Transcriber: Tatjana Jevdjic Reviewer: Capa Girl
My name is David Wolfe.
I was born near New York city in America,
currently residing in Ontario Canada.
I am a renegade nutritionist, I am renegade superfoodist
and infopreneur,
but above all of that
I am gastronome.
I explore unique foods that are available to us all over the world.
In 2002 I founded, as part of my work,
a nonprofit organization
The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, whose goal is to plant
18 billion fruit trees and nut trees all over the planet.
We're at about 200,000 right now.
And, that same year that we founded this organization,
a wonderful organization filled with amazing people,
I ran into the most incredible fruit and nut tree in the world.
It is the source
of the Earth's favorite food.
That's right, the population of the world has one favorite food.
And of course, it's chocolate.
Now, in my exploration of this I stumbled into it
because I was a health food fanatic.
I never ate chocolate since I was fifteen years old.
This was about when I was maybe 32.
I stumbled into this form of chocolate here.
This is raw chocolate.
This is chocolate in its unique original form,
a form that is called --
by the British it is the slang word "coco."
But it's really cacao. That's the real word.
And is sometimes called a bean, but it's really a nut.
It is the most widely eaten nut in the world
that nobody actually eats.
I was in Hawaii with some friends.
We were peeling them. They started showing up in our smoothies.
We'd get these coconuts, we'd break up coconuts
We called them superfoods smoothies.
And we started adding them to these smoothies and I asked my friend one day,
I said, "What is this?" I didn't know what it was.
And he said, "Oh, just peel the next one, and eat it."
So, I did eat it. And that's what it looks like on the inside.
And, at that exact moment
that I ate that food, I was touched by the spirit
of chocolate.
A food that's archetypically connected
with winning the golden ticket,
that's connected with prosperity.
I was taken on a rocket ride
across the universe
in a voyage of discovery that has brought me right to you
at this present moment, right now.
This food is filled with legends and lore,
which I summarized along with scientific data and recipe information
and all kinds of great stuff
in my book "Naked chocolate,"
which became the sourcebook or a reference book
for people who are interested in raw chocolate,
because all the chocolate we've ever had has been processed
through high heat and machines.
And we thought, maybe we should just eat it
cold processed -- is there a difference.
And that's we're gonna explore here
as we delve into the astonishing truth
about the world's greatest food.
Chocolate comes from the Mayan lands and ancient Mayan farms.
Chocolate is a Mayan word.
The word "cacao" is one of the oldest words
in use in the world today.
Some people estimate that that word is 15,000 years old.
The oldest word in the world.
It was brought to the West and brought to you
by Hernando Cortez.
He was the conqueror of Mexico. It all happened by an accident,
because Montezuma, who was the leader
of Mexico at that time,
was in a state of civil war in Mexico City.
And when Cortez showed up there in 1521, there was --
they believe that
Cuauhtémoc himself had come to the great city.
Christopher Columbus, when he first spotted cacao
he thought it was almond.
And this was money for them. This is what their currency was.
Today we use coins. Then they used cacao.
It was their money.
And he saw -- somebody dropped some cacao beans on a little boat.
And they all jumped for it.
Columbus wrote that these people are crazy about almond.
Montezuma was known to drink 50 cups of chocolate a day.
It was always consumed as a drink.
And there you see the cup
that Montezuma was known to drink out of, or one that's similar to that.
Anyway, how do you turn this bean, this nut, into a drink?
Well, you'll have to break it open, and eventually
get all of those cacao beans into a beverage, which we'll see later.
But before we do that,
we've gotta look at where the chocolate comes from.
This is the chocolate tree.
And yes, money does grow on trees.
Still today the number one cash crop in the world.
And it's the best crop
for keeping indigenous people in the jungle,
so that we don't cut down our sacred forests.
Every time you choose to buy chocolate,
organic chocolate, and or, what I prefer -- raw chocolate,
you are voting with your money to save the rain forest,
and it is a vote that counts.
It's the best vote you can have.
It grows in a little pod.
What an interesting looking plant.
It grows right off the trunk.
The fruit does.
