The purpose of this research was to produce cocoa butter equivalent from the blend of mango seed almond fat (MAF) from “Keaw” variety mango kernels and palm oil mid-fraction (POMF). Seven MAF-POMF blends with different proportions (100/0, 90/10, 80/20, 70/30, 60/40, 50/50 and 0/100 (%wt) of MAF to POMF) including cocoa butter were characterized using various techniques. Fatty acid composition w...

Application of a comparative aroma extraction dilution analysis on unroasted and roasted Criollo cocoa beans revealed 42 aroma compounds in the flavor dilution (FD) factor range of 1-4096 for the unroasted and 4-8192 for the roasted cocoa beans. While the same compounds were present in the unroasted and roasted cocoa beans, respectively, these clearly differed in their intensity. For example, 2...

Here we compare the codes CoCoA+ and Birds. CoCoA+ is the code released by the authors of Ma et al. (2015) implementing their algorithm in Apache Spark. As indicated in Ma et al. (2015), it is available in http:// github.com/gingsmith/cocoa/. Birds is the code released by the author of Yang (2013) implementing their practical variant of DisDCA proposed in that work using C++ and MPI. It is avai...

Epidemiological studies have demonstrated the beneficial effect of plant-derived food intake in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). The potential bioactivity of cocoa and its polyphenolic components in modulating cardiovascular health is now being studied worldwide and continues to grow at a rapid pace. In fact, the high polyphenol content of cocoa is of particular interest from ...

BACKGROUND Natural cocoa and cocoa products are increasingly attracting the attention of many investigators and the general public because of their potential nutritional and medicinal properties and other claims. OBJECTIVE This study sought to evaluate the effect the consumption of natural cocoa powder has on some biochemical and hematological indices in the rat, as a way of establishing the ...

Chocolate is often labeled with percent cocoa solids content. It is assumed that higher cocoa solids contents are indicative of higher polyphenol concentrations, which have potential health benefits. However, cocoa solids include polyphenol-free cocoa butter and polyphenol-rich nonfat cocoa solids (NFCS). In this study the strength of the relationship between NFCS content (estimated by theobrom...

Good quality cocoa beans are well studied and known as rich source of natural polyphenols. On the contrary, little research has been done regarding polyphenol extracts (PE) from low quality cocoa beans i.e. partially fermented dry cocoa beans (PFDCB) and unfermented dry cocoa beans (UFDCB). The following research was carried out to study the antioxidant, antibacterial, and food colouring proper...

Ochratoxin A (OTA) is a mycotoxin mainly produced by mould species of the genera Aspergillus and Penicillium, which grow on a variety of agricultural products. OTA-contaminated foodstuffs pose a major health hazard to consumers, including human and animal. In Cote d'Ivoire, numerous studies are being carried out to find the best way of preventing OTA contamination of cocoa raw material. The obj...

Cocoa consumption began in America and in the mid sixteenth Century it quickly spread to Europe. Beyond being considered a pleasant habit due to its rich sweet lingering taste, chocolate was considered a good nutrient and even a medicine. Traditionally, health benefits of cocoa have been related with the high content of antioxidants of Theobroma cocoa beans. However, the direct psychoactive eff...

The articles in the issue provide important evidence for the acute effects of cocoa flavanols on the peripheral vascular response in humans. As Hollenberg and Luscher point out, ‘‘not only does flavanol-rich cocoa-induced nitric oxide production show a dramatic influence on blood vessels in healthy individuals, preliminary information available indicates that the influence on nitric oxide synth...