Why Age?

Chocolate

“Oh roses for the flush of youth,
And laurel for the perfect prime;

But pluck an ivy branch for me -
Grown old before my time”

Christina Georgina Rosetti
1830-1894

Is Chocolate the Elixir of Life?

The Aztecs thought so.

They elevated it to mystical importance in their society, and used every part its source - the cocoa plant - for a specific purpose. The bark and flowers formed a cornerstone of traditional medicine and the dried beans served as currency, but it was the drink made from fermented and roasted beans that held paramount place in their regard. Only the royal elite and their coterie were considered worthy enough to consume this libation of the gods.

The first European to try it was not impressed.

When servants of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma placed a gold cup of xocolatl in front of the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez, the cold, frothy concoction flavoured with spices, chillies, and dotted with greasy blobs of cocoa butter moved him closer to nausea than heaven.

It took the subsequent union of industrial technology, milk, and sugar to produce the rich, smooth, velvety confection that excited the palates of Europeans of the seventeenth century and everyone who follows them.

Few today can resist it, whether as a hot drink or as squares of melt-in-the-mouth sublimeness. It is the 500 compounds in chocolate, however, from those identical to the chemicals produced in the brain of someone in love, to those that minimize blood platelet aggregation and reduce the risk of heart disease that excite today’s phytochemical researchers.

Telomere true

It turns out the Aztecs were right and chocolate might have to be moved from confectionary shelves onto those of health food stores and into the laboratories of longevity researchers for more investigation.

Early research on chocolate indicates benefits for the body in the very engine room of ageing - the human cell - and involves the components: cell division, chromosomes and telomeres.

When the human cell divides, it passes on chromosomes in order to maintain the unique identity of the owner of those cells. Telomeres are the little tails on the end of chromosomes and they usually shorten with each division. Scientists think that the shortening of telomeres is a critical factor in our physical decline and the ageing process.

Anything that retains the integrity of telomeres as their host chromosome is passed from cell to cell may therefore slow ageing.

Chocolate is one of those things.

Volunteers consuming it under controlled trials had chromosomal material examined under electron microscopy afterwards and something in chocolate seemed to be maintaining telomere integrity as chromosomes passed on during cell division.

Grandma was right

Before you indulge in a chocolate feeding frenzy in order to stay younger, stop to consider that chocolate, as we generally consume it, is far too high in sugar and saturated fat to be more than an infinitesimal part of a healthy diet. What researchers found was that the mystery compound keeping telomeres intact was only effective when consumed in dark, unsweetened chocolate, the kind your mother or grandmother used to keep in the pantry for cooking purposes. An old-fashioned chocolate cake was made with dark, rich, unsweetened chocolate or cocoa powder.

Chocolate is so rich in kilojoules it is really only fit for polar explorers in quantities greater than a couple of squares a day. Consuming chocolate for ageing prevention means obtaining concentrated cocoa extract, not sugar. That means dark and bittersweet - the kind greedy kid fingers seize in Mum’s pantry and reject as the intense, unusual flavour hits the palate.

Call yourself a chocolate lover? Not if you prefer the milk powder/sugar and additive-laden confection that masquerades as chocolate. Retrain your palate to appreciate the 70 or even 85 per cent cocoa mass variety freely available in supermarkets and just have a couple of squares each day.

Better still, seek out the old-fashioned dark, unsweetened cocoa powder if you can find it, and make yourself a heavenly libation that will enhance your health.

Along with whatever mysterious compound in the cocoa of chocolate that works at a chromosomal level to slow ageing, you get many other antioxidant compounds that contribute to health.

Antioxidant compounds in chocolate have a lab-tested efficacy in slowing the oxidation of LDL cholesterol. This process changes cholesterol to a form that can damage blood vessels. Flavonoids in chocolate reduce blood levels of pro-inflammatory chemicals.
Cocoa contains resveratrol - the antioxidant in red wine that is the key to the tipple’s good properties - again, like chocolate, best taken in moderation.

Nature’s packaging

It’s not the intention of my review of the benefits of chocolate to adopt the reductionist approach of seeking out the minutiae in food then working backwards to identify foods that contain them. The key lesson here is that all plant foods are teeming with beneficial compounds that slow the many processes that age and harm us, from oxidation to inflammation. Nature has packaged all the things we will ever need to stay as young as our genetic inheritance will allow in delicious foods and it is up to us to eat them.

They are to be found abundantly in the plant kingdom. We don’t need to know the names of the 2500 or more known plant chemicals or even the foods that contain them. In order to age as slowly and healthily as we can we merely need to dine richly and extensively from the banquet that nature has provided us.

People are shocked when I advocate consuming up to a kilo of plant foods every day in order to get all the beneficial nutrients and sundries we need. A healthy, age-slowing diet by Western standards involves eating about 40 different foods per week. Research on elderly Japanese women in remarkable health reveals they consume 200 different foods per week, most of them plant foods.

Among plant foods, chocolate is royalty. The name of the tree that produces it is Theobroma cacao. (Latin: Theo - gods, broma - food.)

Truly food of the gods.