Who knew Raw Chocolate was a Health Food?
By Kate Magic Imagine if you’d only ever had pasteurised orange juice out of a carton, and you tasted a fresh orange for the first time. Or if you’d only ever eaten white sliced bread and then you saw some whole grains of wheat, you quite possibly wouldn’t recognise them as the same thing! Well, that’s the difference between what we think of as a chocolate bar and pure, unprocessed, raw cacao. EU regulations state a chocolate bar has to contain a minimum of 17 % cacao solids. Cacao solids are a highly processed form of cacao that have been heated at very high temperatures and lost much of their nutritional value. They are then combined with hydrogenated fats, dairy products, additives and preservatives, not to mention large amounts of sugar, to produce the kind of chocolate snacks we are all familiar with. If a carton of orange juice contained only 17 % oranges, or a loaf of bread only 17 % wheat, consumers would be outraged. But somehow this pale imitation of chocolate is deemed the r
