, Or sometimes seasonings would be outed, like vanilla or honey or chili pepper.
So how did the Mayans think about chocolate? They did they consider it the food of the gods or were they a little more level headed about the way they approached it?
No, I mean they were full on crazy for chocolate. They leave the drink as offerings to their gods, and there are also paintings recovered from the time that show cacao and mythological scenes. It was also kind of a way to settle important legal matters or even seal the deal on a marriage wow for example, like early records of Mayan marriages show that in some places a woman had to prepare a cacao drink to prove that you
can get that thick, frothy consistency just right. I mean, it does kind of make sense, because could you ever see yourself loving somebody who can't properly froth a pot of chocolate.
I don't even know what that means, but I can't imagine it.
But caca wasn't actually restricted to just the loftier sides of life. There were ceremonies and celebrations that used it, and it was also an early form of currency.
Oh wow.
Yeah, so in the fifth century CE, the Aztecs used it to buy food and other goods. For example, you can actually get a whole turkey for about one hundred cacao beans.
It feels like a pretty good deal. I don't know what the exchange rate is and coco beans, but I'd buy it.
Yeah. Well, what's amazing is that it bread some early counterfeiting schemes as well.
Counterfeiting of beans, is that what you're talking about. How do you counterfeit a bean? You just like take a rock and paint it or something.
Yeah, well, if you want a turkey bad enough anything. Yeah. So, researchers have actually found these counterfeit beans at multiple dig sites in both Mexico and Guatemala, and at first glances, they just looked like these incredibly well preserved cacao beans. But once they actually touched them, the researchers realized that they were just made of clay, which.
Is pretty ridiculous. I mean, but if kakau was that valuable, I would have to think that it was a delicacy that was reserved for the super wealthy. I mean, if people were going through the trouble of making these phony clay beans. What was it really hard to come by them or what?
Yeah, I mean it seems like the Mayans had taken a really generous approach to cacao.
In their day.
They thought of it as food from the gods, as we mentioned, so they thought it was meant for everyone to eat. So Mayan families, even the ones who weren't well off, would prepare batches of their favorite drink ahead of time, and then they'd enjoy it at every meal. And the Aztecs, on the other hand, considered cacau to be this upper class luxury and almost a status symbol.
And I mean that's partially because they were using it as money.
Too, right, But as a result, the lower classes would really only get a taste of stuff at weddings or sometimes at community celebrations. But what is clear is that Aztec rulers really loved their cacau, and probably the most famous was Montezuma. He supposedly drank I think it's like gallons of hot chocolate every day.
See gallons. I can't imagine drinking gallons of anything.
Yeah. So the Spanish explorer Cortez claimed to have witnessed Montezuma consuming more than fifty cups of chocolate in a single day. I should mention, though, that some researchers think Cortez was exaggerating.
All right, So just as a reminder, we remember that Cortes was the conquista or who conquered the Aztec. So was he the first to bring chocolate back to Europe?
Yeah, so this is fuzzy too, just like with the Olmex and the shoe are It kind of depends on who you ask. So some historians claim Christopher Columbus was responsible for it. I'll say it was Cortes who returned to Spain bearing cacao and also the chocolate making apparatus from Montezuma's court. And whether or not Cortez was the first,
he was definitely obsessed with this concoction. So in a letter to King Carlos the First of Spain in fifteen nineteen, Cortez wrote, the divine drink which builds up resistance and fights fatigue. A cop of this precious drink permits a man to walk for a whole day without food.
I mean he might have oversold it. Just the tad chumming chocolate is really good but all right, so it might have been Columbus, or it might have been Cortes, but either way, it sounds like Spain was definitely the first in Europe to experience chocolate though right, yeah, I.
Mean that seems pretty clear. And there's even a third version of the story that attributes chocolate's European introduction to the Spanish, albeit to clergymen rather than conquistadors. So this is according to the True History of Chocolate by Sophie and Michael co and they say it was a Spanish friar who brought cacao beans as a gift. Apparently he did this while introducing minds to the core to Philip
the Second. But no matter how chocolate made its way to Spain, it quickly caught on all over Europe, and of course European palates weren't accustomed to that bitter, spicy brew enjoyed by the Aztecs, so they started making their own version of hot chocolate with cane sugar and cinnamon and other common spices, and by the sixteen fifties, these super trendy chocolate houses popped up in London and Amsterdam and even a few other cities, and it wasn't long
after that that chocolate actually made its way back across the Pond.
