Chocolate: from sacred drink to ultra-processed snack

An honest deep dive into how cacao changed over four thousand years, from a bitter medicinal drink into pure temptation, and why the real story isn’t the chocolate, but us.

Snap a bar of chocolate in half.

You hear that dry, short crack, the “snap” that chocolate makers spend their whole lives engineering. You smell something warm, something sweet. You place a piece on your tongue and it melts at exactly body temperature, as if designed for it.

It is.

But here begins the uncomfortable part of the story. Because that same piece was once not a sweet at all. It was a bitter drink, not a dessert. It was medicine, religion, and, I’m not making this up, money you could literally eat.

The chocolate changed completely in four thousand years.

We didn’t.

And maybe that’s the most interesting thing a chocolate bar has to tell us.

The bean that began as a rough stone

Let me take you back to the beginning, and be honest from the start about what we do and don’t know for certain.

The oldest traces of cacao aren’t recipes or drawings, but chemical residues of theobromine, a compound found only in cacao, recovered from ancient drinking vessels. Archaeologists found those residues among the Mokaya culture on the Pacific coast of Mexico, dating to around 1900 BCE, and among the Olmec a few centuries later. Not a sweet treat. A bitter, frothed drink.

Think of that first bean as a rough stone.

Unpolished, jagged, bitter.

Everything that follows, thousands of years of culture, industry and desire, is really one long story of sanding and polishing, until that rough stone became so smooth that we started to see ourselves in it. Remember that stone. We’ll keep coming back to it.

Among the Maya, cacao became sacred. Among the Aztecs it became status, medicine and currency. And then that one anecdote you find everywhere: emperor Moctezuma II supposedly drank fifty cups of cacao a day, from golden goblets.

Beautiful image. But here I’d rather check the source.

That number comes from the Spanish chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and modern historians treat those “fifty cups” with a pinch of salt. Likely exaggerated, the way stories become in the retelling. That Moctezuma loved chocolate is certain. Fifty cups is legend, not bookkeeping.

I’d rather have a true story with a small nuance than a beautiful story that isn’t true.

When cacao beans were your salary

Something lighter, because I find this genuinely funny.

Among the Aztecs, cacao was money. Real money. The 16th-century chronicler Francisco Oviedo recorded the exchange rate: about ten beans for a rabbit. Another colonial document from 1545 does the math even more finely: one bean for a tomato, thirty for a small rabbit, a hundred for a turkey.

Consider what that means.

Your salary could literally go mouldy. You could eat your groceries. And somewhere there was surely an Aztec teenager who’d snacked away his pocket money and had to explain that to his mother.

But there’s a serious side to the joke. Something was so valuable that it became money. And what do people do with something precious? They want more of it, easier, cheaper. That hunger, not for chocolate but for more, is the engine beneath this whole story.

Europe tasted cacao. And found it disgusting.

Then comes the moment that, to me, sums up the entire history of food.

Cacao reaches Spain in the 16th century. Europe tastes that bitter, original drink.

And doesn’t like it.

So people did what people always do when something natural doesn’t quite please them: they sanded off the sharp edges. They added sugar. Cinnamon. Vanilla. Later, milk. The rough stone got its first polish, and slowly a bitter health drink turned into a luxury product for those who could afford it.

It’s almost touching how consistently we do this. We find something in nature, we find it not quite good enough, and we keep tinkering until it fits exactly what our brain wants.

Incidentally, a Swedish botanist gave this plant its official name in 1753: Carl Linnaeus christened it Theobroma cacao, from the Greek theos (god) and broma (food). Food of the gods. Linnaeus knew the accounts of Aztec reverence, and chose his words with a flair for drama.

Food of the gods. We would turn it into a factory product.

A Stone Age brain in a supermarket

Why did Europe let itself be seduced so easily? Why do we, now, still?

Put simply: sugar and fat together are one of the most powerful reward combinations that exist for our brain. Pure cacao already contains fat by nature (cocoa butter). Add sugar, and you create something that hundreds of thousands of years of evolution made us vulnerable to.

And here’s the important part.

In the world where our brain took shape, energy-rich food was rare and life-saving. Whoever found a tree full of ripe fruit had to eat as much as possible, you never knew when the next one would come. “Eat this, now, a lot” wasn’t a weakness. It was a survival advantage.

But we no longer live in scarcity.

We live in abundance.

Our ancient brain still runs on the old software, while the world around it has been completely rebuilt. The bar in the supermarket didn’t just appear. It was refined, by people who know exactly how that reward system works. The melting point, the snap, the sugar-to-fat ratio: all sanded down to maximum appeal.

So the real question isn’t: why is chocolate tempting?

The question is: why do we build a world that constantly exploits our oldest instincts?

The machines that sped everything up

Around the 19th century came the industrial revolution, and with it a handful of inventions that smoothed the rough stone at breakneck speed.