And inside --
there's the flower.
This is the glory of chocolate.
Look at the different colors there.
Inside we see this.
These are the cacao nuts, or the beans, or the nut
that all chocolate is made out of inside.
And around each nut is a white pulp.
And that pulp was traditionally in Amazonia and Central America
where chocolate is from, was only eaten by women.
But men ate the nut on the inside.
This is what that pulp looks like.
That's what we call 'The best day ever'.
When you have that much chocolate, real chocolate,
original chocolate, raw chocolate,
the fruit than nut, the pulp, everything,
but you gotta watch out, because all the creatures in the forest eat it.
And in fact,
it is known that if you have a forest with 140 species of different birds
then when you put a cacao orchard in,
and you put it right into the jungle;
no trees are taken out, nothing is cut down.
You take your little baby cacao plants or "chocolate trees",
you put them right in the forest,
and that will attract at least 40 more species of birds.
Birds love to hang out in chocolate trees.
It comes back to this; the coin of the realm,
the great cacao bean. The secret inside.
We had an amazing discovery early on.
In that, that cacao bean, the thing that all chocolate is made out of,
is the highest antioxidant food in the world.
This was a discovery. This was not known ten years ago.
It is known now.
Chocolate contains 15 times the amount of antioxidants
as wild blueberries,
20 times the antioxidants as what's in green tea,
30 times the antioxidants as red wine.
All of those pigments of color, that are captured,
that beautiful purple color
that's the antioxidants; it's actually the color.
And the brown of chocolate is the polyphenols
that protect yourselves and actually protect you from aging.
Listen to this:
It is known now that chocolate is the number one longevity food in the world.
That is known.
It is the number one food for your heart according to the research,
for your heart.
It's also a great way
to party and have a good time without a hangover.
Chocolate grows across the temp required that the --
what we call the tropical belt of the world;
from about 20 degrees north latitude to 20 degrees south latitude.
In that belt. And it's originally from the Americas:
Central America,
Venezuela, Ecuador.
Most people now believe that chocolate is originally from
the Orinoco river basin of Venezuela.
That's where the Spanish first rolled into and saw tens of thousands,
even hundreds of thousands of wild cacao trees,
but no people,
500 years ago.
I searched all over the planet. I visited shamans
asking them what they thought about chocolate.
This shaman in the Amazon told me that you can take the cacao tree bark,
peel it off, soak it in ice-cold water.
It releases the gel in 24 hours, and when you rub that in your scalp,
it cures male pattern baldness.
I'm an infopreneur.
My eyes went into dollar signs, when I heard that.
You mean, there is a product that would sell more than chocolate itself,
that comes from the chocolate tree?
And we're researching this right now.
First and foremost I am a researcher.
That's what I love to do, I love to study,
research and look into the data.
Chocolate is the number one food
in magnesium of any food in the world,
that is the number one mineral deficiency in the Western world.
Also, chocolate is the highest natural source of iron,
the highest natural source of manganese
and the highest natural source of chromium
of any major food in the world.
These are very important minerals for blood building.
They're very important for stable blood sugar
and, of course, magnesium de-stresses us.
Could we use that? I think so.
Chocolate is also extraordinarily rich
in phosphorus, zinc and copper.
Zinc and copper for healthy nervous system and phosphorus for bone.
We always hear about calcium, calcium, calcium.
Phosphorus, we need that for healthy bones.
And this is why chocolate is associated with longevity.
If you recall,
there was a great book written years ago, which we're gonna look at
"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
And the Oompa Loompa's had brilliant pearly white strong teeth,
because chocolate
is great for your teeth.
Chocolate toothpaste is coming.
This is what the cacao bean looks like when you break it open,
when you break it into the different pieces.
And those are called nibs,
and these products are available here in Finland now.
And all over the world.
Raw chocolate products -- in fact this industry is now
over a hundred million dollar industry.
And it all came from one moment
when I bit into raw cacao bean. And for the last 8.5 years,
I've been proselytizing about the power of chocolate
all over the place.
In fact it never stops. Some people complain about that.
Anyway, iconically chocolate is associated with wonder and magic.
