#119 – Why (& How) You Should Be Eating Chocolate with Marcos Patchett

In so many of our episodes over the last four years, we have explored how no food we eat is intrinsically ‘bad’. Instead, it’s what we as humans living in a rapidly globalising and industrialising world, have done to that food that causes problems. The topic of today’s episode, cacao, epitomises this. Originally, in its home, central america, cacao beans were revered and used unsweetened as a drink. Our world has taken and transformed them into an unrecognisable sugary commodity that fills the shelves of shops globally. A commodity that can, as Alison personally knows, through at 20, being addicted to the stuff and obese, ruin health.

But as ancestral cooks, we need not be scared. And our guest today knows that better than anyone we’ve ever come across. Marcos Patchett is a self-confessed cacao geek and has written two books on this bean’s wonders, the first of which, The Secret Life of Chocolate is 700 pages of incredible research, of which Alison has devoured every page!

Cacao is an incredibly nutrient-dense food and one that can give us both pleasure and health. Let’s talk about why, and, how, you should be eating chocolate.

Supporters of the podcast, check your private feed for a fascinating discussion on addiction that we just couldn’t squeeze into the main episode.

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What we cover:

• Why we should be eating chocolate
• Health benefits of cacao
• Anti-oxidants and how they work
• Cacao as suncream!
• Discussion on the stimulant effect of cacao, comparing it to the stimulants in coffee and tea and covering the different types of beans
• Wider discussion on habituation and how ‘exciting’ foods can be part of our life, healthily
• Reductionism in food culture and how cacao, just like every food, is more than the sum of its parts
• How we should be eating chocolate
• How cacao was originally consumed and what happened when it came to Europe
• Alison’s experience making atoles
• Ways we can maximise cacao’s health benefits in our own lives

The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

Marcos has written two books on cacao:

The Secret Life of Chocolate (Alison has the hardback but this is also now available more economically as an ebook), and Pharmakakawa.

If you want to buy a copy of them, he is offering podcast listeners a 20% discount. Use the code CHOC20 on the publishers website: https://www.aeonbooks.co.uk

Marcos’ Instagram

Marcos’ herbalist website

Marcos is on You Tube as The Nocturnal Herbalist

Alison’s course Bean-to-Bar Chocolate with No Special Equipment mentioned in the recording will guide you through making chocolate at home from the raw bean with equipment you already have in your kitchen

 

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Transcript:

Alison:
Hello and welcome back to Ancestral Kitchen podcast and this is a first in our episodes. If you’re listening to me today, I am recording an episode in person with our guest today, which has never, ever happened before. Usually, you know, it’s me and Andrea across the Atlantic, thanks to the wisdom of the internet, but I’m actually in Marcus Patchett’s kitchen. Yeah, this is all correct. So our guest today is Marcus Patchett, who is a return guest on the podcast. If you go way back to episode , we talked to Marcus about his book. And the episode’s titled The Secret Life of Chocolate, which is the same name. The book is of the same name. So welcome, Marcus. Thank you very much for agreeing and letting us in your kitchen to the floor.

Marcos:
Well, thank you for having me. Or vice versa, both ways.

Alison:
Yeah, both ways. That feels nice. That feels nice. So the first episode was about your first book, The Secret Life of Chocolate. And I think if anyone goes back and listens to that episode, you will just hear me going on and on about how amazing the book is. Which felt amazing from my end. Thank you. pages. Well, I feel like if there’s a book that you read that really you think, wow, it’s really nice to let the person know, you know, and to actually have a relationship with you since that feels really nice. Thank you, likewise. It’s a tome of a book, pages, and Rob and I read each one of those pages out loud with Gable listening kind of to most of it. I think it was our evening reading for… I think about six months, literally, to get through the whole book.

Marcos:
Yeah, you told me that before and that blew my mind. That was so amazing because you always, when you write a book, you never know how it’s going to be received, obviously. And I remember being asked while I was writing it, so what’s your target audience? And I was like, you know, by one of these people who are really into marketing and stuff. And I was like, I don’t know, people, somebody who likes it. I just want to write it. So it’s really, really, it made me really happy when when you know just when you always hope that at least somebody’s going to receive it and and be as into it as you guys were it was just like yes that made me really happy

Alison:
Yeah we were and I think I feel that you know writing the book that I’m writing now about if there’s someone who loved my book as much as we love your book that’s my job done so yeah we we learned so much about chocolate and anyone who um wants to dive into chocolate deeply. I don’t think there is any other book out there on the.

Marcos:
Market that does what your book does.

Alison:
Do have a look in the show notes because we’ve got a discount code if you want to get hold of a copy. So that book changed my attitude to chocolate completely. But you do have a more recent book on chocolate. So can you tell us why this more recent one is different to The Secret Life of Chocolate?

Marcos:
Well, okay. Yeah. Essentially, that’s an easy one. It’s basically smaller and more condensed it’s just uh it’s a sort of i always think of it as the radio edit of the big book okay and it was suggested to me by the publisher um because he said look this big book’s an investment it’s a coffee table book and obviously that was my intention i wanted to write essentially my own version of as comprehensive a book on the subject as i could coming at it from a herbalist point of view so the mini book which is called pharma cacao i thought the the main audience for the big book has been you know there’s has been largely herbalists and cacao ceremony people okay not not limited to because the people like yourself who are sort of into food and into into you know sort of um complementary ways of living i guess there’s probably an alternative is i don’t i’m not comfortable with that phraseology but um but who are looking at life in a in a slightly non-mainstream way i think is the largest the biggest audience but that the

Marcos:
Most people who bought the Big Book fell into one of those two camps. Like the herbalisty people, people who are into natural medicines, quote unquote, or… People who were into the cacao ceremonies, which have become this big thing over the past of quite fashionable past years or so. Um, so the little book was targeted mainly at those. So it’s, it’s, uh, cacao in medicine and ceremony. So it’s just distilling some of the main ideas and themes from the big book into, into a sort of pocket version really. And of course you, there’s so much that gets lost. So it’s not a replacement for the big book.

Marcos:
Um, there are only, there are one or two new things in the little book though which because obviously i finished researching it in okay it got published in yeah and then since so it’s now been like basically

Marcos:
What is that that’s seven years since i finished researching it so since then there’s a couple of new bits have come out you know several new pieces of research on on cacao on the pharmacology which um nothing revolutionary but a couple of new interesting bits which i crowbarred a couple of those into the little book so one of them was about theobromine uh that one of the major alkaloid constituents in cacao and how they’ve shown at least in in petri dish and i think maybe in vivo i can’t remember off the top of my head but like in some living organisms as well that um ingestion of theobromine which cacao is high in raises the level of bdnf which is a brain derived neurotrophic factor which is this substance which encourages the growth of new neural connections like so it’s raising the level of bdnf is important for sort of recovering from nervous system injury maintaining structural repair in the brain as you get older so in other words higher levels of that are often correlated with improved cognition as you age and that sort of thing so um so i found that really fascinating

Marcos:
That theobromine this main alkaloid that was thought to be sort of like a um a less good version of caffeine you know it’s like the kind of cruddy caffeine is actually doing that specifically so that was really interesting and then there’s there was another couple of bits and bobs of sort of like just pharmacological things but the big thing that’s happened since then is they found some ruins in ecuador um which uh show that cacao was in use

Marcos:
As in the cacao seed was in use in Ecuador in South America. And that sort of, most of the book focuses on the development of cacao culturally in Central America. Yeah, yeah, I remember. You know, so that was where it achieved its greatest cultural prominence and But it looks like, and it was previously thought, and what I’ve got in the book, the big book, is that cacao was developed in Amazonia, first grown in Amazonia, then brought upwards, you know, across the Andes and then taken into Central America. And that’s still the case, but we now know there was at least one civilization, i.e. City building people in South America who were using it in South America before it got imported into Nisa America, into Central America.

Alison:
So before literally before.

