Chocolate and Sugar hypothesis

There has been a theory within the circle of chocolate consumption that arises a few different questions. The first question is the following: is chocolate actually something that tastes delicious to most humans or does the extra added ingredients more specifically milk and especially the added sugar what makes it as tasty as it is? I would say that chocolate would still be popular to many people even without the sugar and milk, especially today when the trend of low-carb, low-sugar diets being incredibly popular. Of course, there would be many people who would not like the taste of actual chocolate being so bitter and not as sweet as conventional chocolate, but it is important to remember that there are many people who consume some other foods similar to pure chocolate which are also bitter without any sugar, or anything to make it sweet. One example of this could be with the people who consume black coffee. Coffee is fairly bitter but has an earthy taste. There was a time when students of Dr. Patricia Juarez-Dappe were able to experiment with both dark chocolate, and with cacao beans, this was used as a social experiment to see if there would be many people would actually be interested in the taste of pure chocolate, and many have said yes. One demographic today who seems to be quite fond of dark chocolate is women, who on average seem to like dark chocolate much more than men. One of the reasons as to why women seem to like dark chocolate more than men do is because of the incredible health benefits of it. Chocolate contains many different vitamins and one of them being iron, which is incredibly beneficial for women who are menstruating in their youth. This is due to them losing some iron during their menstrual cycle each month. Of course one thing to remember is that anything that has sugar in it is going to taste much better for humans almost always, this is inevitable. To summarize the thesis of this blog it goes to say the following: “If chocolate was never mixed with sugar the way that is is today in most cases it would not be as popular as it is today, but it would still be an incredibly popular food and desert item.” This is especially the case with American consumers of chocolate, the reason being that Americans as a whole on average consume a lot of sugar annually, and one thing that this of course means is that there is a very big demand in sweets being sweet. This could explain why chocolate is considered a desert. One question that readers should ask themselves in order to further understand this concept is the following: coffee in its natural state tends to be on the bitter side, as is the case with chocolate prior to it being sweetened, why then is coffee not considered a desert?” The reason for this is because it is bitter, so the chocolate would probably still be treated as a desert by some, but there would definitely be many people with the idea that chocolate in it’s the purest state (meaning with any added sugar) is not a sweet, and rather a different type of herbal food similar to coffee. Either way, chocolate would still be a very popular food across the world, and there are a few different real life examples which would prove this to be the case. The first few which are fairly obvious could be with regards to the Mayans and Aztecs, who consumed chocolate without any added sweeteners (for the most part, although there were some times when they sweetended it), if pure chocolate tastes so bad, then why would they treasure it so much? Continuing this argument, why would the Europeans in history feel the need to treasure chocolate so much to the point where they would consider it a luxory food which only the elites would have access to (think of the British royals who would drink hot cacao in their palaces). The final and perhaps the most obvious example is with the dark chocolate consumer of today, why is there such a big demand in chocolate without any sweeteners today if it supposedly would not taste good without any sweeteners. The fact of the matter is that chocolate would still have a large demand today even if it was never a food item traditionally mixed with sugar, or just with any of the other additives of which are used today.

Bibliography

https://www.healthyfoodamerica.org/sugartoolkit_overview#:~:text=The%20typical%20American%20consumes%20about,World%20Health%20Organization%20(WHO).