Sweet Healing: Chocolate’s Role in Health Transformation

Jonathan Pantalis

How’s it going?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is so good. You are the Founder of Living Ratio Chocolates, a company known for its innovative and health-conscious approach to chocolate making. Your journey into the world of chocolate was inspired by, of course, a personal quest for health and wellness. Most of us in the health space have had a problem and figured out a solution. But it led you to create a product that is indulgent and simultaneously beneficial. I asked you to speak at this summit because food is polarizing. Many people quit their health journey because they feel they cannot get the food piece dialed in, and they feel if they cannot and fail at food, then they are failing at everything else. I would say the number one reason that people give up on their detox protocols, their parasite protocols, their mitochondria, and their energy-producing protocols is because they feel I cannot do that because I am not getting the food piece. If I cannot get the food piece, I may as well not be doing any of this. I want to change that mindset, and I want you to help us do it today. We are going to get into the world of chocolate, and we are going to talk about chocolate that is good for you. But let us start by sharing with us. I think it is important to share a little bit of a story here and humanize this for people. You have a health story, and it led you to create chocolate. What was it that made you do this? Then we will get into the benefits of this chocolate that you make and how it helps the nervous system and helps you get into a healing state. Yes. Chocolate can get you into a healing state. I love this talk. I said It is going to be the best talk ever. Take it away. What happened here? Why did you create this?

Jonathan Pantalis

Totally. First of all, I guess it is. I am just happy to be here because I truly believe in what you are doing, and what you do aligns with what? The conclusion that I came to during my health journey. I am excited about this. But I had a lot of challenges with focus, energy, and just emotional regulation when I was growing up. In the earlier phases of my life, I was very challenged, I had dyslexia; I had all sorts of issues that made it very difficult for me to function as a normal human being. I am sure a lot of people can relate. Once you have some of these issues, such as parasites or whatever sugar, where all these toxins can cause a lot of issues. 

I struggled tremendously. I was very ambitious. I had a lot of goals; I had a lot of things I wanted to do, but I felt awful all the time. I would, my energy would maybe last an hour or two a day, and then I would go into a slump, and then I would feel bad about myself and, about it, fall into depression. It was just a vicious cycle. One day, I learned about detox and that maybe the food I was eating had something to do with how I was feeling. It is a concept that growing up on a standard American diet, everybody thinks that food is calories. But that was my mindset. I believed that what if they sold it to us in the store or the restaurant? It has to be safe. It has to be healthy. The reason I am feeling bad probably has nothing to do with food. I did think about those things. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. You thought it was your fault. It sounds like you were the idea guy who could not get anything done. There are a lot of people who tune in to this to hear, as I call it, middle-age deficiency and inflammation syndrome. It sounds like it started with you earlier. If we do not solve this, the underlying causes of low energy are brain fogginess, difficulty concentrating, and difficulty being creative. If we do not solve this, it just carries on throughout our lives. Especially for your generation, I think you are about 20 years younger than me. We see a lot more of this because you were born into a much more toxic world than I was. I was born in the 70s. In the early 70s, toxins were there. When were you born, Jonathan?

Jonathan Pantalis

The early 90s.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes, exactly. Much more toxic world that you were born into. Your generation, we see a lot more of this. Now, for me, it is middle-aged, deficiency syndrome. For you, it is young and youthful.

Jonathan Pantalis

It is probably happening even more now that, 10 years younger than myself. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

My daughter. My daughter’s generation now. She is 18, and I can see the toxic effects in her body. We are constantly working towards eliminating that. We live in a toxic world. 

Now you have established it, you need a solution here. You misunderstood food. You misunderstood what food meant for you. You trusted big food. That is what was out there. You trusted what was in the grocery store. We all do until we do not. Until we open up our eyes and realize, I got to take control of this. Food is such a big deal because we have to eat it every day. Most of us eat at least three times a day or more. Keep going. What happened next?

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes. Food was a very pivotal thing for me that happened. I was with my grandparents. I moved out of my parent’s house, and I got sick and I got my grandfather sick. He was in his late 80s, and he was very upset with me about getting him sick. It is awful to see someone at that age. He was super sick. It could be deadly for them. I went to the store. I do not know what I did. I went to Whole Foods or something. I got a few supplements, and I do not know why I did that. I wanted to try something new. I bought something. 