Marcos:
Like literally anti-dating it like so it’s it’s thousands of years old um so i’ve i refer to that briefly but i’m gonna have to wait but i’m literally i literally just put that as a little footnote in the small book because it’s a small it’s a pocket book so um and hopefully one day um when i can bear to start diving back into the research i’m going to do an updated version of the of the big book yeah but i’m i wasn’t planning on doing that for at least another like years if i’m still around on the planet then that’s what i’ll do and include all that information in there but so that’s been really interesting that that’s i think they only made that discovery in sort of like so yeah

Alison:
Okay okay so pharma cacao is the second book and it’s smaller so if people are wanting to just kind of dip their toe in a bit without committing yes that’s the book to start with i just was thinking when you talked about the um the big book the secret life of chocolate that for our listeners who you know perhaps aren’t familiar with your work they may well be familiar with sandal cats who is a the fermentation guru and he has the art of fermentation which again is a tome and that’s like the sort of the the big dictionary of fermentation and geography you know he travels around geographies and yours is like the equivalent just for cacao and it’s its scope is the medicine side of it and that the kind of the history side of it and the mythology side of it as well. So if the listeners wanted to have kind of a picture in their head of what your book is, it’s as in-depth and tome-like as Fandall Class is.

Marcos:
I don’t know if you see it, but on the shelf, just up there.

Alison:
Oh yeah, I see it.

Marcos:
Literally next to my book.

Alison:
Oh, they look good together.

Marcos:
I think we spoke about in the last thing that literally the R of Fermentation is one of my favourite books. So when I had my book published, I had the vanity and hubris just Put it

Alison:
Next to it. It’s similar in size, isn’t it?

Marcos:
Yeah, yeah.

Alison:
It really is. Gosh. Okay. So anyway, we’ve already gone off on too many tangents. So the first question we always ask on the podcast was, what was the last thing you ate?

Marcos:
Yes. Well, so… I don’t know if it counts. I actually had, it’s not really eight though, because I do the intermittent fasting thing. So I haven’t had breakfast this morning, but I had a bowl of matcha because I thought we’re going to have a conversation. I feel slightly like sleep deprived. So I was like, okay, I need to wake my brain up. So that’s, but that sort of counts because matcha is obviously solid that you dissolve. So it’s a suspension of tea and water. So it kind of counts as a food. But if we’re talking proper meal, that would be last night. And I think it was i did some uh millet with some sort of roasted uh some like toasted hazelnuts and then a bunch of roast vegetables um yeah it was very nice

Alison:
We like millet on the podcast we’ve had a separate episode on it i’m yeah i’m all into millet so amazing um i don’t think did i actually say to everyone that you’re a herbalist did i say.

Marcos:
That at all i’m not sure not i’m not sure not in this

Alison:
One i don’t think you are yes and that will infuse that’ll be obvious i think by the end of the conversation for sure all the things we touch okay okay so in this episode what i want to do is cover why we should be eating chocolate because i think um a lot of listeners are influenced by another cookbook called um nourishing traditions which is quite old now but is by sally fallon from the weston a price foundation and she says in that that chocolate is best avoided because it’s a stimulant and she groups it together with tea and coffee but we know from from further research done after that book was published that there are many benefits to drinking coffee and drinking tea we’ve just had an episode on coffee and and a few months back we had an episode on tea the same is true of chocolate and i don’t think that anyone who’s listening to this podcast should be afraid of chocolate and we do know that other ancestral kind of figureheads in the sphere have come out and said, you know, that these stimulants aren’t something to be avoided.

Alison:
There are things that we can incorporate and there are benefits to them. So because you’ve done so much research on it, I don’t know anyone better placed to speak about the health benefits of chocolate. So I want to explore those and kind of leave a path for listeners to feel good about the place that chocolate has in their life or to bring chocolate into their life if they haven’t been eating it but i also want to talk about how you should be eating chocolate because just like all of our other food choices how we eat chocolate is so important and every food these days seems to have a rubbish version of it no there’s a rubbish version of every sort of food that we’ve created in the last like you know years that we should now avoid, but there’s also a way that generally we can eat those foods and for those to be beneficial to us. So I want to cover that. Okay. So before we dive in, let’s go to an ad break. Okay, so why should we be eating chocolate? I’m just going to place that question in front of you.

Marcos:
Marcus. Oh my God, that’s a huge question.

Alison:
Tell us some of the health benefits.

Marcos:
Okay, there are several. I mean, the one that’s been most researched, and you see this talked about, you know, on many, many different podcasts and platforms. So I’m going to gloss over this, although this is the one that’s most heavily researched. The polyphenols, the antioxidants in cacao, I sort of like shorthand it as the brown stuff, although they’re, you know, because they’re mostly, in the raw bean, they’re often purple in color, the anthocyanins. But when they’re the ones that are most pharmacologically active, and I’m going to geek out a little bit here at the prosianidins, which I don’t think have that purple tinge. They’re actually a breakdown product of the anthocyanins. And you’ve got different varieties of cacao, the criollo, which is the posh bean, the expensive one, and the forestero, which is the less expensive and hardier variety. Forestero tends to contain more anthocyanins. So those beans look purple in the raw state. And the criollo tend to look ivory white or pale pink because they have far less of the anthocyanins. But they both contain absolutely buttloads of the procyanidins.

Alison:
So you’re saying that the cheaper one has more polyphenols in it?

Marcos:
No. What’s interesting is that actually the more… Yes, yes, yes. Sorry, I’m confusing myself now. Yes, the Forresterra, exactly. The cheaper one has more anthocyanins. But it’s the procyanidins which seem to have most of the health benefits. And the procyanidins are a slightly smaller molecule, smaller molecules, and they are also fermentation byproducts of the anthocyanins. The anthocyanins get broken down by your gut bacteria and turned into procyanidins. So if you’ve had too many antibiotics, that might not work so well, so that’s a whole separate topic. But anyway, all of this, I’m going on a massive rabbit hole tangent here, but the point of this is that all forms of cacao contain these antioxidant polyphenols, different forms of

Marcos:
And there’s plenty in Criollo, the more expensive type as well. It’s just they’re not the purple ones. Yeah, okay. And they all do really good things to blood vessels. So specifically, they protect vascular endothelium. They reduce inflammation in vascular endothelium. What that means, vascular just means blood vessels, and endothelium means the lining, the inner lining of blood vessels. So they have an anti-inflammatory effect on the lining of blood vessels, and they also sort of help to dilate blood vessels a little bit so they improve blood flow everywhere and they reduce injury or damage to blood vessels which as you might imagine leads to reduced risk of things like stroke and heart attack over time it also leads to all these subsidiary benefits like there’s been benefits shown in reducing or protecting to some degree against some of the harms from atherosclerosis or from diabetes. Atherosclerosis being silting up of the arteries, which, you know, leads to high blood pressure and increased risk of heart attack and stroke, fatty arteries. It reduces that and often in type diabetes or even type , long-term diabetes, because the extra sugar in the blood.

Marcos:
You get a similar but different process of like the, that all the pipes getting gradually clogged up because the sugar in the blood, that’s why diabetes is so dangerous because when you have sugar floating around in the blood, the sugar combines with proteins. It literally sticks to proteins, forms glycoproteins, which just means sugar proteins. And these then get stuck to the walls of blood vessels and silt them up, which is why in diabetes, if people have long-term uncontrolled dodgy blood sugar, they often get problems with peripheral circulation kidney problems,

Alison:
Retinol problems in the eye. Is that why they get like ulcers on their legs and stuff?

Marcos:
Yes, because what’s happening is the microcirculation is getting gradually clogged up. And it’s often the deposition of this glycoprotein that’s sometimes called hyaline that coats the inside of all their blood vessels. So all of this, TLDR of it all, is that cacao polyphenols, because they reduce inflammation and damage to the lining of blood vessels and dilate them, can help to, to some degree at least, offset and restore microcirculation so plus they do other stuff they actually protect against the development of type diabetes and this is interesting because of course people think chocolate you know must avoid but actually and this of course we’re talking specifically about cacao itself and the darker the chocolate the better for this purpose which i’m sure exactly i’m sure we’ll get into yeah but but so so the dark dark chocolate and cacao do have a protective effect against diabetes meaning that having a bit of it every day or even a few times a week can reduce the likelihood of developing diabetes and will actually tend to slightly lower blood sugar levels a bit a few points by improving insulin sensitivity which means people’s set because what happens in type diabetes again there’s so many rabbit holes so so this is read the book yeah yeah because i mean there’s so many what happens in type obviously type is the form of diabetes that tends to, it’s not always the case, but tends to develop later in life.

