THE BENEFITS OF CHOCOLATE

We don't often think of chocolate as something that is good for us. It's an indulgence, a 'naughty treat', and often laden with refined sugars and fats. But cacao – the raw ingredient found in dark and high quality chocolate or sold as powder, nibs or 'butter', actually has a number of benefits for our health.

Cocoa and cacao are often confused, but they start life in the same way: as harvested beans from the cacao tree’s seed pods. The differences occur during harvesting when cacao powder is cold pressed into raw cacao powder (therefore retaining more of its beneficial properties), while cocoa powder comes from roasting raw cacao at high temperatures,