Whether eating tons of chocolate actually prevents cancer would be difficult to answer, even with rigorous study. But we’re not here to fact-check whether chocolate is good for you. That’s been done before, very nicely. Instead, we’ll take a look at a history of chocolate health claims. Not long after Westerners learned about chocolate from the Aztecs in the 16th century, they’ve been obsessed about what it could do for them. (Like being yummy is not enough? Conquistadors are so hard to satisfy.)
In 1631, the Spanish physician Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma published science’s first paper about chocolate and health. At the time, European doctors still based their practices on the idea that human health was dominated by a balance of four humors. Colmenero explained cocoa’s effects on the humors. He also wrote the first recipe for Western-style hot chocolate.
A decade later, one Captain James Wadsworth, Englishman, published several translations of Colmenero’s work. In one seminal edition, he added some chocolate super powers of his own devising to the introduction:
It vehemently Incites to Venus, and causeth Conception in women, hastens and facilitates their Delivery: It is an excellent help to Digestion, it cures Consumptions, and the Cough of the Lungs, the New Disease, or Plague of the Guts, and other Fluxes, the Green Sicknesse, Jaundise, and all manner of Inflamations, Opilations, and Obstructions.
Although such claims wouldn’t hold water now, Wadsworth did have one insight that might still apply today. Hot chocolate, he wrote, “makes such as drink it often, Fat, and Corpulent, faire and Amiable.”

Image: Karen Gray Photography
In a series of studies, scientists found that what protected Caribbean Kunas’ hearts was a drink they made from locally grown cacao beans, with a little added sugar. They drink tons of cocoa, “easily 10 times more than most of us would get in a typical day,” one researcher told the NIH newsletter in 2011. The rest is scientific history.