Marcos:
And that is where… People develop insulin desensitization so that they lose their sensitivity to the hormone insulin. What insulin does, it’s produced by the pancreas and it helps your cells take in sugar and also fat and protein to some degree. And what happens with type diabetes, my analogy is it’s a bit like if you have an over-enthusiastic postman who keeps ringing the freaking doorbell, eventually you’ll start to ignore the doorbell. That’s essentially what the cells do. If somebody’s been at least partly part of this is diet somebody’s been living on a diet with way too many refined sugars or you know just processed foods for too long so their insulin’s been content of drinking lots of sugary beverages those those have been almost correlated in an almost linear fashion with the development of diabetes so that’s interesting but sodas as they say in america so just gallons of sugar water if you’re doing that for years then your your pancreas is constantly having to pump out vast volumes of insulin like at a moment’s notice and eventually your cells just stop out that they stop answering the door to the postman that so you lose that insulin sensitivity and some of the polyphenols in cacao and incidentally polyphenols and other foods rich in polyphenols like berries and a bunch of other plants tea being one uh will restore that sensitivity to insulin they’ll so

Alison:
The cells will actually.

Marcos:
Change yes they will they will start responding to insulin again a little bit so i’m not saying that this is um that cacao on its own would reverse type diabetes but it will always help and it will if somebody is at risk of it’s a very good thing to include in the diets that’s the conventional research and there’s loads more of it but what’s

Alison:
Really interesting about that is that when i was about i was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome. And I remember reading all about it. And it just, again, it’s a fact. It’s potentially one of the reasons for it. Is that there’s a problem with the pancreas and you become.

Marcos:
You know, There’s an interesting link with the blood sugar and lack of insulin sensitivity.

Alison:
Exactly. So I wonder if, you know, so many people are suffering with cholecystic ovarian syndrome in the society we live in. And I wonder whether it would then do the same thing, because if their problem is that they’re not sensitive to insulin anymore, then that, again, could potentially do what it does with diabetes.

Marcos:
Definitely. It’d be a part of the puzzle. And, you know, cacao is so, so helpful for so many things. I mean, obviously there’s other bit, like somebody has any form of lack of insulin sensitivity, then doing something like exercise, obvious one, but the specific form, and we’re off topic here, but high intensity interval training. So that’s really, and I love recommending that to clients because it’s sort of getting the benefits of a to one hour work, minutes to one hour workout in the shortest possible timeframe. Do you know what I mean? So you can literally do five to minutes a day and get the same benefit as doing minutes. But anyway, that’s a whole thing. People can look that up if they’re interested. So doing that high intensity interval training, doing things with a diet as you advocate on this podcast, like eating a more whole food ancestral diet in general.

Marcos:
And so exercise, whole food diet, and then including specific medicinals or medicinal foods because cacao is something like a lot of plants are on the spectrum between food and drug. And really, they’re just in my mind the same thing. It’s just, you know, the more you go to the drug end of the spectrum, the more likely it is that those plants contain more compounds that are potentially toxic, but have specific uses. Whereas on the food end of the spectrum, they’re more just a soup of compounds that are equally benign or potentially problematic, but are relatively low level. Do you know what I mean? So cacao is closer to the food end of that spectrum. And therefore for most people unless there are a few people who have the misfortune of having a cacao sensitivity which is which is you know sad for them but you know other than those for most people it’s going to be good um and yeah it would certainly i think be a useful thing to incorporate diet of say anyone with pcos or any form of insulin uh i’m forgetting the phrase but it’s lack of insulin

Alison:
Sensitivity insulin desensitization.

Marcos:
I can’t remember there is a phrase for it but it’s just popping out my head

Alison:
This morning um if you when you do read your um big book there’s just a huge long section on all of the benefits you know that the kind of heart disease all of the different trials you kind of pull up yeah and and show all of the evidence and there are some really surprising things you know as you carry on reading that chapter as to things that actually cacao can do and one of them i remember is sun cream do you can you Bring that to the conversation and tell us about that. Yeah, this was fascinating.

Marcos:
Yeah, so it’s cacao and skin health. And this is, again, probably a polyphenol-related thing, the antioxidant compounds. Well, I think they showed in some clinical trials that cacao provides protection against UV light. It reduces skin damage. So I think a similar effect but weaker is found with tomatoes because lycopene, the pigment in tomatoes. But cacao has a stronger effect. And I think partly that may be because the antioxidants themselves might be protecting against UV-induced damage. Because they have this sort of um they have that what antioxidants are side like another tangent off a tangent yeah that we i mean my i think your brain is a bit similar alice my brain is mostly made up of tangents so just

Alison:
Kind of push it together to make a.

Marcos:
Coherent hold yeah but uh but so uh yeah one of the antioxidants uh this is my very cereal box and slightly inaccurate explanation but it serves our substances which will donate so what happens with oxidation is you get um oxygen coming along like oxygen is used in every sort of metabolically active cell in the body to produce energy we burn oxygen uh to produce energy oxygen plus glucose equals energy glucose is fuel you use the oxygen to burn it produces energy that’s that’s what happens in the mitochondria of every cell and everyone if you’ve done GCSE biology you know it’s turned into ATP and blah blah blah all right so that’s happening so we’re basically using glucose is the fuel oxygen is the stuff from the air that we use to burn that fuel however that process just automatically by default produces things called free radicals now what these are technically they’re not little I always say little like little Che Guevara’s they’re not they’re they’re They’re little free electrons.

Marcos:
And I regard, it’s best to envisage them, imagine them as like soot from a fire. So this burning fuel produces soot, which is like these little free radicals. And if you get enough of these free radicals, what they’re doing is little free electrons. They’ll bounce off other atoms and nit electrons from them. So they call this little, cause this little chain reaction of destabilization at the atomic level. So it’s like soot from a fire. You get enough soot, eventually the cell gets clogged up and then the cell is damaged and eventually it dies. That’s oxidation and that’s happening in every cell of our body all the time as we’re now that our body can produce substances which are antioxidant and does like there’s a major one produced by the liver called glutathione and what these are are basically just chemicals with electrons to spare so they go around handing out these electrons to stabilize these three radicals so you can visualize them as chemicals that go around mopping up the soot basically and And so what antioxidants are, are substances in our body or in food, such as the polyphenols that you find in tea or cacao, that have these spare electrons. They’re electron donors. They go around mopping up the soot from these fires. So, yeah, I can’t remember how I got onto that, but that was essentially what… Oh, because you’re asking about the skin, the skin damage. Yeah, that was it.

Alison:
Thanks for remembering.

Marcos:
So, partly it is reducing skin damage by that mechanism. Partly, I think it’s because they dilate the blood vessels, so they improve the blood flow to the skin. Yeah. Like I say, they improve the blood flow everywhere. Like people have been given cacao or chocolate and shoved them into a CAT scanner, and you can literally see the circulation improving to their skin and to their brain and to everywhere within about half an hour. because of this vasodilation that they cause. And that’s because the polyphenols in cacao increase the production of nitric oxide, which is this gaseous little compound in the vascular endothelium, in the lining of the blood vessels, which causes dilation and then gets the blood flow over it. So it’s partly that. And they actually did one experiment looking at skin health. And they found that cacao, taken as part of the diet,

Marcos:
Improved various parameters of the skin appearance like they improved the elasticity um improve the one thing they didn’t improve which i was a bit gutted about was wrinkles it did everything else but wrinkles so it reduced redness improved like the elasticity elasticity it’s got to help with it yeah it’s got sure one would think but apparently not but improved other major indices of skin health like it’s hydration like elasticity um like reducing redness stuff like that so and i’m guessing that’s just because the combination is two things it’s essentially reducing damage things that damage the skin so if you’ve got uv light uvb the uv burning rays will actually cause cause damage to dna and break down the skin and stuff and burn it and cacao buffers against that so it actually is like taking a bit of an internal spf

Alison:
Yeah wow well we don’t we we never put you know cream on our skins having lived in you know tuscany for years of our lives, we use hats you know, we don’t go out at the wrong times, etc, etc but I feel like, You know, really, neither Rob or I have had serious problems with burning, despite living in Italy for years. And I do wonder how much effect our diet has had.

