This Is The Secret Ingredient That Makes Chocolate So Delicious

The chocolate traditional, we found in supermarkets, is made by corporations, mixing low quality cocoa beans, then adding a large amount of sugar, vanillin, cocoa butter and emulsifiers such as soya lecithin to ensure that the taste and texture always be the same. What we think chocolate tastes like is usually just sugar and vanilla.

The product, made in this way, is named industrial chocolate. And we ate it, so we know it’s not all bad. Generally, most people like chocolate and differ only in preferences. For example, if it is sweeter, more bitter, milk, with nuts, walnuts, cookies, raisins, and various other combinations.

Chocolate

Whatever the format, chocolate is one of the most consumed foods in the world. However, even the most chocoholic may not know that this ancient food has one thing in common with kimchi and kombuchá. The fact that the flavor comes from fermentation.

Chocolate’s familiar taste is produced by tiny microorganisms that help transform raw ingredients into the complex final product. And self-proclaimed chocolate scientists are working, in laboratories in Peru, Belgium and even Côte d’Ivoire, to understand how this fermentation changes the taste of chocolate.

To do this, they sometimes create artificial fermentations in laboratories. And other times they taste the cocoa beans fermented by nature. But often, they turn the experimental batches into chocolates and ask volunteers to taste them and tell researchers what flavors they can detect.

The researchers managed to solve, after decades of testing, several mysteries surrounding cocoa fermentation. For example, the microorganisms involved and how this step interferes with the taste and quality of chocolate.

Fermentation

The well-known chocolate begins its life in the form of seeds in the shape of a football. They grow directly from the trunk of the Theobroma cacao tree .

And 3,900 years ago, Central America’s Olmecs developed a multi-step process to successfully turn these giant-seeded fruits into an edible delicacy.

First the fruit is opened and its seeds and pulp are removed. The seeds, then called grains, are cured and left to drain for three to 10 days before being allowed to dry in the sun.

With the beans already dry, they are roasted and then kneaded with sugar and sometimes with powdered milk until this mixture is homogeneous. When this point is reached, the chocolate is ready to be transformed into bars, cookies or chocolates.

It is during the curing phase that fermentation takes place naturally. And chocolate’s complex flavor consists of hundreds of individual compounds. Several of them are generated during fermentation.

This fermentation is the process of enhancing the qualities of a food through the controlled activity of microbes. And it allows bitter or tasteless caca beans to develop rich chocolate-related flavors.

Flavor

All reactions that are caused by acetic acid bacteria have a big impact on taste. Also because it is these acids that break down polyphenol molecules, which have a deep violet color and are quite astringent, into brown chemicals with a milder taste, which are known as o-quinones.

This is when the cocoa beans stop having a bitter taste and start having a rich, nutty flavor. Along with the flavor transformation, the color transformation also takes place, going from a reddish purple to brown.

Sleeping Less Than Six Hours A Day Is Related To Dementia

Nothing better than getting home after a tiring day, taking a shower and sleeping . Healthy sleep is extremely important to recovering your body and preparing you for a new day. However, due to the hustle and bustle of everyday life, this is not always what happens.

Of course, we all know that lack of sleep has a big effect on our productivity the next day. And more seriously than an ailment, the relationship between poor sleep and dementia symptoms has been studied for years. However, there is still a lot that researchers do not know about how lack of sleep can contribute to cognitive decline in conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.

One limitation faced by researchers is that several observational studies, which looked at sleep duration and dementia, have some relatively short follow-up windows. Or they only looked at older people at first, as dementia symptoms tend to run for decades and can start to show up much earlier in people’s lives.

Study

Then a team led by epidemiologist Séverine Sabia of the University of Paris analyzed the data from Whitehall II, which is a continuous longitudinal study of the health of more than 10,000 British civil servants. They did this study to get a long-term analysis, examining how the sleep they get into old age can influence dementia outcomes.

The Whitehall II study began in 1985. Hence, it gives a comprehensive dataset spanning over three decades. This gives researchers plenty of evidence to look at to see if and how sleep duration and quality in midlife and onwards may be related to diagnoses of dementia.

“Short persistent sleep duration at age 50, 60, and 70 years compared with normal persistent sleep duration was associated with a 30% increase in the risk of dementia, regardless of sociodemographic, behavioral, cardiometabolic, and mental health factors ”, wrote the researchers.

Reviews

An important point is that these studies are observational only. This means that the discovered link is only a correlation between short sleep and increased risk, not a random mechanism,

That is, researchers are not claiming that bad sleep causes dementia. They just point out that many people in the Whitehall II study who developed dementia later tended to sleep less than other participants who were less likely to develop the disease.

In this study, the duration of normal sleep was defined as seven hours per night. And eight or more hours of sleep was already defined as a long sleep. The short duration was six hours or less per night. And those who only consistently slept that amount per night had a higher risk of developing dementia at all ages.

While people who slept a normal amount of sleep showed a lower incidence of dementia. And there was no clear evidence of a link between sleep duration and dementia.

Relationship

While the study relies on participant self-reported data, these findings help to strengthen researchers’ knowledge of the links between poor sleep and dementia. Even though the cause of these mechanisms is still puzzling and further research is needed.

“Since dementia results from changes in the brain, it’s not surprising that people with dementia often have disturbed sleep patterns. Perhaps it is simply a very early sign of the dementia to come, but it is also quite likely that poor sleep is not good for the brain and leaves it vulnerable to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease,” concluded the psychiatrist and dementia researcher. Tom Dening of the University of Nottingham in the UK, who was not involved in the study.