What jumps out for me, and your cocoa butter idea is a good one, is the emotion involved in hot cocoa. It is an extremely pleasant, tasty, homey association with the past that could be such a good feeling that the feeling itself is what stimulates the brain.
Just a thought. It would be a mind over matter explanation and would account for the lack of success identifying a specific chemical compound.
Start raising kids where a beating or a severe lecture (Michelle Obama) is associated with drinking hot chocolate and the benefit might disappear in a couple decades.
I’d always assume a chemical, because there are so darned many of them that are biologically interactive with us.
To start with, cocoa is full of antioxidant-rich phytonutrients. ORAC is the acronym for “Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity”, and raw cocoa has the highest ORAC value of any food (which is why the researchers focus on it.
(I might also add this is why chemotherapy patients should never, ever drink cocoa or eat chocolate, because the intent of the chemo is to create oxygen radicals in the tumor.)
Cocoa has more flavonoids than any known food. Two flavonoids in particular, catechin and epicatchin, are found in extremely high amounts in cocoa powder and have copious amounts of research supporting their health benefits. These two flavonoids along with hundreds of other known phytochemicals in cocoa appear to prevent and even treat some of today’s most devastating diseases. Interestingly, this myriad of flavonoids in cocoa appears to be absorbed intact into the human blood stream.
This is unusual because many flavonoids are destroyed during digestion, a reason that flavonoid supplement don’t seem to work as well as those within plant cells tissue.
Many Americans are deficient in the minerals copper and magnesium, both of which are found in cocoa. Cocoa contains about 0.8 mg of copper per 100 g and is therefore a great food source of copper. Copper has many uses in the body, including the oxygenation of red blood cells and aiding in cellular energy production. Cocoa also has the highest amount of magnesium of any known food source,approximately 131 mg per 100 g of cocoa. This mineral, which plays a significant role in cocoa’s health giving properties, is required by over 300 enzymes in the body and is crucial for cardiovascular health, optimal blood pressure and protein synthesis.
Other chemicals in cocoa cause euphoria, including phenyethlamine (PEA), serotonin, tyramine and anandamide. One of the most well-known is phenyethlamine (PEA) which helps the body release its own opium-like compounds, called endorphins, and also boosts levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Most people are deficient in the neurotransmitter serotonin and this is why many Americans are prescribed anti-depressants which boost serotonin levels. Anandamide binds to the same receptor sites in the brain as THC, the active constituent in marijuana.