Marcos:
Probably huge. Probably huge. Because, as I say, just the research on, and cacao is not the only food, or functional food is the trendy term now. But, like, it’s not the only food or substance, natural substance, that has a similar effect. I mean, cacao is, for me, top tier, because it does so many things simultaneously. sleep. But like I say, tomatoes, the lycopene in tomatoes are something. And there are other compounds in many other plants and herbs, which will do similar things. So if you’re eating a varied whole food diet with a bunch of herbs and like, you know, those, the exciting things you talk about in your podcasting, it’s far more likely that you’re going to be buffered against that. But I mean, similar to you, I went, when I went, every time I’ve gone traveling in Mexico, Guatemala, the only time I’ve ever got burned was when I joined a, an outdoor, a team, like we were building an outdoor eco toilet in some house somewhere. I’ve randomly joined this student team because we were outside in the hot sun all day. So normally what I do with my, and I was only on the back of my neck because I always wear a long sleeve t-shirt and a hat and all the rest of it. So normally, same as you, I’ve traveled in the really hot countries and I don’t come back with the mildest of tans because it’s partly my vampiric behavior where I just go out late. Night time. I tend to avoid the day.

Alison:
I might do that, I got bitten all by all the mosquitoes.

Marcos:
Okay.

Alison:
I want to talk particularly about stimulants. I mentioned a bit earlier on about this, but for a lot of people in the health world, they are like a no-no. And yet, as I said, prominent health figures have come down on the side of things like coffee and promoting the health benefits of it. Now, chocolate has a far longer ancestral pedigree than coffee. I wanted to ask you, as someone who’s done research on chocolate, but also as a herbalist, how you feel about the role of stimulants in a body. And specifically, as a personal note, you and many of the listeners know that I live in a highly sensitive body. And how do you feel about stimulants within different body types? How do we know what are the right amounts for us? You know, what should we be looking for?

Marcos:
That’s a brilliant question. Okay, so I’ll address the second bit first. Yeah, okay. With the sensitive bodies and the right amounts. Very simple answer a bit of a get out jail free card actually is is just that it it really depends on the individual sensitivity you know your own body is your best laboratory as you know so i know that’s a huge cop out but it is it is also factually true that you know that that whole cliche like one man’s meat is another man’s poison whatever that’s true so what is great for one person may be more problematic for another person yeah now the stimulants that you mentioned sort of coffee tea cacao which is sort of like the common thread of those is caffeine right yeah caffeine is present in all of them and it was i always regard it as a hangover victorian science that they were looked at and i think i mentioned this in the previous podcast that we did it’s sort of like this idea that they’re just this chemical with a bunch of packaging you know because the victorians were really keen on getting to the active ingredient or the active constituent and that’s totally understandable because science was in its early era of pulling out the the thing the chemical that made it work and as things have got a bit more sophisticated it sort of confirmed the you know in a

Marcos:
Sense the older way of looking at things which is that you cannot it’s it’s the quote i put at the beginning i think of the chapter on pharmacology in the book which is the quote from the dowdy ching about um if you can enumerate the parts of a carriage you still have not described what a carriage is you know another is that i know it’s a a cliche now but that holism the holistic thing in other words a thing is a thing in and of itself and just because you can take apart as constituents that doesn’t mean those constituents are wholly descriptive the entire entity and this is so to bring it back to the stimulants this is very true so on the on the still somewhat reductionist level those three plants because we mentioned all three of them yeah cacao or a tea coffee contain different ratios of the three alkaloids caffeine theophylline and theobromine okay so they’re all stimulants but they’re all slightly different yeah um so there’s there’s different ratios in each part but then they also contain a whole smorgasbord of other constituents that are totally different so the effects are very different actually so coffee uh is a much uh more caffeine relatively um and it also gives you a much rapid much more rapid up and then down you know there’s a and then a uh so this is just subjective tea because it

Marcos:
Also contains l-theanine which is this amino acid which has a calming effect slightly lower levels of caffeine actually weight for weight a lot of people don’t realize it’s weight for weight tea has more caffeine than coffee in it it’s just that the doses we prepare and you know the way we prepare them your average cup of tea has much less caffeine than a cup of coffee because we use way more coffee beans and the beans are heavier right so yeah anyway uh that’s a a nerdy aside but yeah that’s this podcast will be entirely made of nerdy aside exactly um but but so the point there is that

Marcos:
Coffee tends to give you a fairly rapid arc and then a relatively rapid dissension of effect. The tea, because it’s got the L-theanine, which is a sort of calming, relaxing effect, at the same time as the caffeine, has a slightly more balanced effect. And with the cacao, because you’ve got theobromine as the main stimulant, which is less stimulating and there’s less caffeine, has a much more gentle stimulating effect. Plus, you’ve also got the other constituents, the main ones being in this case, the polyphenols, which will modulate the effect of that to the extent that we know that with cacao, and this is a huge thing, and this is getting onto secondary medicinal effects, which we haven’t even got into yet. So we talked about the big ones on circulation and heart health and diabetes and blood sugar and all that. The second level effect is because cacao lowers the level of adrenaline and cortisol, the stress stress steroids so it does so acutely so they’ve they’ve taken people’s samples of people’s saliva and urine within hours of ingesting cacao and also over a medium term so like over two weeks yeah and what’s super interesting about that is that the more stressed or anxious somebody feels the more it lowers the level of cortisol and adrenaline so it actually knows yeah that’s what’s super cool about it now so state dependent it’s state dependent

Alison:
So how much how much cacao do you have to actually.

Marcos:
Not that much i mean i think in the in these there were two small human trials that they’ve shown this with and i think they use dark chocolate something like so that’s just crappy i mean i love dark chocolate some i’ve used the word crappy there that’s because i have a i have a bias against refined sugar which i know you also share yeah but um but i regard dark chocolate as methadone now it’s my inferior substitute for the real thing um but but um not to say that heroin is good folks i’m just you’re being tongue-in-cheek right but um so yeah so the point there is that cacao actually lowers cortisol adrenaline i think in those trials they use something like dark chocolate grams a day so that’s half a large bar yeah yeah but if you translate that to something like cocoa nibs or actual cacao We’re probably only talking about grams or so.

Alison:
Yeah, because of course if it’s %, % it’s chocolate.

Marcos:
Exactly, so in a % bar, % will be sugar. And then of the remaining , probably another grams or so will be added cocoa butter. Do you know what I mean? So we’re looking at to of the nibs. So not that much, a reasonable dosage for sure. And it has that… Whereas coffee, I think, would tend to, I don’t know this for sure, but I think coffee slightly raises cortisol levels, raises stress steroid levels. Tea, I think, probably lowers it a bit, but I’d need to double check that because of the calming effect of the L-theanine and the higher levels, again, of polyphenols. Not the same ones as you find in cacao so they they are not entirely interchangeable but like cacao tea has a similar um similar property of reducing the risk of heart attack and stroke and reducing type diabetes and stuff like that cacao i would say has a stronger effect on the microcirculation though and on circulation in general because cacao has that unique thing tea does not do that cacao has this unique thing when you take it you can put somebody in a cat scanner and their circulation improves everywhere. So to bring it back to the stimulants, I think firstly, we’ve got to stop thinking of stimulants as a monolith. They’re not all the same thing.

Marcos:
Each plant has a different suite of effect. It’s sometimes known as the entourage effect, which is the sum of the effect of all the chemicals in a plant creates a unique fingerprint of effect for that entire plant. So the plant itself is the medicine, not a constituent or one constituent from it no matter how i always think of caffeine and theophiline as theobromine is like caffeine is like diana ross and the other two of the supremes do you know i mean so it’s kind of like i’ve got this idea that you know that and they are the stars of the show in a sense but i i think i say in the book it’s a bit like if caffeine is a motor and we’re like oh that’s the bit that makes it go yeah sure but if you take a motor out and strap it to a skateboard it’ll go really freaking quickly but there’s no steering no no no airbags no you know what i mean the rest of the car is missing so the point there is is each of those stimulants is different and what i think to my mind makes cacao different is that it is a stress lowering stimulant uh you know there are so for most people who are stressed it’s actually a good stimulant to have at least occasionally um i would suggest more than occasionally but that’s that’s up to individual choice um i guess the because of the theobromine stimulates heart rate it stimulates

Marcos:
Both the rate and the force of the heart a bit and the kidneys caffeine is more central nervous system it has a stronger effect on the brain keeping you awake basically yeah and it also is a diuretic and it speeds up the heart a bit theobromine has variable effects on the central nervous system for some people it acts as a wakey-uppy stimulant for other people it has virtually no effect on the brain.

