Scientists Work Out How To Make Chocolate Healthier And More Flavorful

by Justine Alford

Good news, chocoholics: Scientists have found a way to not only make chocolate more nutritious, but also to enhance its taste. Praise science!

By making a couple of simple adjustments to the earliest processing steps, researchers found that they could boost the content of health-promoting compounds in cocoa beans and also improve the resulting chocolate's flavor, making it sweeter. The work waspresented at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society and published in African Journals Online.

Humans have been gobbling cocoa for thousands of years, but it is only relatively recently that scientists have demonstrated that dark chocolate and cocoa could actually be beneficial to our health due to the fact that they are rich in biologically active compounds known as polyphenols. These chemicals are known to have a variety of desirable properties, such as antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, and their consumption has been linked to various positive health effects, such as a reduction in blood pressure and reduced incidence of stroke and cardiovascular diseases.

Unfortunately, some of the steps required to transform raw cocoa beans into a form that can be used in the production of delicious candy bars are known to alter the content of these compounds. After the pods are cut down from cocoa trees, they are split open and the beans are removed. These are then fermented for several days in banana-lined baskets before being dried in the sun and finally roasted. This roasting stage is critical to the flavor outcome of chocolate, but it also causes the beans to lose some of their polyphenols.

Armed with this knowledge, scientists from the University of Ghana set out to find a way of retaining these important compounds without negatively affecting its taste. They decided to start off by adding in another stage to the process, which involved storing the pods prior to fermentation. After testing out a range of conditions, the researchers found that storing them for 7 days prior to processing as normal resulted in the highest antioxidant content.

Next, the team decided to examine whether they could optimize the roasting process so that more polyphenols could be retained without sacrificing flavor. Traditionally, beans are roasted for between 10-20 minutes at 120-130oC, but they found that roasting at a lower temperature for 45 minutes improved the antioxidant activity of the beans. Furthermore, when this roasting technique was combined with the storage step, the beans had both increased antioxidant activity and a higher polyphenol content. Not only that, but the chocolate produced using this method was also sweeter.

The researchers believe that these positive effects are due to the fact that the storage stage allowed the beans to have more contact with the sweet surrounding pulp, which can alter the biochemical and physical properties of the beans. “This aided the fermentation process and enhanced antioxidant capacity of the beans, as well as the flavor,” notes lead researcher Emmanuel Afoakwa, adding that this technique could be particularly useful in countries where cocoa beans have a less intense flavor and lower antioxidant activity, such as in Latin America. Afoawka now plans to continue this work by further scrutinizing different storage and roasting techniques in order to optimize the process.

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/scientists-work-out-how-make-chocolate-healthier-and-more-flavorful

Soon Censored? Korean Scientists Successfully Kill Cancer with Magnets

In South Korea, scientists used a magnetic field to get cancer cells to actually self-destruct. The body removes old, defective, and infected cells through the process of programmed cell death (PCD), or apoptosis.

In apoptosis, the rejected cell responds to certain signals sent by the body by fragmenting. Immune cells then consume these fragments. The magnets help trigger apoptosis. When apoptosis fails, however, rejected cells divide uncontrollably, developing tumors.

MAGNETS INDUCE APOPTOSIS

Professor Jinwoo Cheon of Yonsei University in Seoul and a team of scientists conducted experiments on bowel cancer cells using magnetic fields to induce apoptosis.

They attached iron nanoparticles to antibodies, which bind to “receptor” molecules on tumor cells. These molecules cluster when the magnetic field is applied, triggering the “self-destruct” signal and thereby apoptosis.

In the experiment, over half of the bowel cancer cells were destroyed when the signal for apoptopic clustering came into effect. Untreated cells remained unaffected and unharmed.

BIG PHARMA’S RESPONSE?

In a related experiment, the scientists performed the same therapy on zebra fish, which caused them to grow unusual tails. More trials are in the works.

“We have demonstrated that apoptosis signaling can be turned on in-vitro (in the laboratory) and in a zebra fish in-vivo (living) model by using a magnetic switch,” say the scientists.  “Our magnetic switch may be broadly applicable to any type of surface membrane receptors that exhibit cellular functions on clustering.”

The study is to be published in the journal Nature Materials.  One must wonder how this form of therapy—one that does not, as of yet, line the pockets of Big Pharma—will develop in the world of traditional medicine. Drug manufacturers (literally) bank on perpetual sickness, and cancer drugs have shown time and again to worsen tumors.

But regardless of any potential alternative treatments, big pharma will continue to push these dangerous ‘solutions’ on the public. Even while numerous cancer-fighting foods like turmeric, ginger, garlic, papaya leaf extract, berries, and many more exist, the pharmaceutical industry and mainstream medicine won’t recognize these as solutions.

http://themindunleashed.org/2014/04/soon-censored-korean-scientists-successfully-kill-cancer-magnets.html