Ancestral Brew

How to make Aztec Chocolate (Xocolatl)

Recipe inspired by the 16th-century documentation of Spanish Friar Bernardino de Sahagún.

📺 Full recipe and video credit: - highly recommend the channel if this kind of history is your thing.

How chocolate is made

The Guna people of Panama have been studied by Harvard researchers for over twenty years, and what they found still doesn’t have a clean explanation.

One in every 150 children born here has albinism. The global average is one in 20,000. They call them sipu; children of the moon, and they are considered sacred from birth.

But the biological anomalies don’t stop there.

Harvard Medical School professor Norman Hollenberg spent decades trying to understand why island-dwelling Guna barely die of heart disease, stroke, or cancer. Their blood pressure doesn’t rise with age. Their heart disease death rate is roughly nine times lower than the rest of Panama. Their cancer death rate is fifteen times lower. Dementia is virtually nonexistent.

He checked their genetics. Guna who move to Panama City and abandon their traditional diet develop the same diseases as everyone else, so it wasn’t their genes. He checked their salt intake. Higher than the United States. Still no hypertension.

The answer was their drink.

The Guna consume more than five cups of raw, unprocessed cacao every single day; ground by hand from whole beans, boiled in water, drunk hot and unsweetened before anything else. More than water.

Now here’s where it gets interesting for the skin angle specifically.

The Guna live in a tropical archipelago. Intense equatorial sun. And yet skin cancer rates among island-dwelling Guna are remarkably low. Whether cacao is contributing to this is not definitively proven, but the research is pointing in that direction.

A 2006 study published in the Journal of Nutrition found that women consuming high-flavanol cocoa daily for 12 weeks showed a 25% reduction in UV-induced skin redness compared to a low-flavanol group. The same group showed increased skin density, improved hydration, and reduced roughness. The researchers concluded that dietary flavanols from cocoa contribute to endogenous photoprotection, meaning protection that comes from inside the body, not a topical cream.

The mechanism is blood flow. Cocoa flavanols increase microcirculation in skin tissue, improving the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the dermis.

It took me a year to find the best beans.

That search led me to Indonesia. This region produces cacao with some of the highest polyphenol concentrations on earth and naturally rich in theobromine, magnesium, potassium, and fibre, with some of the lowest heavy metal levels tested.

This is what makes real cacao one of the most complete cardiovascular foods documented in science.

① Vasodilation - epicatechin triggers nitric oxide, widening your blood vessels.
② Blood pressure - cacao peptides block the same three targets as blood pressure medication.
③ Smooth muscle relaxation - theobromine relaxes arterial walls and raises HDL.
④ Antiplatelet - inhibits clotting through the same pathway as low-dose aspirin.
⑤ Anti-inflammatory - flavanols reduce the key markers that predict heart disease.
⑥ Lipid improvement - lowers LDL, prevents LDL oxidation, raises HDL, drops triglycerides.
⑦ Insulin sensitivity - improves glucose metabolism, one of the biggest CVD risk drivers.
⑧ Arterial stiffness - measurably reduces arterial rigidity. Confirmed in a 2025 clinical trial.

Who knew eating chocolate could reduce blood pressure