Hot Chocolate! Junk Food or Nutrient Bomb?

Winter seems to be dragging on in Belgium. What better way to lift the mood in this grey weather than a with cup of hot chocolate?
"But wait? Isn't hot chocolate bad for me? Doesn't it have a lot of sugar?"
If you have followed me for a while, you know the answer by now đ
⊠It Depends!
The other day, I had to go to the big hypermarket in our area. (I say "had to" because I only go there in an emergency, such as - we run out of tahini & peanut butter and that is the only place that has those in an acceptable format. Big hypermarkets for me are like the Lotus Casino from the Percy Jackson series - a place where you go in for just a few minutes and you exit 5 days later. So I tend to avoid them when I can!).
Wandering around the aisles, looking somewhat lost (- why do they always move things around and there is never anyone to ask for directions?), I came across the hot chocolate shelf. In this grey weather, it's all I have been wanting to have lately - (I think my body must be low in magnesium or some other mineral that cocoa is full of).
But one look at the shelf is enough to make anyone's head spin. In our modern western society we are spoilt for choice.
There are so many different kinds of the same thing! How is one to make a choice?
(Good thing I am not a coffee drinker, or I would have never gotten out of the Lotus Casino - there is a whole aisle of that!)
Do I just go with the prettiest label? The latest ad I saw on a billboard?
The answer my friend is ⊠in the small print.
This is where my background as a lawyer comes in handy! I am not afraid to read the small print đ
. It is there that the truth lies. Not in the pretty label, nor in the clever marketing.
So this is how you do it:
Step 1. You pick up a box and turn it around.
Step 2. Zoom in to where it says "Ingredients". (If you are in your 40s like me and need to pull your glasses half way down your nose, it helps!) Ignore the table with carbs, fats, protein etc, Go to the actual list of ingredients.
Step 3. If you see "Sugar" as the first ingredient - put it back on the shelf. You do not want to pay for that, it is just not worth it.
Step 4. Find one that says 100% cocoa. If it says "organic" it's a bonus.
"Wait a minute. Isn't this what my mum uses when she bakes that brown cake? Isn't it going to taste disgusting?"
Don't worry, my friend - I have you covered! I will show you how its done in a minute - but first, I want to show you something else.
I want to teach you how to read the "small print" so you can do this like a pro.
Let's take the first 4 packets we see on the shelf. Most of these you will surely recognise, no matter what country you live in. (Yes, Big Food is a global affair).

They all look pretty. The orange one makes you warm and toasty just by looking at the picture. The yellow one is what your kid is going to harass you to buy. The dark brown one is for the stylish one for yappies. The earthy one is for the tree hugging health geeks,
Whatever! Let's now turn them around:

