Over the weekend we hosted a fair trade chocolate and pesticide-free wine tasting in conjunction with Metta Community Yoga Center. We had the honor and pleasure of hearing our favorite local chocolatier, Lisa Reinhardt, talk about her passion, creating quality chocolate.
Lisa spent a lot of time talking about the thought she put into how she would make her Wei of Chocolate product line, and how bothered she was by the many things she learned about traditional chocolate making. One of the things that she shared resonated with me very much, as I thought about its pertinence to PCOS.
I know that many of you struggle with cravings for sweets, and that often times that craving translates into a binge on chocolate. Lisa shared that since cacao tends to be grown in Third World countries, much of it is grown in conditions that would not be legal in the United States. In particular, many pesticides that are banned in our country are freely used elsewhere.
Lindane, a toxic and endocrine disrupting chemical both used as a pesticide and as a medication for head lice, is a commonly used pesticide in cacao-producing countries. Though banned in 2006 in the US, except for its medicinal uses, it is not banned in many primary cacao-producing countries. In fact, chocolate tested in 2007 did have lindane residues.
I suspect that the argument you would get if you asked one of our major corporate chocolate producers here in the US is that the residues are so minute that they pose no health risk. I've just learned, in all my years of working with PCOS, that this line of logic doesn't work. First of all, you all tend to have nervous and endocrine systems that are more sensitive to chemical insult; you need to stay away from these compounds more diligently than the average person does. Secondly, the relationship you have with sweets and chocolate is not the average relationship. When you eat it, you tend to eat much larger quantities of it than does the average person…giving those pesticides more opportunity to accumulate and cause problems.
You've got a couple of choices here. You can keep eating the stuff you get at Walgreen's because it's cheap and it's available and hope that someday someone at the top of the ant pile over at Willy Wonka Inc. is going to care enough about PCOS to take a risk and buy the more expensive, pesticide-free raw material, and accept the sales loss that decision will create on behalf of the greater good…
…or you can take action immediately and only purchase the organic stuff for yourself. You know it's more expensive, but don't you deserve to do the right thing for yourself?
By the way, that lindane stuff? It's not just toxic to YOU. It's toxic to all the people in those Third World countries who grow it, touch it, process it, etc. By shifting your spending and making it harder for all of the people in that supply chain to make a living off of lindane-laced cacao, you're helping people in far away places balance their own hormones.
Some important things to think about.
If you're looking for a newer, better chocolate to treat yourself with, check out Lisa's website. She's wildly popular in Phoenix and gaining popularity in other cities like Los Angeles and New York. It's not a bad bandwagon to get on. Her organic chocolate, by the way, comes from the rainforests of Ecuador.
If you happen to be interested in which countries do ban lindane, here it is.
Banned lindane for all uses(21):
Finland, Indonesia, Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Saint Lucia, Sweden
Severely restricted the use of lindane:
Australia, Austria, Cyprus, Norway, Sri Lanka