REAL LIFE NEWS: HOW ELECTRICITY MAKES CHOCOLATE HEALTHIER
by Hazed
Mmmm… chocolate… my favourite thing. If only it wasn’t so unhealthy! Well, maybe in the future it will have fewer calories, because physicists have found that by applying electricity, the yummy stuff needs less fat to make it delicious.
Cocoa butter is a vital ingredient in chocolate. It gives it the smooth velvety texture you experience when it melts in the mouth. Previously, attempts to produce chocolate with less cocoa butter have failed because without it the chocolate becomes gloopy.
But physicists from Temple University in Philadelphia have found that if they zap liquid chocolate with an electric field along its direction of flow, it polarises the cocoa molecules and causes them to clump into spheroids. This means less fat needs to be added. (The technical reasons as to why that is can be read at the source link below.)
Tests showed that using this method, the amount of fat in a Mars bar could be reduced by more than ten percent.
What’s more, reducing the fat in chocolate means it has a higher concentration of cocoa, making it richer and tastier. So we can expect chocolate to be healthier and yummier. Excellent news!
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/21/low_fat_chocolate_electric_fields/