Marcos:
Almost always has an effect on speeding up the heart rate and the peeing so what i’m ambling toward meandering towards there is that for people who have um like a rapid like maybe they’ve got a rapid heart rate or something like atrial fibrillation just be a bit careful about the dosage of cacao i mean cacao does have this heart protective effect um that the polyphenols which we talked about um it reduces the risk of heart tag and stroke but it does have that immediate effect because the theobromia is slightly speeding up the heart rate. So I know that there’s a herbalist called Kevin Orbel-Machin who’s been around for decades. And he had, I can’t remember what heart condition he had, but he had a very severe heart condition. And he noted that post-surgery, obviously because he knows his cacao and his onions and every other plant. So he tried having cacao in recovery from the surgery, but he actually, he said it just gave him palpitations. And for most people, because it has that stress lowering effect to the opposite, but just be aware if you have a heart arrhythmia or a very sensitive heart,

Marcos:
That cacao may be a little bit sensitizing for those people because it stimulates the heart rate. He found that at a certain point in his recovery, he was able to have a bit of chocolate and it was fine. But it was just sort of in the immediate aftermath when the heart was sort of like a bit weak as a kitten, I think he described in this article he wrote. He would have to sort of have gentle medicinal plants like hawthorn and lime flower that were just calming and supported the heart and nothing stimulating at all but in terms of our spectrum of stimulants cacao is I would say overall less stimulating and has this secondary relaxing effect and we haven’t even talked about these other constituents which might modulate the endorphins a bit what I call cacao’s fairy dust constituents Maybe we’ll get to

Alison:
That in the second half, I think. I think, thank you for all that. I think it’s, Very important that you said at the beginning, you know, that our body is our laboratory. And that’s certainly the attitude that Andrew and I share, you know, through all of our episodes, that we ourselves are on journeys and we try things and we see what happens. And it’s very hard sometimes to easily access what happens because, you know, life is complicated. It is multifactorial. It’s so hard. But personally, I know that I can’t handle coffee. I’ve been through periods where I have drunk green coffee. And I’ve gotten much better with that than I have with roasted coffee. But still, I can handle cacao. And I’m like you. I mean, I don’t have dark chocolate. I have chocolate that’s got either no sugar in it or a very, very, very small amount of sugar in it. I can handle that. Much better than i can handle coffee and i don’t drink tea either.

Marcos:
Which is fascinating and that and case in point right like a bit of a qed there yeah um so and and you know as a more sort of i would say victorian-minded scientist or conventional pessimist oh it’s the different levels of caffeine i’m like it’s not just that though it’s it’s it’s the it’s the the suite of other constituents as i say like caffeine we know tends to increase anxiety uh cacao we’ve measured it reduces the levels of adrenaline and cortisol um and that i think is underlying a lot of its other potential so one of the things that the reason coffees come because the the the thing you’re alluding to earlier about this i felt this was a this seems to have been a bit of a thing in the past and particularly in the s and s where a lot of complementary health people were sort of asserting that that coffee and chocolate and tea were like addictions yeah you needed to cut out yeah yeah and i can see why they thought that and i do think a lot of people are i don’t like feeling dependent on anything yeah so even even cacao like i’ll have it three times a week and every so often maybe every couple years you know i’m gonna go for a month without it just because like you know i’m yeah i’m uh perverse like that no i

Alison:
I can because you want to know what’s happening to your body and you want to not be in a state where you don’t know what happens if you don’t have this.

Marcos:
Substance exactly exactly that i kind of want to see where my baseline is i want to know where my baseline is and occasionally i like to know that at least at least hypothetically i’m running the show you know what i mean very hypothetically uh given that we’re we’re you know we’re more microbe than we are human you know the amount of microbes living in us is greater than our human

Alison:
Cells i am i also think that um it’s really interesting you talk about you know doctors of a certain mindset will say, well, you’ve got to have less coffee. And I think, you know, they’re a doctor, I know that there are doctors still saying that, but that’s because there are people drinking alcohol.

Marcos:
Instant coffee you know yes

Alison:
Seven cups a day with pasteurized.

Marcos:
The whole thing about you go to an airport and the queue of the queue of um early morning caffeine addicts generally like just before the shutters even go up they’re out they’re queuing outside because they need their fix of coffee which i can i find um relatable but i think you know because but anyway the the other thing from this is that most studies have now shown that on the whole coffee does seem to reduce the risk of overall mortality. It reduces the all-cause mortality. And so does cacao, I think a bit more than, well, significantly more than coffee does. So the cacao’s reduction in relative risk of all-cause mortality is significant. I want to just pause a moment there on a technical point, which as a non-mathy person confused me for quite some time. And that’s the difference between absolute risk and relative risk okay this is a stats thing relative risk is

Marcos:
It’s you can you often find and journalists often confuse these things so they’ll often report a new bit of data about this this drug reduces the risk of death by percent and when you read the actual original it’s having that they’re usually complete nugs or something but if you read the original article they’re often talking about relative risk okay and what that means is you might have a group of, uh, a thousand people and in one group two people die like that group of a thousand people two people die yeah and then they give this other group of a thousand people the drug yeah and in that group one person dies right that’s a reduction in relative risk okay relative risk meaning relative to the

Alison:
Other group yeah.

Marcos:
fewer people have died yeah the absolute risk is . you know whatever the decimal point is

Alison:
How many people there.

Marcos:
Were yeah if you if you look at it as a percent you We turn that into a percentage and it’s two out of a thousand to one out of a thousand. So the absolute risk is vastly.

Alison:
Well, the journalist is just going to pick whichever one makes the right article.

Marcos:
Makes the most flashy headline. And often I think some journalists literally don’t understand the difference. So with Cacao, I’ve tried to be pernickety about in both the books about when I’m quoting research, this is relative risk and this is absolute risk. And obviously the absolute absolute risk stats are often seem a lot more a lot less impressive relative risk is important though because when you’re looking at huge populations of people that difference between two out of a thousand

Alison:
To one out of a thousand.

Marcos:
Can be big yeah it can mean many so so for cacao i think it’s i can’t off the top of my head i couldn’t i’d have to look it up in the book in my own book uh but i don’t know if this sort of comes to something But I’d have to look that up. But it’s a significant reduction in relative risk of all-cause mortality, something like %. And it’s correlated with, and this is more like absolute risk, over a population, the regular use of chocolate, not even cacao, just dark chocolate, even like once a week. This is crazy. It’s been correlated with an average… Increase in life expectancy of about a year. Gosh. Which is nuts. It’s like just having cacao once,

Alison:
Twice.

Marcos:
Now, obviously, that’s correlation, not causation. All the usual scientific caveats. Is that because the kind of people who eat chocolate more regularly, they might be a bit more bougie in general, they might be, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when you start, as you know, having read the book, when you start stacking up all the different angles,

Alison:
It starts convincing. Yes.

Marcos:
Yeah, because it starts becoming a bit of a no-brainer if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you know.

Alison:
There’s one more thing. Before we go on to talk about how we should be eating chocolate, I just want to talk about the different beans you mentioned at the beginning of the episode. So I have a course on my website which will show people how to go from a bag of unroasted beans to a bar of chocolate without having a very expensive machine to make the chocolate. And it’s something we do regularly at home. When I first started, after having read your book and looked at the different profiles of the different types of beans, the criollo and the forestero, and the middle one, Trinitario, is that how you pronounce it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I thought, right, I’m going to choose my bean really carefully because I think that I’m caffeine sensitive. So I did some research with a cacao supplier and I ended up finding a bean in Ecuador somewhere that wasn’t criollo. It was a kind of a cross between the other two.