In 1828 the Dutchman Coenraad van Houten devised a press that removed the fat from the cacao bean. This produced easily dissolvable cocoa powder. And, less innocently, the technique of treating cocoa with alkali (Dutch processing, literally named after my country) to make it milder and darker. Remember that word, alkalization. It returns shortly with a painful scientific aftertaste.

In 1875 Daniel Peter and Henri Nestlé combined cacao with milk powder to create the first milk chocolate. Softer, creamier, less bitter, and further from the original bean than ever.

And around 1879 Rodolphe Lindt reportedly left a mixing machine running for days by accident, and so discovered conching: the endless sanding of chocolate until it glides velvet-smooth across your tongue.

Do you see the metaphor becoming literal? We built a machine that does nothing but sand, for days on end. Until nothing rough remains of the rough, bitter stone.

No longer a luxury. No longer rare. Suddenly: everywhere, cheap, for everyone.

	Then	Now
Taste	bitter	very sweet
Flavanols	high	often low
Processing	minimal	ultra-processed
Role	ritual, medicine	snack
Availability	rare	everywhere

“But chocolate is healthy, isn’t it?”

Now it gets more nuanced than the label suggests. And this is exactly the part where, as someone who works in a hospital, I want to be extra careful, because this is where most misunderstandings begin.

Yes, pure cacao contains interesting compounds: flavanols, a group of plant polyphenols. Based on articles from PubMed, we know those flavanols can favourably influence the function of your blood vessels: they help the inner lining of the vessels (the endothelium) relax better, partly through nitric oxide (Heiss et al., 2006). Put simply: the vessel wall becomes a little more supple for a while. A recent experiment even showed that a flavanol-rich cocoa drink protected vascular function during two hours of sitting in older adults (Daniele et al., 2026).

Sounds lovely. Now the cracks.

The largest study ever, COSMOS, gave more than 21,000 older Americans a daily cocoa extract with 500 mg of flavanols. The main result? On the primary outcome, total cardiovascular events, there was no statistically significant effect (Sesso et al., 2022). There was a favourable signal on a secondary measure, death from cardiovascular disease, but the primary question was not answered with certainty. An honest story says so.

And then the biggest fallacy of all.

Almost all of that research is about cacao or concentrated cocoa extract, not about the milk-chocolate bar from the vending machine. In fact: remember alkalization, that Dutch technique? Research shows that this very process breaks flavanols down dramatically. Natural cocoa contains on average about 34.6 mg of flavanols per gram; after heavy alkalization only 3.9 mg remains, nearly ninety percent gone (Miller et al., 2008).

So people hear: “chocolate is healthy.”

While the study was about something that barely resembles their bar.

Put simply: the health claim applies to the bitter, unprocessed side of the story, precisely the side we spent four thousand years sanding away because we didn’t like it.

Does the chocoholic really exist?

Maybe you recognise this: you say you’re addicted to chocolate. “I’m such a chocoholic.” But is that actually true, or a joke we tell ourselves?

First the brain, because yes, there is such a thing as a pleasure system. Though that word is a touch too pretty. Deep in your brain lies a reward network, with an important hub called the nucleus accumbens, that runs on the messenger molecule dopamine. Put simply: dopamine isn’t so much the “this is nice” chemical, but more the “I want this, go get it” chemical. It drives you toward the reward, even before you’ve taken a bite.

In animal research, mice that compulsively keep seeking chocolate were found to have fewer of a certain dopamine receptor (the D2 receptor) in that reward region (Patrono et al., 2015). Note the words animal research. That’s a clue, not proof about your bar on the couch.

And the chocoholic itself?

The word is surprisingly old. Scientists used “addiction” for chocolate as early as the 19th century (Meule, 2015). But a thorough review concluded that most self-reported chocolate “addiction” is not a real addiction in the pharmacological sense (Rogers & Smit, 2000). What’s really at play is something much more human: ambivalence. Chocolate is “nice, but secretly naughty.” And precisely because we forbid it to ourselves, the craving starts shouting louder.

Put simply: forbidding makes desire louder, not softer. Whoever puts themselves on a strict ration thinks all day about that one exact piece. We then call that a craving. And to explain why resisting is so hard, we slap the word “addiction” on it. Often it isn’t a chemical chain around your wrist, but a psychological knot in your head.

Why some people simply don’t like chocolate

And then that one person who looks at you with pity and says: I don’t need chocolate.

They really exist. And partly that lies in the genes. On your tongue sit bitter-taste receptors, and one gene among them, TAS2R38, varies strongly from person to person. One group tastes bitterness very intensely (the so-called supertasters), the other barely (non-tasters). For a supertaster, pure chocolate can simply be too bitter to enjoy.

