In-house cocoa flour RMs instead of CRMs were prepared and checked for its homogeneity and stability. Due to CRMs limited availability in terms of matrices of concern and high production cost when making in-house cocoa flour, RMs are alternatively used for daily quality control in the laboratory. The analysis method for reliable checking of homogeneity and stability of cadmium content in the in...

We present a survey on the developments related to Gröbner bases, and show explicit examples in CoCoA. The CoCoA project dates back to 1987: its aim was to create a “mathematician”-friendly computational laboratory for studying Commutative Algebra, most especially Gröbner bases. Always maintaining this “friendly” tradition, the project has grown and evolved, and the software has been completely...

Cocoa has a rich history in human use. Skin is prone to the development of several diseases, and the mechanisms in the pathogenesis of aged skin are still poorly understood. However, a growing body of evidence from clinical and bench research has begun to provide scientific validation for the use of cocoa-derived phytochemicals as an effective approach for skin protection. Although the specific...

Flavanol-rich cocoa products have been reported to lower blood pressure. It has been suggested that theobromine is partially responsible for this effect. We tested whether consumption of flavanol-rich cocoa drinks with natural or added theobromine could lower peripheral and central blood pressure. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled 3-period crossover trial we assigned 42 healthy individuals ...

BACKGROUND The consumption of dietary antioxidants is considered to be a good strategy against photo-aging. However, the results of previous clinical trials that investigated the effects of oral consumption of high-flavanol cocoa products on skin photo-aging have been contradictory. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate whether high-flavanol cocoa supplementation would improve th...

Excessive peroxidation of biomembranes is thought to contribute to the initiation and progression of numerous degenerative diseases. The present study examined the inhibitory effects of a cocoa extract, individual cocoa flavanols (-)-epicatechin and (+)-catechin, and procyanidin oligomers (dimer to decamer) isolated from cocoa on rat erythrocyte hemolysis. In vitro, the flavanols and the procya...

Smallholding in the cocoa sector has been seen as a hindrance to production and productivity growth due to the ageing of the cocoa farmers, limited access to credit, low level of education and low adoptability of innovations. In order to curb this, policy makers have resorted to implementing policy instruments that encourage the extension of small rural farms into larger farms, thereby undermin...

The purpose of this research was to produce cocoa butter equivalent from the blend of mango seed almond fat (MAF) from “Keaw” variety mango kernels and palm oil mid-fraction (POMF). Seven MAF-POMF blends with different proportions (100/0, 90/10, 80/20, 70/30, 60/40, 50/50 and 0/100 (%wt) of MAF to POMF) including cocoa butter were characterized using various techniques. Fatty acid composition w...

Application of a comparative aroma extraction dilution analysis on unroasted and roasted Criollo cocoa beans revealed 42 aroma compounds in the flavor dilution (FD) factor range of 1-4096 for the unroasted and 4-8192 for the roasted cocoa beans. While the same compounds were present in the unroasted and roasted cocoa beans, respectively, these clearly differed in their intensity. For example, 2...

Here we compare the codes CoCoA+ and Birds. CoCoA+ is the code released by the authors of Ma et al. (2015) implementing their algorithm in Apache Spark. As indicated in Ma et al. (2015), it is available in http:// github.com/gingsmith/cocoa/. Birds is the code released by the author of Yang (2013) implementing their practical variant of DisDCA proposed in that work using C++ and MPI. It is avai...