Marcos:
Might have been a Trinitario then.

Alison:
Yeah, it was lower caffeine. Yes. And, you know, I knew that there were different flavor profiles to the different types of beans. Anyway, so I bought a large amount. I can’t remember. As usual, just bags of large amounts of food in our house. I think I might have bought kilos. And I made chopped up from that. Now this supplier don’t do that bean anymore. So I kind of, you know, I look around and I see what are the different supplies. And people often ask me when they buy that course, what bean did you use? Because I’m caffeine sensitive. And I just wondered if you could talk very briefly about the three different varieties and if people are choosing beans raw to make into chocolate, as they would do if they were taking my course.

Marcos:
Should

Alison:
They be bothered about.

Marcos:
That at all? I don’t know. That’s an interesting one. I mean, me being a big chocolate junkie, I would tend to go for the… So yeah, let’s start about that on top. So the variety, there are three main varieties. In fact, there are lots of other hybrids and whatever, but the three main as you’ve mentioned are criollo forastero and tributario yeah i won’t do them a fancy spanish pronunciation like keep it whatever uh so less pretentious uh so criollo is the criollo if you’re doing it like all fancy criollo is the has more caffeine relatively that’s about . so not massive yeah um forastero varieties have less caffeine okay and more i’m interesting more of the and the reason the criollo though are the more expensive varieties and that was the variety that was developed in Central America over thousands of years and selected. Criollo varieties are trickier to grow. They’re much more sensitive.

Alison:
Right, okay.

Marcos:
They are more disease susceptible, presumably because they’ve been hybridized and tinkered with over millennia.

Alison:
As has happened with so many other plants and they’re the ones that you just get all the diseases.

Marcos:
Exactly, because in the relationship with humans, humans have selected them for that. And the desirable quality was obviously a bit more stimulation so they’ve bred in the slightly higher caffeine they’ve also got a less sour taste yeah because they have fewer of the anthocyanins in okay that which are the sour purple looking polyphenols that think of cyan as in you know the color hence the anthocyanins but um so what in cross-section when they’re raw they’re sort of an ivory or slightly maybe slightly pale pink but usually ivory color whereas your forest era in cross-section when they’re all a purple or pinky sort of colour. So the

Marcos:
To answer the question, I mean, yes, the Criollo contains more caffeine. But I mean, because all varieties of cacao have this adrenaline and cortisol lowering capacity, I don’t think that’s such a major consideration. And this is my, I admit, it’s a bias. I have no scientific reason for this, really. But i would tend i personally tend to gravitate towards the criollo varieties because that was the variety that was selected for and and bred for so many and okay it was bred presumably for taste

Marcos:
Gustatory value because less less sour and for that the slightly higher caffeine but it it doesn’t have a lower antioxidant effect even though it’s got less anthocyanins it’s got lots of the prosanidins the less uh sour more broken down forms that are more active yeah um and it still has this cortisol and adrenaline effect and to my mind and it sort of has a nicer more psychotropic effect it affects my mood more which is i’m looking uh for my drug in you know i’m looking for a good drug here so i’m looking for i’m looking for something that is both good for me yes that will have an effect that i like so but you so again what i’d suggest you can experiment here you get some a good criollo variety and a forest area variety and just toast them up and just see because yes you’re absolutely right the criollo variety contains a bit more caffeine sometimes double but it’s not high it’s like . percent which is much lower than some other caffeinated caffeine containing plants um

Marcos:
And it still has that adrenaline and cortisol lowing property. The forestero, slightly lower caffeine. The trinitario, as you’d imagine, for a hybrid somewhere in the middle. And then the other varieties that I’ve mentioned in passing are mostly kind of trinitario things. They’re called forestero hybrids. And there are lots of variants that you find, particularly in the Amazon Basin, where we now think cacao originated. So the varieties called amelonado, which look, Like, look, they’re so cool because the pods are round, so they’re like melons, like amelonano, melon. And then you’ve got these other ones, lagarto, which is like crocodile-looking, like lizard-y looking skin. So loads of varieties, but the three main borks are the criollo, which is the fancy pants,

Marcos:
Human interacted with for millennia, slightly higher caffeine, lower antioxidant one from Central America. And then the forestero from the amazon basin in south america originally although of course now it’s grown all around the world the trinitario so named because it was originally developed in trinidad uh because it was the cow farming in trinidad colonial plantations where they they got there and they crossed that what they were trying to do and they succeeded in doing was crossing the much more lower yielding disease sensitive fussy pernickety criollo variety with the hardier but sourer Forastero to produce a hybrid, Trinitario, which was supposed to be best of both worlds. You know, it would have a better flavor profile. So… So the answer to this, again, I’m going to play the get-out-of-jail-free card, is that it will depend on individual sensitivity. If you’re going by caffeine alone, then absolutely the Forresteria or a Trinitario variety might be better. But I would encourage you and other entrepreneurial types to also get a little batch of the Criollo and just toast them and play with them and see how they go. Because as I say, it’s a herbalist bias, but I always tend to think the variety which was most prized by humans, yet it could be because they just wanted a stronger stimulant. That has happened among many cultures. But it could also be because it was a better product.

Alison:
It brought something with it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting because since we come back to the UK, as I said, the supplier that I got those beans from no longer sells those beans. Yes. So Rob bought me for my birthday a kilo of Criolla and I made chocolate with that. And I’ve been fine with it. So I wonder whether things have changed or perhaps I didn’t need to be worried about it in the first place.

Marcos:
I suspect the latter because, as I say, it’s a feature of cacao in general, that it lowers the cortisol adrenaline. So I think the issue you might have with caffeine, first of all, is probably partly a dose issue. If you take coffee is per dose of coffee, much more caffeine per dose, even with tea. So say you’ve got a, I mean, even like if you use grams of cacao to make a drink, so we’re talking about a quote unquote ceremonial cacao level drink, you’re going to get in that maybe only milligrams of caffeine. You’re getting milligrams of theobromine, so tons of that. But as I say, people’s sensitivity to that in terms of the central nervous system.

Alison:
How does that compare to coffee?

Marcos:
Oh, so, yeah, coffee, like an ordinary, I think a drip, like a, I’m not sure about the different variety, but maybe a… An espresso, an espresso, a single shot of espresso, I think contains something between and milligrams of caffeine. You know, a lot of the massive, well, the grande from Starbucks contain up to like plus milligrams of caffeine.

Alison:
It contains a lot of other stuff.

Marcos:
Let’s not go there. But then a cup of tea depends, like green tea, black tea. People often think green tea is lower caffeine. It can be, but it just depends. Green tea is actually slightly more stimulating the black tea, interestingly, which is probably a feature of the polyphenols. Doing things with the caffeine but anyway so green tea black tea a cup of that might contain something between anywhere between to milligrams of caffeine so a huge grams of cacao will contain about milligrams of caffeine so that’s about the same as in an ordinary cup of black tea

Alison:
See i never have grams in one go never yeah it’s a large it was a huge before we left home this morning i had two little chocolates that i made and you know that that’s not yeah.

Marcos:
No that wouldn’t be it would be probably like five grams or something yeah

Alison:
So and that feels to me i mean we’re going to go on to talk about how we should be eating it but for me the the point of having chocolate is the sensation you know the experience and for me two of those little chocolate feels the same space having experimented with coffee that having a coffee nice for me psychologically. So that’s fine. You know, tick the box, get on, you know. Okay. So thanks very much for that. What we’ll do now is we’ll go on to talk about how we should be eating chocolate and we’ll just take a short break first. Okay. So you mentioned in passing about three or four minutes ago, putting cacao in a drink, you know, she said, if you’re making a drink. So what I want you to talk to us about briefly first is about how chocolate was ancestrally, originally eaten, just a little bit of the history around it.

Marcos:
Yeah. As you’ve just implied, it was not eaten, but drunk. So, I mean, the fruit, the cacao fruit from the pods i presume that was always eaten yeah because you know that’s a lesser known thing where you’ve got this mucilaginous sweet fruit in the pods but the seeds um which have a relationship with humans probably going back years or more um we’ve we’ve always um fermented them which means you just scoop them out the pod yeah you pile them up with a bit of fruit pulp on them still uh leave them for a few days uh depending different regions but fermented and then those are being toasted uh and then shelled yeah and then you grind the shelled seeds to a liquid because the beans have like as you know about fat so it’s like making a nut butter but they turn into basically liquid chocolate at that point and then mixed with water and other plants sometimes for flavoring or for medicinal purposes um so it’s always been drunk um and

Alison:
Not was milk i mean.