To American colonies. Wait, did you say chocolate houses or these like coffee houses or what.
Yeah, exactly, they were kind of these posh establishments. But drinking chocolate actually predates both coffee and tea as a stimulant beverage in Europe. So it's actually more accurate to say that coffee houses are like chocolate houses rather than the other way around.
I mean, it's still crazy to you that drinking chocolate was the norm for so long. Yeah, fairly.
The eating chocolate that we used to really didn't come about until like the nineteenth century. That's when these British chocolate tears frying sons hit upon the idea of adding sugar and cocoa butter to make a paste that could be molded into the world's first chocolate bar.
Well, you know, the addition of sugar and fat, whether it was cocoa butter or milk. I mean, that was definitely a turning point for chocolate, and I do want to talk a little bit about why that is exactly, But first let's take a quick break.
Okay, Well, so I feel like I might know the answer to this one already. But why do you think adding sugar and fat to chocolate is such a great idea?
I mean, in terms of taste, I think you could pretty much ask anyone in the world why adding sugar and fat might be good. So I think it helps on the taste front, for sure. But sure the biggest boon that sugar in fat gave to chocolate was actually this added sensory quality, you know, being something that melts in your mouth. I think it's actually pretty important.
And that's something that didn't happen until sugar and fat were added.
Yeah, that's right, So you know the old Eminem slogan about melts in your mouth, not in your hand. But we actually should be more impressed with what Eminem's pulled off with that, because, as it turns out, getting chocolate to melt where and when you want it is not at all an easy task.
So why is that?
Well, because cocoa butter contains fatty triglycerized and they can arrange themselves in six different ways, and each of those combinations results in its own unique melting point. But here's the cash to that, there's only one of those arrangements that actually has the proper melting point to melt in your mouth, but not outside it.
So how do you get to the ideal melting point.
Well, the trick is to nail that ratio between milk fat and cocoa. So, for example, you know, dark chocolate has this higher percentage of cocoa and proportion to milk fat, and that gives it a higher melting point. But milk chocolate, on the other end, has much less cocoa than it does milk fat, which that's why it'll melt in your hand if you don't eat it quickly enough, which is why I tend to just shovel it into my mouth.
But the thing is, even for a talented chocolate tear, it's actually pretty difficult to get those fatty triglycerites to crystallize just the way you want them to, and so it takes a lot of patience, takes a lot of skill, you know, to perfectly control the chocolates temperature during this whole tempering process, you know, just so you don't throw your proportions out of whack in the process of doing this.
You know, what's funny is that, I mean, I love that there's an art taking chocolate and how it melts. But I met this editor a long time ago, really good book editor, and I was asking him how he got into the business, and he said he really wanted to be a chocolate maker. But so he went to like this famous chocolate maker in town and Vermont or something, and he shook hands with a lady and she said, your hands are too warm. You'll never be good at this.
Oh wow, crazy, And you walk across the street to a bookstore. And that's how I got.
Into Yeah, like, you're not tall enough to be a quarterback, but.
I mean I get why it's worth the effort, Like, you know, making this creamy piece of chocolate that melts away and coats your tongue. That's a fantastic feeling.
It really is. In fact, I was reading about this study from a group called mind Lab, and they tried to determine just how important that melting sensation is in our enjoyment of chocolate. So the researchers gathered a bunch of volunteer couples in their twenties. They monitored their heart rates and brain activity while they first melted chocolate in their mouths, and then again while they were kissing each other.
That's pretty great. So all these couples are just like standing around the lab eating chocolate and then making out while wearing heart markers and things strapped to their heads.
I guess, and they were proud, probably paid to do this as well. I guess. Sounds like not a bad gig. But the crazy thing they discovered was that the melting chocolate caused a more intense reaction than the kissing did. And I mean, the kissing did cause the volunteer's heart to race, and I guess that's good for their relationships, but you know, the chocolate made the effect last four
times longer. It actually more than double volunteers resting heart rates from about sixty beats per minute to one hundred and forty. And the same kind of thing happened in the brain as well. So once this chocolate started to melt, the pleasure centers in the brain lit up more strongly and for a longer period than they did during the kissing.
That's pretty nuts, and it kind of makes me think of how it chocolate has his reputation as an aphrodisiac, and how it's so strongly associated with love Valentine's Day. It almost seems like that mouthfeel could be a big reason why.