Ingredient 1, making up the bulk of this product (51%): Malt Barley extract : this is a sweet syrup, made from soaking barley to activate certain enzymes which turn its starch into various sugars, mainly maltose. Now listen to this little "fun fact", (I nearly fell out of my chair when researching this):
- Maltose has a glycemic index of 105! The glycemic index is established by measuring how much foods raise our blood sugar after we eat them and everything is measured against glucose, whose glycemic index is 100. (I had no idea that a food with a glycemic index higher than that of glucose even existed! - but you live and learn...)
So what does this mean in plain English? It means: start your (or your kid's) day with this product and you are guaranteed a fast and sharp blood sugar spike, promptly followed by an equally fast and sharp blood sugar crash about 1h later, with the resulting flood of stress hormones, the shakes, a trip to the kitchen/store for some sugar (or a temper tantrum, as the case may be).
Just reading this first ingredient should be reason enough to put this back on the shelf, but for the sake of completeness, let's go on.
Ingredients 2&3 - Milk and whey concentrates - fine, except that, in order to get milk down to this form it undergoes quite some processing. Part of that process is what is called "spray drying" - a method of forming a dry powder from a liquid by rapidly drying it with a hot gas. If you read my blog on milk you know by now what happens when one heats milk that much. AGEs (advanced glycation endproducts) are not our friend. The less of those the better.
Ingredient 4 - Cacao: A super food, full of antioxidants and minerals. How much of it is here? 13%.
Ingredients 5&6 - sugar and fructose - I could write a thesis here, but I will leave it for another time. For now, you should just know this: Sugar (sucrose) = 1 molecule of glucose + 1 molecule of fructose. When your have sugar + fructose it does not take a math genius to figure out that in total you get more fructose than glucose. However, if you are going to ingest one of those two in a processed, non-real food form, go for glucose. Fructose, by itself (without the package of fibre that nature designed for it in fruits) is really, really not optimal. It goes straight to the liver, which has to decide what to do with it. If the liver is already flooded with too much energy (in the form of glucose, fructose and fats), like the big scoop of maltose we already gave it all in one go, fructose is not going to be used for energy. It will go into storage ... as fat. (Think, high triglycerides, fatty liver and the lot). It is a fascinating topic and one of my favourites, so I will save this for a proper post at some point in the future. Bottom line: sugar and fructose belong in fruit, not in a hot chocolate product that is already choc full of maltose.
Ingredient 7 - Minerals - as anticaking and acidity regulating agents. Fine. WIll the body recognise them in this isolated form as something useful? I don't know.
Ingredient 8 - Rapeseed oil - This is an oil that contains omega 6 and some omega 3 fatty acids. Again, this is a huge and important topic, but for now, you should know that omega 6 and omega 3 oils are very very fragile, they do not want to see Air, Light, or Heat. If they do, they oxidise and become toxic to the body. What do we have in this product? A fragile oil that has already undergone heat and processing to end up in this powder, that will be heated even more when this powder is used to make hot chocolate. Do I need this in my body? No, thank you.
Ingredient 9 - Synthetic Vitamins - To the amateur eye this looks like a good thing - "extra vitamins in my hot chocolate, that's a bonus, isn't it?" .
Here is the thing. Vitamins are made by plants. Us, humans and other animals, cannot make our own vitamins. Yet, they are essential for life, so we must absolutely get them from food. We can get them by eating the actual plants, OR we can try to "extract" them from the plants to add them to other things.
However, extracting vitamins out of a plant is quite a process. When we need vitamins on a massive scale to add to processed foods, we need a faster and cheaper way of doing it.
So we came up with ways of making vitamins in the lab, that have the same chemical composition as those in plants. The raw materials for them can come from things like coal tar derivatives and petroleum products (e.g acetone).
Their chemical composition may be identical to the vitamins in plants, but they may not have the exact same "shape". This is important because, for things to work in the body, different enzymes need to "dock" to receptors, like a key that fits in a lock. With synthetic vitamins, the lock can be somewhat different, so the key does not fit, or does not fit well. Thus, the result you get may not be optimal in the best case, and in the worst case, outright harmful. So be wary when you see a long list of synthetic vitamins on your kid's cereal box. Rethink whether this is something you want their body to have to deal with.
Ingredient 10 - Salt: as a taste enhancer of sorts. Essential to life, but as with everything, too much of a good thing can be ... a bad thing. In the context of a diet based largely on whole foods it is not a big deal. In the context of a diet based on processed foods, it adds up.
Ingredient 11: Vanillin - this can be natural or synthetic. I let you decide what you think the probability is in this case that it is natural.
In my humble opinion, this product is a waste of money, at best.

It looks like Starbucks wants us to do some maths. Ingredient 1 is sugar and ingredient 2 is cacao. But how much cacao is there total? About 38% total, if you do the math. A bit better than OVO, but still, not optimal.
Ingredient 3 - Soy Lecithin - you will see this everywhere, especially in chocolate. The jury is still out on this one. Personally, I choose to consume it only if the food it is added to is really worth it for me - like some good quality 85% dark chocolate, Otherwise, I pass.
Ingredient 4 - Natural Flavouring - this is another mystery. What is it? Where does it come from? What went on in the extraction process? Nobody knows. (I do the same analysis as with Ingredient 3 above).

Same story here as in the ones above. Total cacao content, a mere 23%. How many kids start their days with this? What happens to their little bodies 1hr after? (My heart goes out to all those nursery and primary school teachers who have to deal with the collective sugar crash at 10am each day - they are superheros. Hopefully they had some eggs for breakfast themselves to have the stamina to deal with this!)

Finally! Hallelujah. 100% cacao, organic, no fillers, no sugar, no emulsifiers, no synthetic vitamins, no salt, no c**p. Just pure cacao, a bomb of minerals and antioxidants.
Yes, its bitter (a sign of the polyphenols it contains), but this is real food.
And now, ladies & gentlemen, all we have to do is use our imagination to make this into
A nutrient bomb of a drink
Here is what you need:
- 1 teaspoon of cacao
- 1 teaspoon of carob powder (another nutrient bomb that unlike cacao does not contain oxalates, caffeine or theobromine that some may be sensitive to, so it dilutes the bitterness of cacao, while adding in its own goodness (If you must know, carobs are rich in Dâpinitol, a natural bioactive ingredient, with proven insulinâlike function. I will take that as a bonus. Here is the data for the fellow geeks.)
- a little cinnamon (or 5 spice or spéculoos)
- Put these in a cup and add boiling water and fresh pasteurised milk, in a proportion of your choice.
I personally stop here. But if you must, (or if you are making this for a kid who is used to Nesquik), you can add some
- Coconut flower sugar to taste. It is still sugar, but it has minerals and a bit of a inulin, a prebiotic we cannot digest, which means it has a somewhat lower glycemic index that regular sugar. (Even if you add this, the ratio of goodness to sugar will be much much higher than any highly processed store bought hot chocolate powder.)
I made a short (38sec) video to show you what it looks like.
Try it. I promise you, it will be 38" well spent!