Cocoa agroforests can significantly support biodiversity, yet intensification of farming practices is degrading agroforestry habitats and compromising ecosystem services such as biological pest control. Effective conservation strategies depend on the type of relationship between agricultural matrix, biodiversity and ecosystem services, but to date the shape of this relationship is unknown. We l...

BACKGROUND Epidemiological evidence suggests blood pressure-lowering effects of cocoa and tea. We undertook a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials to determine changes in systolic and diastolic blood pressure due to the intake of cocoa products or black and green tea. METHODS MEDLINE, EMBASE, SCOPUS, Science Citation Index, and the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register were searched fr...

Numerous health benefits have been attributed to cocoa and its derived products in the last decade including antioxidant, anti-platelet and positive effects on lipid metabolism and vascular function. Inflammation plays a key role in the initiation and progression of atherosclerosis. However, cocoa feeding trials focused on inflammation are still rare and the results yielded are controversial. H...

Major brands of cocoa powder products present in the Spanish market were analyzed for monomeric flavanols [(+)-catechin and (-)-epicatechin] and flavonols [quercetin-3-glucuronide, quercetin-3-glucoside (isoquercitrin), quercetin-3-arabinoside, and quercetin]. In addition, the influence of the manufacturing process of cocoa powder products, in particular, the alkalinization treatment ( Dutching...

Distributed optimization algorithms are essential for training machine learning models on very large-scale datasets. However, they often suffer from communication bottlenecks. Confronting this issue, a communication-efficient primal-dual coordinate ascent framework (CoCoA) and its improved variant CoCoA+ have been proposed, achieving a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$ for solving empirica...

Sixty four samples of cocoa beans replicated in quadruplicates were collected from five warehouses from southwest Nigeria and examined for fungal loads, ergosterol and ochratoxin A The levels of all the variables obtained were further used as indices for cocoa grading into food quality, FoQ (erg < 5 mg/kg; OTA < 1 µg/kg), feed quality, FeQ (erg = 5~10 mg/kg; OTA in the range of 1.1~3.11 µg/kg),...

Prevention of cancer through the diet is receiving increasing interest, and cocoa because of its polyphenolic compounds has become an important potential chemopreventive and therapeutic natural agent. Cocoa and its main polyphenols have been reported to interfere at the initiation, promotion and progression of cancer. Cocoa flavonoids have been demonstrated to influence several important biolog...

Fermentation is a key step in obtaining fine cocoa through the formation of potent aroma precursors. The fermentation level of cocoa beans is traditionally assessed by measuring the amount of ammonia nitrogen (NH₃) using the time-consuming Conway technique. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), a rapid and efficient tool, was used to analyze NH₃ levels in several hundred cocoa samples at different...

Agroindustrial wastes such as spent grain, cocoa husk, rice bran and sawdust, unamended and amended with cattle, poultry and goat droppings were studied as to their effect on growth, fruit yield and nutrient composition of tomato (Lycopersicum escutentum Mill) in two experiments. Analysis of the wastes showed varying nutrient composition with C:N values of 11.1, 12.5, 23.3 and 18.2 respectively...

This paper compiles the beneficial effects of cocoa polyphenols on human health, especially with regard to cardiovascular and inflammatory diseases, metabolic disorders, and cancer prevention. Their antioxidant properties may be responsible for many of their pharmacological effects, including the inhibition of lipid peroxidation and the protection of LDL-cholesterol against oxidation, and incre...