Chocolate Facts, Effects & History.

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Chocolate is the most popular sweet treat in the world. People around the world (but mostly in Europe and the United States) consume more than 3 million tons of cocoa beans a year, according to the World Cocoa  Foundation. And, not only does eating chocolate make you feel good, it may also be good for your heart and your brain.
What is chocolate?
Chocolate is prepared from the fruit of theTheobroma cacao, a tropical tree whose name means "food of the gods" in Greek, according to " Chocolate: Food of the Gods," an online exhibit by the Cornell University Library.
Theobroma cacaotrees are native to the Amazon and Orinoco river basins in South America. The trees are widely distributed from southeastern Mexico to the Amazon River. They thrive in hot, humid areas within about 20 degrees of the equator, according to Cornell. As the popularity of chocolate spread, growers established plantations in other regions, such as West Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Today, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil account for 79 percent of the world's cacao production.
Cacao trees bear fruit that are about the same size and shape of a papaya, according to Patric Chocolate. These bumpy, lumpy berries, or pods, are full of up to 50 sour seeds, or beans, covered in white pulp.
Cacao seeds are harvested by hand because machines could injure the trees, according to Cornell. Workers remove the pods, which are orange when they are ripe, and open them with a machete. The seeds are placed in large fermentation trays that are stacked and covered in banana leaves, where they are left for two to seven days. Fermentation produces the chocolate flavor and aroma. It also destroys the seed's embryo, preventing unwanted germination, and causes the white pulp to fall away from the seeds.
After fermenting, the beans dry out on sunny platforms. Workers turn them several times a day for three to five days to complete drying. The beans can dry faster in rotary driers but sun-dried beans taste the best, according to Cornell.
Next, the beans are taken to the chocolate factory, where they are cleaned and debris is removed. The beans are roasted in large, rotating ovens. The roasting draws out flavor and removes the beans from their hulls. Roasted beans go into a winnowing machine, which cracks the beans and removes hulls. The remaining part of the bean is called the nib. Nibs become chocolate.
The nibs are ground down under a series of rollers. This process results in a thick paste called chocolate liquor. Chocolate liquor does not contain alcohol (however, chocolate liqueur does). It is the main source of unsweetened baking chocolate, according to Pam Williams, co-founder and past president of the Fine Chocolate Industry Association(FCIA) and founder and lead instructor of Ecole Cocolat Professional School of  Chocolate Arts.
At this stage, the type of chocolate being produced is determined. According to the FCIA, ingredients separate fine chocolate from that of average quality. "Fine chocolate," as designated by the FCIA, contains only cacao liquor, cacao butter (optional), sugar, lecithin, vanilla (optional) and possibly milk fats and solids. Additional flavors or ingredients like nuts can be added later.

Types of chocolate
Fine chocolate falls into three categories: dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate, Williams said.
*.Dark chocolate has chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, lecithin, sugar and vanilla.
*.Milk chocolate has all of the above plus milk fats and milk solids.
*.White chocolate contains everything milk chocolate does except chocolate liquor.
Chocolatiers debate whether white chocolate is really chocolate. Until 2002, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considered it a confectionary rather than chocolate because it does not contain chocolate liquor. The Hershey Food Corp. and the Chocolate Manufacturers Association petitioned the FDA, which added a standard of identity for  white chocolate. Because the FDA refers to it as white chocolate, rather than confectionary, some experts, like Williams, accept white chocolate as chocolate...

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