Dear Somatics,
It’s curious how popular chocolate is.
It’s made from a weird fruit found in the South American jungle; by itself it’s astringent and bitter; it requires fermenting, roasting, sun-drying, conching, and painstaking attention to produce; until 1900 it was unknown in most of the world, but if you stand at the checkout at any supermarket and look at the sweets on display (we all have our hobbies), you’ll notice one thing - that everything is chocolate.
There are thousands of confectioneries in the world, thousands of sweets, but we all want chocolate. It’s hard to describe exactly why we love it so dearly - maybe it’s the texture of it between your teeth, maybe the agonising moment when you have to choose between allowing it to melt on your tongue or biting in; perhaps it’s the colour (though that’s unlikely); most probably it’s the way it makes us feel - because even though commercial chocolate contains very little cacao these days, all cacao contains theobromine, tryptophan, and anandamide - all cacao feels like a dream.
The world has known that cacao is a superfood for over a century. Any child born in the last 100 years can give a glowing endorsement of the uplifting effects of chocolate. It’s not just the sugar (though most chocolate bars are mostly sugar these days), it’s not the milk fats or soy lecithin; it’s certainly not the polyglycerol or hydrogenated vegetable oils - it’s the cacao we’re in love with.
At Soma, our mission is simple - sell the cacao (actually the world’s best single-origin cacaos) without the other crap. And that’s it - simples!
Like Beyoncé leaving Destinty’s Child, cacao is embarking on a solo career, and people are suddenly realising cacao was the superstar all along. Even science is having a say.
By this point it’s impossible to briefly summarise the health benefits of cacao (there are thousands of published studies that focus on all sorts of different things), so we’d like to list four examples of cacao in action, sent to us by our community in the last few weeks:
1. The
Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends
drinking chocolate milk after an intense workout, mostly because chocolate milk contains the
4:1 carbs:protein ratio the body needs for recovery, but partly because the cacao in chocolate milk contains
flavonoids, which relax blood vessels and promote bloodflow to recovering muscles.
2. About
35% of cacao by mass is dietary fibre. The
Journal of the Japanese Society for Food Science and Technology found that consuming cacao (particularly cacao shells, like our
Daintree cacao tea) increased the concentration of
beneficial gut bacteria in healthy women.
3. A study in the Archives of Oral Biology (which we read before bed each evening) found that cacao contains compounds that inhibit the dextansucrase enzyme which turns sugar into plaque - in other words, consuming cacao can help prevent tooth cavities.
4. A
Columbia University study found that 60-year-olds who drank a high-flavanol cacao drink (ie a Soma) daily for a month performed at the same level as 30-year-olds on
memory tests at the end of that month.
It seems Soma Cacao is making you fitter, fabber, smarter and better-looking, and giving you shinier teeth.
And it tastes like a chocolate paradise!
Our love to everyone, and our special thanks to all the Somis who send us messages and respond to our emails each week. We read everything you send, and we treasure all of it. It’s a treat for us to feel like we’re running a corner store on the internet, selling cacao to friends; not just operating a warehouse with a website.
With a 4:1 carb:protein ratio and extra flavanols for bloodflow,
Rose, Alistair, and the team at Soma Cacao
