Chocolate Tree

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

As Samuel Marshak used to tell the children: "Gingerbreads … nuts do not grow on the tree." But chocolate grows on a tree, whose Latin name in Russian sounds like this - "Food of the Gods". Indeed, there were times when such food was available only to the rulers of the world. Today, anyone can taste the "food of the gods." Ah, this bittersweet wealth, intoxicating and inspiring! How is it attractive, beneficial or harmful?

Long New Year holidays are associated with increased consumption of products, among which chocolate is not the last. Whatever epithets this delicacy of children and adults has earned: divine nectar, a drink of the gods, a divine heavenly drink, a panacea and a universal medicine …

Elite drink of millennia

Chocolate is one of the products known to people since ancient times. Three thousand years before our "today" on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the natives of the American continent drank chocolate during religious rituals, reckoning it as a sacred drink.

If apple trees grew in Christian Paradise, then among the Aztecs the "Paradise tree" was considered a tree, which botanists later called in Latin words "Theobroma cacao", which in Russian sounds like "Chocolate tree". It is on it that chocolate grows, or rather, fruits filled with large seeds called "cocoa beans". It was from them that chocolate drinks were first prepared, which from the sacred ones first passed into the category of elite ones.

True, I doubt that we, who are accustomed to the sweet taste of chocolate, would have appreciated those sacred drinks, which, in addition to ground cocoa beans, included various hot spices. It was only in the 17th century that sugar began to be added to the drink, which turned chocolate into a fashionable hot drink.

Hard chocolate, which the average Russian can afford today, was invented in the second quarter of the 19th century.

Health-giving chocolate

Of course, what our trade offers us today, all kinds of chocolates, are not so much filled with chocolate as refined sugar and low quality fats.

Real chocolate is 60-70 percent dark chocolate. Dark chocolate is a high-calorie nutritious product that contains many vitamins and chemical elements important for the human body. This is a long chain of vitamins: "A", "B1, B2, B3", "C", "E". A number of chemical elements from the periodic table: iron, calcium, potassium, magnesium, manganese, copper, zinc; as well as pantothenic acid, the importance of which for effective metabolism in the body can hardly be overestimated.

Real chocolate is 20 percent protein and over 50 percent good quality fat. In addition, it is rich in powerful antioxidants called "flavonols", which help improve blood circulation and help restore memory that deteriorates with age.

All of the above improves heart function, lowers blood pressure and the risk of stroke, promotes the formation of "good" cholesterol, and makes the brain work efficiently and productively.

Real chocolate has a beneficial effect on human skin, softening it, protecting it from the harmful effects of sunlight, giving the skin a pleasant radiant appearance.

Everything is good in moderation

The usefulness of chocolate does not mean that you should switch to eating only it. The benefits of real chocolate will be much greater if chocolate is a nice little addition to a properly balanced diet of a variety of fresh vegetables, quality proteins and whole grains.

Studies by scientists concerned with declining health indicate that eating about 50 grams of good quality 70 percent dark chocolate is enough per week. You should also know where such chocolate can be purchased.