Marcos:
And not oh no no absolutely milk is that milk was a post-colonial sort of european import

Alison:
So that had someone made that up in europe someone yeah oh yeah.

Marcos:
Totally well well actually what i think that the timeline was and the best i mean i cover this in my book but my original source for this and still a fantastic book that i’d recommend turning on if you’re interested in anything to do with chocolate is sophie and michael co’s the true history of chocolate that was a really good secondary source for me obviously all my primary stuff i’m as a herbalist more interested in the nuts and bolts of why this works yeah and like yourself in the ancestral forms of the drink yeah um but they really go into the history and and more so into the european side right uh but they cover the the pre-columbian as well but anyway the point is that uh the timeline is the um

Marcos:
Cacao, at some point in the past, people were in Mesoamerica, in Central America, way before the Spanish conquest. They were fermenting the beans to a varying extent. Maybe some regions they’d have just been fermented for a day or two, others maybe four or five days. And then you toast them, shell them, grind them, mix with water. And that was always the form that they were consumed with. often with, and there are thousands of varieties of indigenous drinks made with different plant admixtures. And of course, one of the native most common gruels, like you find these gruels and pottages worldwide made with different grains. Theirs was of course atole, maize atole, which is made with maize and cacao would sometimes be added to those and still is. Um so uh that was the ancestral fall when could when the europeans first came over in sort of like s and and took over the gaff um the they would they they imported some of their own spices so vanilla comes from central america vanilla was was uh indigenous um but they started using cinnamon which they imported from sri lanka and black pepper which has fallen out of fashion was drunk with chocolate at the time.

Marcos:
Loads of sugar, they started adding sugar. So that was the form in which, so you ended up with this sweetened hot chocolate popping up in the courts in Spain, in the Spanish court. And then all the other toffs and knobs around Europe got really impressed by that. So then it went to the French court. And then I think at some point that milk started being added, um, in Europe after it. So the Spanish would initially just sugar dark, you know, not, not so much milk. And then I think when it got spread around the rest of Europe, they started adding, adding milk. And then obviously with the, with the manufacturing, I think it was Daniel Peter from, from, from Nestle who made the first, I think it was him who made the first milk chocolate. Um, it might’ve been Rudolph Lynn. Well, I think, no, I think I’m, I’m, you have to remember.

Alison:
So it changed, not only putting milk with them, it’s changed here from a drink to a bar.

Marcos:
It’s changed, changed forms. Look, even in , there’s Henry Stubb, who is, I always think of him as like my, my counterpart years ago. Because he was like basically, he was a doctor though. He was a posh, well-heeled doctor, but he would have been using many plants, of course. In London in the s. and he wrote rather disparagingly because he was a massive fan of cacao ground ground it and made drinks and he said uh i put a quote in the book i think at the end of chapter one when when he talks about the the the what is drunk in the coffee houses in england today is he talked about being being a mess of milk and sugar and eggs and nothing so nourishing or wholesome as the original cacao original drink is because he was sort of noting that all of these he said all of these additives improve the chocolate not one bit you know he put it in beautiful language yeah new yeah that was four and five years ago um and of course you know so they might have added to the the nutrition in terms of fat or protein or whatever calories um and and and you know other nutritional good things but they actually often detract from the we you know when we filleted the been pharmacologically, we know that the polyphenols absorb slightly better when combined with some complex starches or carbohydrates. So as in a traditional atolene.

Marcos:
Surprise surprise but but exactly but when you mix it with milk because there’s the higher amount of protein milk the casein the the milk protein the casein actually binds the other polyphenols bind to the bind to the milk uh bind to the casein and slightly reduced not massively yeah they slightly reduce so you get about less of the polyphenols okay um sugar’s a mixed bag because sugar because it’s a carbohydrate will increase the uptake of polyphenols but refined sugar on its own also causes some metabolic stress. So you’re sort of slightly undoing some of the anti-diabetic benefits and all of that. I mean, what’s fascinating about it to me though, is to get back to your original question about what form should we be consuming? Yeah. Definitely. I would say the original form, the OG form, which is why we get on and why I’m on this podcast, presumably, because it’s that original form, the ancestral form of it was as a drink could be made into an atole and i just think that is optimal in the sense that it’s probably the best absorbed yeah um and you’ve got these amazing traditional recipes and

Alison:
Flavors and they’re in your book and yes and having obviously i was most excited in your whole book about the recipe and i remember um you know having read it i we got corn and i nixtamalized it and i fermented it in a ball yeah until it went sour you made and then i made yeah i made an atole recipe that’s in your book and it was absolutely delicious. I just said, I find it, not surprising really having you know done the research i have but just you know that we have gone and taken this and put it with milk and sugar and yet originally it was eaten with complex carb or with water and with herbs in order to best get the benefits from the plant yeah and.

Marcos:
I think that was probably an empirical process like that that you know they they worked or who knows whether it is empirical or intuitive or whatever a combination of the two but but um but yeah they they it’s not I mean, look, I don’t want to be an absolutist about these things. I don’t think I’m not saying, and I’m sure you’re not saying either, that every traditional form of a thing is always the best, but it’s just, it’s more often the case than not, that if something has been developed that way for a long period of time, there’s a sense to it. And it doesn’t always mean that that’s always the best or it’s always right, but there’s a sense to it. And there’s that the roots form of things, it’s always worth looking because, you know, know there is sometimes a baby bath water issue but i think very often we just chuck chuck the whole thing out the window and think we can reinvent the wheel and there won’t be any problems with it and i know we’re on the same page with that but yeah so

Alison:
When you look around when you step outside these four walls and you go and see you know you might step into the shop.

Marcos:
Or you

Alison:
See the coffee shops that are on the street what do you feel about the chocolate products that you see around you.

Marcos:
Well i mean look i like i’m a fan of chocolate in any form really but i tend to not as i said i do i am a massive also at the same time i’m a massive chocolate snob so i i i uh i think you’ve

Alison:
Got the right to be you know.

Marcos:
Thanks thanks thanks uh but yeah no i i i tend to i do really think eating chocolate is the methadone now it’s sort of the inferior version and that’s Not to say there aren’t some really lovely, particularly like posh artisanal ones, but even over the counter, like if you’re… So, so if I was to recommend people just like, you know, somebody says, I can’t be bothered to make a drink from scratch. I’m not going to do it. Yeah. How do I get some of the benefits? Yeah. I’d be like, well, probably if you’re going for eating chocolate, something like % plus. You don’t, because obviously think of the remaining percentage is always sugar. Yeah. So you want.

Alison:
You just forget about that. You get the %, you forget % sugar. Yeah.

Marcos:
Which is, I always flip it in my head and go, okay, so that’s % sugar. That’s % sugar. so it’s not that sugar is is necessarily evil because it’s not it’s just it used to be used as a spice it’s a sweetener yeah but but we know that in consumed regularly in significant amounts it does metabolic damage and also probably does bad things to the microbiome and all sorts of that so so anyway the form that i would recommend would be plus if you’re going to go for eating chocolate my the ideal form you can buy cocoa nibs now if you’re just getting if you just want some of the health benefits of cacao just get the nibs you can get them from the supermarket you can get them from and you can just all they are is the roasted toasted seeds that have been shelled and then broken up yeah and you can add a handful of those to muesli or to some breakfast dish or to whatever or add make a trail mix or something like that and just have a handful of them in your diet every day if you mix them with something sweet like raisins or dates or something like that then it’s freaking chocolate it’s chocolate yeah exactly but it’s got added fiber but it’s not got any added fat, yada, yada. Yeah. So that’s another good way. And then if you’re gonna get the stuff to drink,

Marcos:
Cocoa, by the way, I’ll just do a little segue into cocoa, because cocoa is still good, but it’s one of the least, and it’s probably better in terms of health benefits to have eating chocolate with a bit of added sugar than most forms of cocoa. Okay. Not that cocoa is bad. I still think it’s amazing.

