History of chocolate - 18 February 1994

A headline in the New York Times gave us an idea, it said, "Keeping Elderly At Home And Care Affordable", you'll gather that care affordable is one of those new compound noun adjectives, like user friendly, that you get used to before you can translate them into English and so you go on using them for the rest of your life.

What this headline keeping the elderly at home meant to us was more of a challenge than anything else, why should we be kept at home and gazing out like a marooned sailor on a raft at an ocean of snow and ice cracking trees and happy golliwog children in the park and unhappy adults stumbling and climbing and slipping everywhere else in 5 or 10 degrees in a whistling north-west wind and lots of them winding up in the hospital. Enough is enough, so off to Kennedy Airport.

I must say it's a sign of the superb job done by 1,700 men and 1,000 thundering ploughs through the nights and the days that Kennedy Airport was closed during the past hideous five weeks for only one day. The 1,700 men are known here as sanitation workers, which may be funny to you but not as funny as calling them "dustmen" would be to Americans, they were all over this great city and it's five boroughs from the first snowflake and by last weekend all the avenues and the main highways in and out of town were squeaky clean with the snow now turning between grey and black in huge orderly ramparts at the edge of the sidewalks or the fringe of the roadways.

So on Monday morning when the plane took off and we looked down on the endless stretching landscape of blinding snow and the curves and ribbons of black highways snaked between these endless ramparts, it was like I imagine it would be like a great battlefield of trench warfare at the South Pole. It was a privileged feeling to be able to rise above it and be gone and it was all provoked by that headline "Keeping Elderly At Home And Care Affordable". How about sending elderly away to California for instance if they can afford their care?

Well, to be frank after working in front of a microphone for just on 60 years and if from the time you were a toddler you were schooled in such boring clichés as saving for a rainy day not buying things you couldn't afford. The trouble is when you learn such reactionary doctrines early on, you can't shake them. So yes, we don't mean to be smug, but we simply state a fact when we say we were in ourselves care affordable.

Driving from the San Francisco Airport into town between green surrounding hills, we saw the sign on one of the main highways out of the city still up "Route 280 closed", it was going to be repaired and strengthened within a year of the '89 earthquake. It's now been four and a half years; it makes you wonder if that main freeway in southern California which collapsed in a second or two will ever be rebuilt.

So what is the scoop from California? Well the first news as it came out; the great news came actually from Dallas, Texas and a medical symposium being held at the university there. The subject of the symposium was, wait for it "Chocolate in Perspective", the story came from a reputable medical correspondent and appeared either by luck or more likely by cunning design last Monday, which was you may recall Valentine's Day. The connection the happy or contrived coincidence will be immediately clear when I say that what the perspective of the symposium showed just in time was that although chocolate is rich in the villainous saturated fatty acids, the ones that are accused of raising cholesterol levels and clogging coronary arteries, yet the new, the amazing yet the highly saturated cocoa butter, which makes chocolate taste like, well, chocolate I quote "almost miraculously spares blood vessels". This is not only news, it is sensational news and especially for chocoholics.

The organiser of the symposium one Dr Margo Denke, a nutritionist described along with two other colleagues, the peculiar magic of cocoa butter. Incidentally, the fact that these three pioneer researchers are all women has I believe no scientific significance whatsoever.

Anyway this is the story, which turns on what is so special about cocoa butter from a medical point of view? It's essential element is a saturated fatty acid unlike any other, which occurs more plentifully in chocolate than in any other food, it's called stearic acid – an 'S' before tear, stearic acid – and it has no effect on serum cholesterol or rather before it could like, say, meat and dairy products do its mischief, it's converted in the liver to another acid, oleic acid. This is a mono unsaturated fat present also in olive oil and has no effect on cholesterol. Before the assembled doctors could tear of and go on a stearic acid binge, Dr Denka and her colleagues warned choco- maniacs not to just grab and wolf the first chocolate to hand, read the label carefully she said, she might have added in countries where it's compulsory to print the chemical ingredients of all food products she noted that some chocolate candies, sweets, biscuits products contain palm oil and coconut oil, which do raise cholesterol. And by the way she says, prefer the right stuff dark chocolate to the anaemic, that's my word, milk chocolate since it obviously contains butter fat.

A metabolic expert at Pennsylvania State University contributed a study, which fed a group of healthy men students three separate diets cocoa butter, olive oil and dairy butter. After a month the only men who showed no increase in their serum cholesterol were the ones you guessed it on cocoa butter. This doctor from Pennsylvania went so far as to suggest not to chocolate manufacturers who by this time must be in ecstasy, but to food companies in general that they would do well to start thinking of using cocoa butter in products that normally contain butter and margarine.

There have been several other confirming clinical trials and one doctor made a point of remarking that in all the studies done so far, females convert stearic acid into oleic acid in exactly the same way as males. So for the moment anyway, there doesn't seem to be any issue for rampant feminists to jump on all stearic acid consumers are created equal. Since this symposium was being held in Texas, since the subjects of the trials were Americans and since most of the medical audience was American, its not surprising that one reporter should have introduced the now rather proud reminder that Europeans never knew the joys of chocolate until at least a century and most of them two centuries after its cultivation by the Aztecs and the Mayans.

Columbus took some of the beans back to Ferdinand and Isabella, but evidently they paid no attention or they thought it odd and bitter. Anyway, about 100 years later, not till the very end of the 16th century, did later Spanish explorers return from the America's with a liquid, a chocolate drink. At that point, the records are murky for some non-apparent reason the drink was kept a secret due one reporter thinks to some bright characters adding a dollop of sugar to the confection and spreading, but only inside the court, the superstition that chocolate was an aphrodisiac not to be taken up by the serfs and pheasants. This I suspect is all very shaky reportage, but just how long it took for chocolate to become acceptable as a pleasant drink in Europe, it took another century for the lump form to develop, I really don't know, but the first great man who spotted occupational diseases the Italian Doctor Bernardo Ramazzini wrote about chocolate as a new thing in the first decade of the 18th century, I think, I'm away from the books but I think his great work De Morbis Artificum, The Diseases of Workers, came out about 1710.

Anyway, a couple of centuries after Columbus took the beans home, you have Ramazzini writing there's a great new soporific and delicious too and he recommends it specially to scholars he says "it soothes the fevered mind, it helps humped-backed scholars to straighten up and fly right, it calms the mind, it helps dreamless sleep a magical new potion called chocolate". Some of you may have been wondering about other hazardous properties lying deep inside the cocoa bean, the Madame's or Mrs what's the plural of Miss, say forget it, it's a myth that chocolate produces pimples. As for caffeine, an ounce of chocolate contains 10 milligrams at most. Your freshly brewed morning cup of coffee between 100 and 150 milligrams, help. By the way no hard evidence that chocolate is an aphrodisiac. The old ones will have to do – youth and boredom.

I promised that next week we'll get back to sterner stuff nuclear inspection in North Korea, the Navy's sexual harassment scandal, what suddenly stiffened the Clinton Bosnian policy, but for the moment I felt I had to stay with this earth-shaking story, the discovery of the DNA molecule was I grant important source of human life, but think what the discovery of stearic acid will do for the human race a vast reduction of nagging of children, of husbands, by wives, no question. Dr Denke, Dr Grundy and Dr Kris-Eftherton must be immediately nominated for the Nobel Prize; I think the Peace Prize would be most appropriate.

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