Oh, it definitely is. And I was reading up on this a little and it turns out that we actually have special touch receptors on our tongues and they respond to this change in texture of a melting piece of chocolate. So once our tongues detect this melt, we have these receptors that send the message to the brain and that stimulates these feelings of pleasure. And the smell of chocolate
has a similar effect, right, Yeah, that's right. And cacal beans are roasted and fermented during chocolate production, and these processes cause chemical changes in the beans which ensure the chocolate has its own distinct aroma. There's actually over six hundred flavor compounds produced at all, and they include everything from overcooked cabbage to human sweat to rob be fat, this all making one.
Hundred mouths water.
That's right.
And you know, of course, none of these compounds smell anything close to chocolate on their own, thankfully, but they're unmistakable when joined together. It's such a strange thing, But in fact, these studies have shown that even just smelling chocolate stimulates the emotional what you would call feel good centers of the brain.
Well, I know we talked earlier about some of the mood altering chemicals that chocolate contains, but you're actually saying that your brain lights up from just the smell alone.
Yeah, So the mood enhancing substances we mentioned are only found in trace somemounts in chocolate, so you're not really gonna feel much of an effect from them unless you eat way more chocolate than you probably should. But what's going on a smell is it's a little bit more psychological, and chocolate has this uniquely pleasurable smell and taste and
texture to humans. So you know, if we detect any of those sensations, we actually just get excited because we know we're about to eat some chocolate.
Yeah, And it kind of makes you wonder if the whole idea of chocolate as an afrodisiac is also just in our heads. Like, we live in a world where chocolate hearts are already symbols of affection and where chocolate has been viewed as decadend or indulgent for almost hundreds of years now, So whether or not chocolate spurs these romantic feelings, we've all kind of been conditioned to make these connections ourselves.
Yeah, I think that's right. And you know, for example, you mentioned Mona Zoomer earlier, and that story I always remember about him is that he supposedly downed a bunch of drinking chocolate just before visiting his hairm at night. And you know, along with this story spread this idea
that a daily dose of chocolate could enhance virility. But you've got to remember, this is the guy who reportedly drank what did you say, fifty cups of chocolate every single day, So drink it before bed was probably just coincidence, right? Or have it right?
So let me just recap things a little bit. Chocolate contains psychoactive chemicals, but not enough to have more than a slight effect on our senses. Its reputation as afrodijiak is way overflown and mostly due to sort of this widespread placebo effect. And while it does have a unique smell, taste, and texture, we don't really know why the majority of humans respond as strongly to these qualities as we do. So I guess I'm wondering, like where does that leave us?
Like?
Is there an answer for why we love chocolate so much? Because somehow it tastes good isn't good enough?
Well, I was reading this interesting BBC News article by a doctor's name is Michael Moseley, and so he's a TV journalist and he's worked on a bunch of different science programs, and there's one called The Secrets of Your Food and it sounds like a pretty interesting show. But his idea for the unique appeal of chocolate goes back to that all important addition of sugar and fat that we talked about earlier, namely, that chocolate contains a combination
of sugar and fat that you rarely find in nature. Now, separately, we obviously know that there are plenty of fruits that contain natural sugars, and then you've got nuts and fish, which are chok full of fat. But both of these together is a pretty rare thing. And in fact, one of the few natural sources where you'll find high levels
of both sugar and fat is in milk. But even then, chocolate generally has a fat to sugar ratio of about one to two, which is higher than almost any kinds of milk except for one, and that's human breast milk.
Huh.
So, doctor Moseley talks about this. He explains that human breast milk is particularly rich in natural sugars, mainly lactose. Roughly four percent of human breast milk is fat, while about eight percent is made up of sugars. Formula milk, which is fed to babies, contains a similar ratio of fats to sugars. This ratio one gram of fat to two grams of sugars. That's the same ratio of fats to sugars that you find in milk, chocolate, and of
course in biscuits and doughnuts and ice cream. In fact, this particular ratio is reflected in many of the foods that we find hard to resist.
So the reason we love chocolate is because they're reminds us of breast milk. I mean, that's more appropriate for Mother's Day, right.
Well, that's the idea though, I mean that that humans have a preference for the particular fat to carbohydrate balance that we've been conditioned to like from the start of our lives. And Mosley describes this chocolate obsession as an effort to quote recapture the taste and sense of closeness we got from the first food we ever sampled.
