About Dark Chocolate

We recommend finding dark chocolate chips that are at least 60% cacao.  Lets discuss how chocolate is made.  It stars with the cacao bean.  We use cacao powder in Ancient Chocolate superfood mix – which is the raw, unprocessed cacao.  In order to make dark chocolate, you simply mix cacao with fat (e.g. butter) and sugar.  To make milk chocolate, you add milk to this.  The higher % of cacao means the chocolate has more of the actually cacao bean and less of the butter, sugar, and/or milk.  The cacao is where the health benefits of chocolate come from.

Nutrition Benefits of Dark Chocolate

Cacao is loaded with antioxidants.  Lets put into perspective at how loaded chocolate is.  One way to measure antioxidant density is through something called an ORAC score.  Cacao scores 95,500 mmol per 100g while blueberries (also known for antioxidants) scores 2,400. Many of the antioxidants in cacao are flavonoids, including anthocyanidin.

Cacao is primarily known for benefits related to mood (helps raise serotonin levels), cardiovascular health, blood pressure (helps increase nitric oxide levels), anti-inflammatory, and also known as a cancer fighter.

Smoothie Tips

We recommend finding dark chocolate chips that are at least 60% cacao.  You can also replace dark chocolate chips with cacao nibs – which are healthier, but don’t taste as good.

Many of our recipes have you first blend your smoothie and then after it’s blended – we have you add the chocolate chips and just pulse your blender so the chocolate chips stay crunchy in your smoothie.  The reason is because if you blended the chips up with your smoothie so there were no chunks, the chocolate flavor gets dissipated more in your smoothie, and you would likely want to add more chocolate chips to your recipe so you could taste it better.  Keeping the chocolate as chunks helps really bring out the chocolate flavor without having to add too much chocolate chips to your smoothie!