Marcos:
Because it’s been it’s had the fat pressed out of it and unfortunately when that happens it exposes some of the polyphenols to air a bit more because the fat it turns out acts like a bit of a protective envelope so then you get a bit of oxidation and obviously most cocoa is is is there’s some degree of heat involved in in the processing of it so you find that cocoa has less of the quote-unquote antioxidant benefits yeah um so but it’s still good it’s still a good form if you’re going to go for a cocoa then uh go for a cold if you can get one of these like less processed varieties of cocoa but i still think the minute you open the packet it’s going to get degradation it’s still good it’s still good it’s still a good form you’re still getting way more antioxidant this is a crazy stat i think i can’t remember i’m going to mangle it slightly But I think in something like in one cup of cocoa, there’s more antioxidants in that cup than most there are in the entire of most Americans’ daily diet or something. So it’s still good. Yeah, yeah.

Alison:
So how do you have your cocoa?

Marcos:
Well, I don’t have cocoa very often, only if I’m in a sort of like wartime situation where I can’t get my actual chocolate. So if I’m staying with my family and I usually buy some unsweetened cocoa and just, you know, use something with some penis amount, like a tablespoon or something, and then just make a slurry with cold water paste and maybe a bit of vanilla extract and a bit of whole powdered green stevia leaf to sweeten it. Not not the stevia side extract which are the white crystal form of stevia you can actually get powdered green stevia leaf that’s a whole other tangent that i’d like not oh there’s so many tangents because stevia is is a brilliant sweetener from south america that’s an amazing plant that uh seems to improve blood sugar sensitivity and slightly lower blood pressure

Alison:
Yeah when we were in italy the garden center had stevia plants yeah because i just i pronounce everything in different.

Marcos:
Ways um and

Alison:
You know you could just gable used to go outside the center and surreptitiously take a bit of leaf and chew it on the way home i didn’t realize it improved sensitivity yes.

Marcos:
It’s fascinating for such a sweet plant it actually improves insulin sensitive sensitivity now i’m not saying you’re going to get much of an effect from the tiny amounts you need to sweeten a beverage but it’ll be there yeah and and but most of the stevia stevia products you get on the market are the extracted sweetened compounds from stevia mixed with erythritol or some other sugar so the stevia’s had the white granule i’m not talking about the white granulates so again i’m not saying those are bad no i’m not saying they’re evil but i’m saying in my view it’s preferable to have the you can just buy the powdered green leaf cheap as chips yeah

Alison:
I’ve seen it behind.

Marcos:
Yeah yeah yeah on the thing and you just use a little bit of that and it enhances the sweetness thing so if i’m having cocoa i’ll usually have a tablespoon of cocoa powder maybe about a fifth of a teaspoon of stevia a little bit of vanilla extract if i want some cayenne in it or something some other spice and then make a little slurry with cold water then make it with hot water and just drink it like that and

Alison:
Then at home when you’re at home how how are you buying a cracker so.

Marcos:
Normally what i will usually have a massive stock of my own homemade cacao discs in the fridge but like yourself i’ve run into supply issues for the past year because my usual supplier from uh mexico has become a bit unreliable so i’m gonna have to make a trip there next year and i’m i need to source more of my my my own stuff for my own consumption yeah um but so i tend to buy um at the moment i’m just relying on blocks of essentially couverture. But there’s a friend of mine, Dea, who does cacao ceremonies and she’s from Ecuador. So she produces these blocks of cacao from Ecuador. So I’m just using her as her brand.

Alison:
So couverture is just beans that have been roasted and ground down into that liquid form and then set solid. Exactly.

Marcos:
Yes. So they’re basically blocks of solidified ground red beans so so you just grate it or chop a bit off it and then dump pop plot that into some hot or pour hot water boiling water on it and then whisk it and then

Alison:
You’re putting stevia in that as well.

Marcos:
Yeah so so i i would i i have that i have i mean i can give you my weekly i have a very fixed i’m extremely like fixed in set in my way so my monday morning breakfast which is because i have this i have a very particular odd weekly routine where monday is my office day so i do all my client work on Mondays and I tend to get up fairly early, anywhere between . and if it’s a lazy morning, ., but usually ., ..

Marcos:
Do a bit of exercise, get all my emails done. And then once I’ve done all my emails, I’m like going to have a nice leisurely three hour breakfast. So, so that I’ll, I’ll, I do a bit more exercise. I’ll, I’ll then start preparing my breakfast and I will make some oat, uh, some like basically some oat cakes from scratch, incorporating some black beans for some protein. Cause I’m a vegan type. So I like, I need to get the protein in there somewhere. Seeds, seeds, black beans, and loads of oats and then bake those into biscuits and i make a chocolate atole so i use about grams of cacao because i want a large dose um grated uh some toasted masajarina flour a little bit of extra masajarina to thicken and then because i am a herbalist uh i put loads of herbs in it so i put a bit of peppermint a little bit of yarrow a little bit of ground ivy some wood betony which is hanging up behind me i pulverize all these herbs uh usually in the Vitamix and then just sift them to get a fine powder. And I add those heads in along with a little bit of carob, because although it’s an inferior chocolate substitute, it combines quite well for extra flavour.

Alison:
I’ve never had the two together.

Marcos:
I mean, it’s just like, it’s a cereal-y taste. It’s a bit like chicory or something.

Alison:
Yeah, I’ve had it separately, but I’ve never put it with Yeah.

Marcos:
I only had a little bit, but I think because it’s when it’s in an atole and grams of cacao is already quite a lot. But I kind of want to intensify the chocolate flavour a little bit, because I’m also putting a load of medicinal plants in there as well. Yeah, yeah. Add a bit of carob, a bit of chili. So I make this whole, basically, so I have these powders. I have the grated cacao, put them in the jug, pour on, make the atole just with the toasted maserina, pour that in, whisk it all together. So I have basically a pint of this atole with all these oat biscuits. And that’s my breakfast. And I sit down and eat that.

Alison:
So you make the oat biscuits from scratch every Monday?

Marcos:
Just every Monday, just once a week.

Alison:
I love the idea of a three-hour breakfast.

Marcos:
Yeah it’s great i sort of start start preparing at and i said it’s really a brunch i’ve had i have it at yeah and then i start working again from one and sort of go work through till six or whatever so it’s a nice like broken up day yeah so that’s my and then on wednesdays tomorrow uh when we’re filming this i will have about grams of cocoa nibs just in breakfast like in the muesli or something and then on saturdays i have cacao three times a week no more and the reason is i don’t want to i i love having that uh hit a bit and i think if i have it every day it sort of loses a bit of that magic for me and i like i like looking forward to it yeah so i mean that’s nice yeah i’m living my life in peaks and troughs i mean this is the the ex party boy in me that likes to have something forward so and then on saturdays i will have a i usually have a smoothie in the morning made with about grams of cocoa nibs then in the afternoon i’ll just have a straight up cacao just like grated cacao yeah hot water yeah maybe with or without a little bit of honey in it um and uh and yeah if i’ve got my own supply i’d make it with uh so in the morning i have about grams of the nibs in the smoothie in the afternoon i have grams just a small cup okay um so i have a very rigid uh sort of like regime of it at the moment but it works

Alison:
Okay, we need to stop. Gabriel and Rob are somewhere outside waiting to come back in for their lunch.

Marcos:
I think your hubby has texted twice.

Alison:
Are you still alive? Is everything okay? So we are about to eat some lovely food, which Marcus has prepared, including, I hope, some buckwheat bread.

Marcos:
Yes.

Alison:
Promise that. Wonderful. Okay, thank you very much, Marcus. We will put in the show notes the discount code, which applies to both of your books, the tome-like Secret Life of Chocolate. And also Farmer Cacao. We will also put a link into my chocolate course. I will put the links for Marcus’s website, his herbalist practice in there. He’s got a small YouTube channel as well. So do go and look at the show notes. It’s only left for me to say thank you ever so much for hosting our recording studio this morning and sharing your wisdom with us.

Marcos:
Oh, thank you for having me back. It’s been brilliant.

Alison:
So thank you. Thank you.