Using this we should be able to quantify exactly what causes the benefits of eating chocolate for stroke, and we'll know what types and how much to eat. But that will never occur with the incompetency of the stroke medical world. You're screwed forever.
http://news.ubc.ca/2016/11/29/science-for-sweet-tooths/
Food scientists at the University of British Columbia have developed a
faster and cheaper way to quantify antioxidant levels in chocolate.
It’s a method they plan to use in new research to help uncover when
antioxidant levels rise and fall during the manufacturing process, from
raw cocoa beans to chocolate bars.
“Our method predicts the antioxidant levels in chocolate in under a
minute, compared to the industry standard that can take several hours or
even days,” said Xiaonan Lu, an assistant professor in food, nutrition
and health in the faculty of land and food systems,
who developed the method alongside PhD student Yaxi Hu. “It’s not a
substitute for the traditional method used at the moment, but it does
show a strong correlation for being just as reliable.”
The UBC method uses infrared spectroscopy, a technology that can be
used to illuminate infrared light onto chocolate samples. The infrared
spectra record the chemical composition of each sample, including the
amount of polyphenols, micronutrients with high antioxidant properties.
The traditional method relies on biochemical tests to read absorbance
values and can be quite time consuming and expensive.
“Testing for antioxidant levels can give chocolatiers guidance on
which cocoa beans to select, or how to improve their processing
parameters,” said Hu.
Chocolate is made from cocoa beans and is manufactured through
several processing stages, including drying, roasting and fermentation
of the beans. The UBC food scientists have started to use their method
to measure cocoa bean samples from around the world in each stage to
determine when antioxidant levels are at their highest and lowest.
“If we identify drying as the step that significantly lowers the
bean’s antioxidant properties, for example, we will want to develop a
strategy to reduce the drying time, or drying temperature,” Lu said.
It could be considered incredibly valuable information for chocolate
companies who want to make products high in antioxidants or appeal more
to health-conscious consumers.
Antioxidants benefit human health and help contribute to the
prevention of cancers, vision loss and heart diseases. Antioxidant
compounds are commonly found in foods like pecans, blueberries and
chocolate.
Lu and Hu’s research on cocoa beans is in its early stages as they
test hundreds of samples. The method they developed to test for
antioxidant levels was funded by a local chocolatier in Metro Vancouver,
the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and by
the non-profit MITACS.
The UBC food scientists hope to attract additional funding,
particularly from a major chocolate company, to further their studies.
Parts of their existing research were published earlier this year in a study, Determination
of antioxidant capacity and phenolic content of chocolate by attenuated
total reflectance-Fourier transformed-infrared spectroscopy, in the journal Food Chemistry.
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