Why would you recommend a cocoa over cacao. Cacao is tradtionally thought to have more high flavanol because of the way its processed.
I think that he is recommending that we read the study. He didn’t design the study, he’s just reporting on its results. I am grateful for that, especially since this particular one deals with heart issues and I had a heart attack about 14 months ago.
As an aside, I put a heaping teaspoon of organic cacao into my coffee every morning because I believe, as you do, that it has more flavenols than cocoa. I am pretty sure that this study use the Cocoa Via product because of easy availability and standardization; I wish that they had used cacao, but I am nonetheless going to continue using cacao myself. BTW, I use coffee from Life Extension that is processed in a way that preserves as much in the way of its (different than cacao) flavenols as possible, because I am an “all of the above” kind of guy when it comes to my heart health. I also convinced my cardiologist to prescribe colchicine, which reduces vascular inflammation (which is the cause of plaque, NOT cholesterol) and am taking a daily 81 mg aspirin. So I am hitting inflammation from multiple different angles.
Oh, I also take a quality EVOO every morning and evening, and I often times eat a couple ounces from a 90% cocoa chocolate bar (which, by necessity, has relatively little sugar), as well as eat sardines (in EVOO) several times per week for the omega-3s that reduce inflammation, plus severely limit my intake of foods that cause inflammation. Like I said above, it is a multi prong approach. I know I’m not going to live forever, but I’d like to get the most out of this life as possible. Cacao is only one of the tools available, though very tasty one (me being an old chocaholic), so it’s easy to use.