There has been recent interest concerning cocoa and chocolate and the health benefits that they confer. Both cocoa and chocolate are extracted from the seeds, or cacao beans, of the Theobroma cacao tree, native to South and Central America. The beans are harvested, fermented, dried, roasted and then ground up to produce “cocoa mass”. This cocoa mass can be further processed to make cocoa powder or chocolate (Hannum and Erdman, 2000). The interest surrounding the health benefits of cacao bean products lay in its chemical composition. The whole cacao bean is 50-57% cocoa butter, which in turn is composed of 34% stearic acid (18:0), 34% oleic acid (18:1), 25% palmitic acid (16:0), and 2% linolenic acid (18:3) (Otton, et al., 1998). About 15% of the dry weight of cacao bean is composed of polyphenols, predominantly (-)epicatechin and (+)catechin (Hannum and Erdman, 2000). It is both the unique composition of cocoa butter and the presence of polyphenols that make cocoa and chocolate candidates as functional foods.

Polyphenols, or flavonoids, have been researched for decades, mostly because of their antioxidant characteristics (Borchers et al., 2000). Besides in chocolate, flavonoids are also found in red wine and in green tea. The consumption of flavonoids, including those found in chocolate and cocoa, have been associated with reducing the risk of heart disease, having potentially beneficial effects on inflammatory processes, and being cancer-protective agents (Borchers et al., 2000). Recent research has investigated the ability of cocoa to reduce platelet activation in vivo, which further suggests that cocoa can reduce the risk of heart disease (Rein et al., 2000).

It has been questioned whether the high saturated fat content in cocoa butter could have adverse health effects, such as raising cholesterol levels thereby contributing to atherosclerosis. It has been shown experimentally that cocoa butter consumption does not increase total and LDL cholesterol levels (Kris-Etherton et al., 1994). This phenomenon is probably due to the high stearic acid content in cocoa butter. Stearic acid is a unique saturated fatty acid because it has been demonstrated that it neither increases, nor decreases blood cholesterol levels (Kris-Etherton, 1997).