A flavor boost that gives you superpowers. After all cacao is a superfood. At Antidote we say only chocolate high on cacao - low sugar gives you the superpowers.

But hey, what about Stevia and all the alternative sugars and Coconut Palm Sugar??? Are those better or worse for you?  

Do you like Stevia sweetened products? Have you heard that empty sweeteners and artificial sweeteners as Stevia, Erythritol, Monk Fruit rather confuse the body as there is no nutrition and calories in them? They trigger blood sugar levels telling the brain something sweet it coming but then it doesn’t. They wreak havoc on our gut microbiome as well.

Several studies go even further on stevia and artificial sweeteners’ side effects. There’s growing concern that raw stevia herb may harm your kidneys, reproductive system, and cardiovascular system. It may also drop blood pressure to extremely low levels. Bottom line is to always look for natural and whole ingredients.

There is a good book by Michael Pollan called: Food Rules, a #1 New York Times Bestseller. And there are a lot of documentaries out on sugar if you are curious or need a push: The Truth about sugar, Fed Up, Sugar Crash, Sugar Coated, That Sugar Film.

A popular brand on the market features "Stevia sweetened", when you look at the ingredient label though you can see Stevia extract on the end of the list and Erythritol, Dextrin in the beginning meaning the majority of sweetness is coming from those ingredients in the beginning and Stevia is merely used for marketing as people think it is harmless.

We continuously want to believe diet marketed products are better for us, alternative sugar, alternative milks and so on. Just because they are marketed that way doesn’t make it so if we look at humans in a holistic way. There is no shortcut. If one wants to control sugar intake for various reasons, may it be just for wellness and managing energy levels, the best is to either cut out sweeteners entirely or go for products that have lower sugar.

If you want chocolate you could get our 100% cacao bar with bits of dates or with cacao nibs on top. It has 0 sugar. If that is too extreme as it is for many you could work your way up from our 70%, 73% bars to 77% cacao Antidote bars (that translates to 23% sugar) to 84% cacao bar (which means 16% sugar). Imagine a 54% dark chocolate, which seems to be the norm in the industry, that means 46% of that bar is sugar. Almost half the bar!!! Just FYI our Antidote milk chocolate bar has 56% cacao which is quite high for a milk chocolate and has only 20% added sugar. That’s what makes it so delicious.

There is nothing wrong with sugar if used in the right amounts - not as a condiment, more as a spice ;)

Lastly this wouldn’t be complete if we don’t talk about Coconut Palm Sugar, which pops up on the front of chocolate packaging like it makes magic so good for you chocolate. Sugar by any other name is always sugar. It is a more nutritious sugar than refined white sugar for sure, however cane sugar comes in many shades of brown, from unrefined, to panela which is the most unrefined and all of those contain nutrients and the more color the more caramel flavor it contains. All those are available to us in Ecuador where we source our cacao and where we produce Antidote chocolate. Notably Coconut Palm Sugar is produced in South East Asia and has a large carbon footprint traveling half the globe which makes it unsustainable by our standards.

Again, you may know all of that. It is important and it is important to talk about it since the sugar type question comes up again and again.  💖  In that sense have a sweet rest of the day. 😉