Beloved Somalovers,
Alistair is an unusual person, and spent an unusual gap year backpacking through Central and South America. Half-way through his gap year, he reached the Darién Gap, and had to work out how to cross it.
The Darién Gap is a 150km roadless stretch of thick, inhospitable jungle separating Colombia and Panama. It is almost impassable, and until the surge in illegal immigration into the United States in the early 2020s, there was no meaningful traffic passing through it. It is a lawless zone, patrolled by drug cartels and bandits.
In 1698, the Darién Gap was the site of Scotland’s only ever overseas colony, New Caledonia. Approximately 20% of all the money in Scotland went into financing New Caledonia. Within one year of arrival, 80% of the settlers had died of dysentery, malaria, or malnutrition; the rest sailed desperately to New York, then a town of 5000 people, seeking refuge. New Caledonia was swallowed into the Darién jungle, and no attempt has been made to settle it since.
Alistair took one look at the Darién Gap, and decided to avoid it. Instead, he sailed to Colombia through the San Blas, a chain of islands inhabited by the Guna People, who are indigenous there, and once lived through much of Panama.
The Guna are a matrilineal people (ie the groom moves to his bride’s house after marriage) who have largely preserved their traditional way of life. They eat mostly seafood, coconut, plantain and farmed tubers (yams, etc), and drink up to five cups of cacao each day. In fact, the Guna people have the highest cacao consumption of any population in the world.
They are also one of the only populations in the world not affected by hypertension. The blood pressure of the average 65-year-old Guna person is 110/70, about 30% lower than the average blood pressure of an Australian of the same age. 20% of Australian 65-year-olds take medication for hypertension; none of the Guna do.
Hollenberg et al found that the Guna suffer from stroke at a 10x lower rate than the rest of Panama, had almost no death from heart disease (20% of Australians die from heart disease), had almost no cases of diabetes or obesity, and unusually low rates of cancer.
He explored these findings further by comparing island-living Guna to Guna who had migrated to Panama City. The Guna living in Panama City (who drank ten times less cacao) had four times more diabetes, a 5x higher chance of dying of a heart attack, a 15x higher chance of developing cancer, and a 75x higher chance of having a stroke.
Of course, Hollenberg’s study is not a perfect study, and there are many factors both confounding and influencing his results (eg lower diagnosis rates in remote San Blas, the effect of an active lifestyle, fresh food, seafood, etc), but he concluded that the amount of cacao the Guna consumed helped them live long and healthy lives, and particularly helped them maintain excellent blood pressure into old age.
This lines up with thousands of other studies which find that the polyphenols in cacao improve blood pressure and blood vessel flexibility, reduce blood clots and inflammation, boost cholesterol digestion, and improve insulin sensitivity. Cacao also improves memory, reduces anxiety, improves skin health, moderately increases gut microbiome diversity, helps with sleep, etc etc etc
We hope you can feel this marvellous good health for yourself in your daily cup (or five) of Soma Cacao.
With banana and allspice (full Guna recipe below),