Well I definitely wasn't expecting that, but it does remind me of this chocolate quote I read from this Portuguese poet named Fernando Pesoa. So you know how metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with questions and about really plowing existence and the first.
Causes and all that.
Right, So Pasoa said there's no metaphysics on Earth like chocolate, and he's right. So, I mean, there's so much history and lore and science wrapped up in chocolate that you can almost never really get your head around it or get to the beginning of it, and in the end, it's probably just best to eat it.
Yeah. Well, I know Tristan agrees with that, because he's eaten like forty five more pieces of this stuff since the beginning of the episode. But all right, before we let him finish the rest of that box off, why don't we share a few more stories about chocolate in today's backt off? All right, Well, I'll kick us off here, so we know there's obviously brown chocolate and white chocolate, which we weren't allowed to talk about today even though
I love because it's not technically chocolate. But the good news is there will now soon be pink chocolate. And this is because, as we may have talked about earlier, you know, cocoa beans are actually kind of pinkish or reddish in their natural state, and so it's taken about a decade or so for food scientists in Switzerland to figure this out. But soon we will actually have pink chocolate, which will maintain that fruity or flavor, be a little sweet. But I'm pretty eager to try some.
Yeah, I'm excited about that. So I've got a different type of good news. If you actually want to increase your odds of winning a Nobel prize, you should eat more chocolate.
So Tristan's in luck.
He's gonna have so many Nobells by the end of this year. A few years ago, a survey was taken of twenty three Nobel laureates during the time of their prize winning work, and it found that forty three percent of those reported eating chocolate at least twice a week, and that was higher than the twenty five percent of people who were at a similar age and education level
but who had not won a Nobel. Wow. So this really scientifically solid finding also came after a correlation that was found between national chocolate consumption and the rate of Nobel prizes. I mean, that seems like pretty solid science to me.
What do you think? Yeah, I mean, let's just forget that whole correlation causation thing and just go with it. That's that's some good science there. That is pretty funny though, that forty three percent of those Nobel winners were eating chocolate. What did you say, twice a week? Okay, that's still that's still pretty big. All right. Well, how weird is it that Quaker Oats finance the production of Willy Wonka
and the Chocolate Factory. Did you know about that? And that's actually why the name was changed from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for the movie, And that's because they wanted to push their new Wonka candies and specifically the Wonka Bar. Now, weirdly, they couldn't seem to get the formula for the bar just right, so they actually didn't even release a Wanka
Bar for a few years after the film. But the film did help launch several other of their popular candies, and thankfully it's still a pretty great movie.
Yeah, so I think We've talked about this German chemist who made those fart pills that make your tooth smell like chocolate, right, But I don't know why chocolate is always the go to answer for this type of thing. But this is like that story on steroids. So in twenty sixteen, Japan sewage companies used a chocolate oil to mass the scent of their sewage trucks, which I guess you know, you'd have your kids running to meet the chocolate truck and suddenly they.
That seems like I would ruin the taste for chocolate. So they're smelling chocolate in the air and that's the sewage.
Yeah it well, it covers up the sewage.
Yeah, yeah, crazy. Wow, that's pretty interesting. All right. Well, my kids were asking not too long ago why dogs can't eat chocolate, and that's because chocolate contains this chemical that we actually talked about earlier, theobromine, which is a little bit like caffeine, and it's actually toxic to both dogs and cats. And so this is the main reason, and that's because their bodies aren't able to metabolize the chemical at the same rate that we can. So if
they have a little too much chocolate. It just causes them to get sick or very sick. But if they have high doses of theobromine, it can actually have tragic results as we know.
Man, well, I feel like we need to bring this back to a slightly happier note. So did you know that Ruth Wakefield, the inventor of the chocolate chip cookies, sold her cookie idea to Neslie Tolehouse and you know how she was compensated with a lifetime supply of chocolate.
No way, Again, it's still so weird to me to think of somebody like as the inventor of the chocolate chip cookiels like that stuff that should have just always been there.
Pray that in for so many turkeys.
Yeah, well, I have to say that is a great fact and worthy of today's Fact Off Trophy. So congratulations, mana.
Thank you so much.
Thank you guys for listening. If we've forgotten any great chocolate facts, we would love to hear from you, guys, you can always email us part time genius at HowStuffWorks dot com or call us on our twenty four to seven fact hotline. That's one eight four four pt genius. We've gotten so many great comments on Facebook and Twitter, so you can always hit us up there. But thanks
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