Cocoa Butter is good or bad for you?

Hello my fellow chocolate lovers,

I am Takanori Chiwata, the chocolate engineer of COCONAMA CHOCOLATE.

In this post, I’d like to share about cocoa butter in a bit more detail.

This is what a cocoa butter looks like.

In our last post, I explained that cocoa butter is a fat extracted from ground cacao beans.

Well, what kind of fat is this?

Is it health benefiting or a type of fat one should avoid?

In recent years, people tend to consume less calories considering their health. This inevitably leads people to avoid fat itself which is high in calories.

However, “good fats” are actually necessary to keep one in good health.

Let me explain about this “good fats” a bit more.

Generally speaking, palmitic acids and other saturated fatty acids often found in beef are considered a “bad fat”. DHA and EPA ,on the other hand, are unsaturated fatty acids often found in fish are considered a “good fat”.

What in the world is “fatty acids” now?

First, we’ve got to start off by breaking down the term “fat”.

General fat consists of fatty acids binding to Triglyceride.

The good or bad of a fat gets determined by the types of fatty acids it consists of.

Oils like olive oil and grapeseed oils are rich in oleic acid, which are unsaturated fatty acids. Their health benefits have been proven too!

Now that I explained about fat, what about our cocoa butter?

Cocoa butter consists of 30% oleic acid, 30% palmitic acid, and 40% stearic acid.

It does contain quite a bit of oleic acid which optimizes cholesterol, so I think we can call cocoa butter a “good fat”.

It does contain both palmitic acid and stearic acid, which are both saturated fatty acids. This fatty acid is called a “bad fat” since it increases the number of both HDL (good) and LDL (bad) cholosetrols. However, consuming too-less of this fatty acid can also cause a health problem, so if you stick with a standard amount you shouldn’t be worrying about it too much.

The most contained stearic acid is hard for your body to absorb, so even if you eat it the calories listed don't always equal the calories your body actually absorbed.

Considering the types of fatty acids it has I can’t really say “cocoa butter is health benefiting”, but I think it can be classified a “good fat”.

Let’s call it a day now. In our next post, I’d like to share about the physical structure of cocoa butter in a bit more depth. See you then!

With hopes that you will be able to encounter the perfect chocolate just for you,

Takanori Chiwata