And if you see that giant head back there,
that's an Olmec head.
They're the ones who originated the word cacao.
And you can see the bird in this image as well,
indicating that connection
between birds in that realm and chocolate.
Chocolate, as I discovered when I was studying in Oaxaca Mexico,
is added to guacamole,
but not process chocolate,
raw chocolate.
They take the crushed up nibs and they put it in their guacamole.
Try it at home.
I was fortunate I grew up in California with Mexican people,
and I was in love with guacamole from an early time.
What an amazing thing to have your cuisine expanded.
And that's what we're doing with chocolate.
I got so into chocolate, I started growing chocolate.
This is my chocolate nursery in Hawaii.
I have a farm in Canada, I have a farm in Hawaii.
And the purpose of that farm in Hawaii is to grow chocolate and explore
the mystery and magic of this great plant.
I grew that chocolate tree from seed.
Such an amazing amount of learning can come from growing plants.
You can learn more from a garden many times
then you can from a book.
I was very, very excited to explore.
Maybe there's even more magic here than we know about.
Now, I have continued to discover that there's little things in,
anandamide, for example, the bliss chemical is present in chocolate.
The love chemicals, phenethylamines
that are damaged by heat,
but entirely present in raw chocolate.
There's at least seven of them in raw chocolate.
And those are the feelings
of love, happiness
and fulfillment that chocolate gives us. It's from a chemistry that's in the plant.
This is the book. And if you recall the book,
I do want to mention that when I got to chapter 16,
there was a most amazing citing
that occured for me when I was in Amsterdam
many years ago. (Laughter)
[You] can guess what happens there.
"Oompa-Loompas!" everyone said it at once.
"Oompa-Loompas! Imported direct from Loompaland,"
said Mr Wonka proudly.
"There's no such place," said Mrs Salt.
"Excuse me, dear lady, but.." "Mr Wonka," cried Mrs Salt,
"I am a teacher of geography."
"Then you'll know all about it," said Mr Wonka.
"And oh, what a terrible country it is! Nothing but thick jungles infested by
the most dangerous beasts in the entire world --
hornswogglersand snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles.
A whangdoodle would eat ten Oompa-Loompas for breakfast
and come galloping back for a second helping.
When I went out there, I found the little Oompa-Loompas living in tree houses.
They had to live in tree houses to escape from the whangdoodles
and the hornswogglers and the snozzwangers.
They were practically starving to death.
And they were living on green caterpillars, and the caterpillars tasted revolting,
and the Oompa-Loompas spent every moment of their days climbing through the treetops
looking for anything to mix with the caterpillars to make them taste better.
The one food that they longed for more than any other
was the cacao bean. (Laughter)
But they couldn't get it.
An Oompa-Loompa was lucky if he found 3 or 4 cacao beans a year.
But oh, how they craved them. Listen to this:
They used to dream about cacao beans all night
and talk about them all day.
You had only to mention the word "cacao" to an Oompa-Loompa
and he would start dribbling at the mouth."
Listen closely: "The cacao bean," Mr Wonka continued,
"which grows on the cacao tree,
is the thing that all chocolate is made from."
Roald Dahl knew, and it was in the book,
the great book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
Remember the Oompa Loompas.
This is an elf with a cacao pod
but the sculpture is 3000 years old.
It is intrinsic to the magic of chocolate.
In Mexico, this is where the great cuisine was innovated,
it was always served as a drink, but today
we have blenders. It makes it so much easier.
You can upgrade
your smoothie, your protein shake by adding a dash of raw cacao
and bringing forth the magic and wonder,
just as they did in Ancient Mexico.
On the Mexican 100 peso note, if you look closely,
right there next to Xochipilli are actual cacao recipes,
iconically represented.
We've innovated and brought forth now an entirely new cuisine,
brought to the greatest chefs in the world,
revive some of the great additives of chocolate,
creating these wonderful and delightful recipes.
The one question that I get more than any other, after all of this is:
Is it possible to o.d. on chocolate?
and the answer is: Yes.
Thank you so much. I am David Wolfe. Have the best day ever.