And now the cracks, because I want to be that honest: this story is often told prettier than it is. In research, the link between that gene and what people actually like is far from always strong; in one study there was even no significant association between the TAS2R38 gene and food preference (Deshaware & Singhal, 2017). And bitterness is easy to drown out: a little sugar, a lot of fat, and most bitter tongues are won over anyway.

In other words: whether you love chocolate is partly innate, but for a large part also learned, through your culture, your childhood, your habituation. That’s exactly why Europeans once added sugar. They sanded the bitterness away until even the doubters gave in.

And so we’re back at our rough stone.

It was never really about chocolate

Shall we take a step back?

Imagine chocolate had never been invented. Would we be healthier? Probably not. We’d have found something else to refine. The pattern you see with cacao you see everywhere:

Soft drinks. Chips. Endless scrolling. A natural reward system that we’ve learned to trigger ever more cleverly and powerfully.

It wasn’t chocolate that made us vulnerable.

Our biology already did that.

Chocolate is therefore less a culprit than a mirror. A smooth, shining mirror, polished for days, in which you see our curiosity, our inventiveness, and our tendency to always want more taste and more convenience. The rough stone from the beginning still exists. We’ve only sanded it so smooth that in its surface we mostly recognise ourselves.

And since we’re on the subject of mirrors and memories, one more misconception to set straight, because that’s simply my trademark.

Almost everyone knows the line “Life is like a box of chocolates.” Except Forrest Gump said it slightly differently in the film: “life was like a box of chocolates”, past tense. That one small word almost no one remembers correctly. We recall not the real line, but the smoother version of it.

Exactly what we do with chocolate. And, I think, with most beautiful stories.

This article is an exploration of history and science, not medical or nutritional advice. If you have questions about your own health, cardiovascular risk or diet, discuss them with your general practitioner or treating specialist.

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Maybe the question isn’t whether your bar is healthy or not.

Maybe the question is: which piece of rough, bitter truth did you sand away today, simply because the smoother version melts so much more pleasantly?

Further reading

• Polyphenols
• E numbers explained
• Why your brain is never satisfied
• Fermented food: the living kitchen
• Sugar: the reward that never has to wait

Sources

Historical image sources:

• Codex Mendoza, folio 46r (1534), Bodleian Libraries via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
• Mayan people and chocolate, Maya civilisation, c. 600–800, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
• Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, Traitez nouveaux et curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate (1688), Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Science (via PubMed):

• Heiss C. et al. (2006). Endothelial function, nitric oxide, and cocoa flavanols. J Cardiovasc Pharmacol. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005344-200606001-00007
• Miller K.B. et al. (2008). Impact of alkalization on the antioxidant and flavanol content of commercial cocoa powders. J Agric Food Chem. https://doi.org/10.1021/jf801670p
• Sesso H.D. et al. (2022). Effect of cocoa flavanol supplementation for the prevention of cardiovascular disease events: the COSMOS randomized clinical trial. Am J Clin Nutr. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqac055
• Vyas C.M. et al. (2024). Multivitamin-mineral supplementation versus placebo on cognitive function (COSMOS). Am J Clin Nutr. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajcnut.2023.12.011
• Daniele A. et al. (2026). Cocoa flavanols protect endothelial function during prolonged sitting in healthy older adults. Food Funct. https://doi.org/10.1039/d5fo02793d
• Rogers P.J. & Smit H.J. (2000). Food craving and food “addiction”: a critical review of the evidence. Pharmacol Biochem Behav. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0091-3057(00)00197-0
• Meule A. (2015). Back by Popular Demand: A Narrative Review on the History of Food Addiction Research. Yale J Biol Med. PMC4553650
• Patrono E. et al. (2015). When chocolate seeking becomes compulsion: gene-environment interplay. PLoS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0120191
• Deshaware S. & Singhal R. (2017). Genetic variation in bitter taste receptor gene TAS2R38, PROP taster status and food preferences. Gene. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gene.2017.06.047

History and culture:

• Powis T.G. et al., Cacao use and the San Lorenzo Olmec (PNAS, 2011): earliest cacao residues, Mokaya ~1900 BCE and the Olmec.
• Cornell University Library, Chocolate: Food of the Gods, on Linnaeus and Theobroma cacao (1753).
• Historical chronicle sources (Oviedo; colonial document, 1545) on cacao beans as currency.
• Bernal Díaz del Castillo on Moctezuma, with the caveat that historians consider the figure of “fifty cups” exaggerated.
• Van Houten (1828), Daniel Peter & Nestlé (1875), Rodolphe Lindt (conching, 1879): the industrial history of chocolate.
• Snopes / film analyses of the misquoted “box of chocolates” line from Forrest Gump (film) and Winston Groom’s novel.

Want to check something? The sources above point to the original publications. If you spot an error, do let me know.