Wellness Superfoods: The Incredible Benefits of Cacao

From Glowing Skin to Lowering Your Cholesterol, this Tasty Superfood Has it All

The health benefits of cacao are pretty impressive — but before you go reaching for a chocolate bar in the name of wellness, let’s clarify a few things.

Adding cacao to your diet can help everything from glowing skin to lowering your cholesterol. The catch is that if you want all the nutrients that are packed in the cacao bean, you’ll need to opt for raw cacao rather than you’re typical chocolatey products that have loads of processed sugars.

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What is Raw Cacao?

Raw cacao is simply cacao beans that haven’t been processed or roasted. The chocolate that we are used to coming across in our day-to-day is processed through a method called Dutch Processing, which was created to reduce the bitterness to achieve a mellower flavor that we are now used to having today.

While dutch processing was successful in creating a flavor that has become one of the world’s favorite sweets, by subjecting the beans to heat they lose somewhere between 60–90% of the benefits that raw cacao has.

Raw Cacao still has to be processed in order to soften the bean enough for us to eat it, but rather than using heat raw cacao is cold-pressed before it is turned into its final forms, such as cacao powder or cacao bars.

What are the Benefits of Cacao?

Now let’s get into the good stuff, the benefits of cacao:

Cacao is Rich in Antioxidants

Cacao beans are packed with Polyphenols, which are natural antioxidants. In particular raw cacao has an abundance of flavanols, which have some of the most potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.

While you might have heard that blueberries are one of the best things to eat for a diet rich in antioxidants, raw cacao actually has 40x more antioxidants than blueberries.