Going Dark or White?

Who doesn't love chocolates? I know I do. There are lots of types and forms of chocolates out there and we all have our preference. For now, let's talk about going dark or milky. Preference as it seems is affected by region. Based on their sales, General Manager of Mrs. Cavanaugh's, Paul Jensen said that Easterners prefer dark ones while Westerners go for milky ones. However, naturally, chocolate is bitter. Cacao has polyphenols and these polyphonic compounds produce the bitter taste in unprocessed Cacaos. So the cacao pods go through process such as fertilization to reduce the bitter taste for customer acceptance. Technicalities aside, have you ever wonder what would be the response of dark chocolate lovers and milky chocolate fans if they were presented with chocolate pieces with varying amounts of less processed cacao. Will the milky lovers be more sensitive to the presence of cacao powder? What do you think?

The answer can be found in the study made by Harwood. M and colleagues on tolerance for “bitter” tasting chocolates. The study made use of rejection threshold which is the value below which a stimulus is rejected by an individual. (Glossary Speech Server, 2007). Rejection threshold stimulus allows researchers to determine the amount needed to cause a rejection response in a certain stimuli. (Harwood, Ziegler, Hayes, 2013)

Put simply, the study explored at what level would Team dark chocolate and Team white chocolate would say “it’s too bitter!” which would mean they rejected the chocolate. Since Team Dark loves and probably is accustomed to the bitter taste, it would take more bitter powder (under-fertilized cocoa powder) for them to say it is too much. Meanwhile, Team White loves sweet and would therefore be more sensitive to the bitter taste. Do you agree with this hypothesis? Well, let’s see what happens.

Harwood and colleagues asked 99 individuals, 53 preferring milk chocolate and the remaining dark chocolate, to participate in this study. Surprisingly, the study showed that there was no difference between the two groups. Basically, both groups, whether they are Team Dark or Team White, have the same reaction to an increase in the under-fertilized cocoa powder in a chocolate sample.

What is interesting in this study that even though people have their own preference in chocolates, they rejected the bitter tasting samples. Both groups showed the same threshold for bitter chocolates which is 80.7%!

In the end, bitter chocolate is still bitter no matter which team you are on. Personally, I love dark chocolate. How about you, which team are you on? 

References: 

Glossary Speech Server. (2007). Retrieved July 29, 2013, from msdn: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb857298(v=office.12).aspx

Harwood, M., Ziegler, G., & Hayes, J. (2013). Tolerance for High Flavanol Cocoa Powdet in Semisweet Chocolate. Nutrients, 2258-2267.

Photo one taken from: http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/24000000/Yummy-c-D0-BD-CF-83-C2-A2-CF-83-E2-84-93-CE-B1-D1-82-D1-94-D1-95-24009285-400-400.jpg

Photo two taken from: http://l.yimg.com/ea/img/-/130227/640px_chocolate_en_rama_18iqhoa-18iqhop.jpg?x=400&sig=Bq2Tj9edck33pZAEWM.rCg--