The stuff that I took then would be nothing compared to what I would do now. But I did feel a difference, whether it was in my head or whatnot. That was the initial spark for me. But I went on a journey, realizing that by eating excess sugar, everything eventually can be okay and balanced. But eating excess sugar was a huge problem for me because any time I eat the sugar, I get a slump, a crash. I felt weird days later, especially when I started to cut it out of my diet. It got worse, and maybe that is something that you see with people: once you start eating stuff, the reactions you have from the withdrawal are awful.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

People give up, they are like, this sucks. I feel worse. Why am I eating better? I feel worse. Because now, you are detoxing. After all, the food that you are eating is healing and is starting to pull toxins out of your body. You are having a Herxheimer reaction.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes. Oh, yes. I did not know anyone at the time. I was doing all my research stuff myself, and what I was going through was misery, absolute misery. I was pretty much dysfunctional for days on end. Then you eat the bread or the sugar, and you feel a little bit better. You feel like you are not going so crazy. I was in a vicious cycle, but I was also a perfectionist. I was like, I cannot do this. I cannot do that. But I was very passionate about chocolate, sweets, and desserts. I was still making them for my business at the time. I was making sugary stuff like caramel brownies and all that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You had a business where you made sweet stuff and sold it.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, my gosh. This is such a cool story because what you create now and what you sell now are 180 degrees from where you started.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes, the original is a way to tell all of a story. But the original idea was to open a pie shop, and thank goodness it did not work out. But that is a whole other long story. It is not just the health journey that did not happen because of it, but I was upset. I loved the artisan pastry because it brings us together. Food brings us together. It is one of those things where you make a delicious pastry, chocolate, or whatever it is, and it brings the whole family or whole group of people together to share the food. It is something that, if you get super obsessed with your health or you are, I only eat this and this and this, you could almost isolate yourself, and that could be a problem too.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Can I just add to this now? A huge point that Jonathan is making now, and this is a very unpopular opinion that I am about to share with you. I could get haters for saying this, but in my community, in my programs, and in working with my clients, we de-emphasize food. In the beginning, I didn’t even put a huge emphasis on it because we all come from different cultures. I work with people around the world. I work with people who are from India, people who are from South America, people who are from Canada, people from Europe, and everybody has a different. I cannot write a recipe guide or an eating structure for people because they have what they need, but one of the most important parts of healing is being in relationships and the community. We and our families are so food-centric that if we start pulling food away, it starts destroying relationships and causing friction. We do not even focus on that until about a month into somebody’s healing process, when they start feeling better, their energy starts going up, and their gut starts coming back online. Yes, I can start getting your gut online without focusing on food so much. 

But what happens is that when people start to feel better now, they start looking around for, This is what’s possible. Maybe if I shift some of these foods that I am eating, it could get even better, and you will naturally start doing that. The other thing I want to share with you before I give you the floor back here is that I learned this from a famous diet doctor, and I always give him credit for this. Dr. Stephen Gallo taught me substitution, not deprivation. I teach that in my community, you have to find substitutions. I do not want you to deprive yourself of chocolate. If chocolate is your thing, we need to find a substitution that leaves you feeling like you had something decadent or satisfying. You have to have the thing without feeling like you have let go of one of your favorite things. Even to this day, with everything I know, I probably eat chocolate every day. I do. I eat something sweet and indulgent every day. I want to focus on sugar and the problems that it is causing with our recovery process, our nervous system, and our cortisol levels. I know this is something a lot about, and it shapes the foundation of what your company’s mission is. Let us talk about that.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes. Sugar is not necessarily bad. Sugar: we cannot go completely without sugar in our bodies. Sugar is not the enemy. But if we have a lot of these—parasites, yeast, etc.—in our body, then it is one of the number one ways to feed that stuff. The more you feed it, the worse it gets. The more you try to kill it off while you are feeding it, it becomes a very vicious cycle. Of course, sugar is more or less an empty calorie. It is not good for your metabolism, not good for, there are so many reasons for that. You can just look at where diabetes is going and where insulin sensitivity is going. It is just not a good thing to have in your body; even a very small amount could alter your metabolism for the rest of the day. It is just not something that you want to put your calories toward if you are trying to feel better and be healthy. Chocolate is traditionally made with sugar, but the reason people say dark chocolate is healthier is because it has more chocolate and less sugar. 

There is not much of a difference in how much sugar is in chocolate. Let me rephrase it. It is dark chocolate, not some other chocolate. It is not milk chocolate, dark chocolate, or some other type of chocolate. It is just the sugar content, and that makes a dramatic difference. That is what I have realized. I sort of fell in love with dark chocolate because of its low sugar content. But for me, at the phase where I was, I still felt terrible when I was eating even the smallest amount of sugar, especially when I was getting deeper into the detox. I had this idea. How could I satisfy that sweet tooth without going backward? Because for me, I was such a perfectionist trying to get the sugar out. I cut it out and every other way. But when it came to me, I would be walking in the aisles of the grocery store and just going to look at the chocolate. For me, it was more than addiction. It was a passion. I was not going to give up that passion for sweets completely, but I am going down the aisle to the grocery store and I am looking, and I am. I do not know if anyone can relate to this, but it is almost like my mind was overrode by my addiction to sugar, which, as a result, is more addictive than a lot of it. There are plenty of studies on this, showing that mice will choose sugar over food until they die. They will continue to eat the sugar over water over everything else. Then they will.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Here is what I envision you doing now at the grocery store, so I can see you going down the aisles and picking up the marinara sauce. Nope, that has sugar in it. I picked up the bread and read the label. Nope, that has sugar in it. Picking up the salad, and dressing, and reading the label. Nope, that has sugar in it. But going down the chocolate aisle and being there, there has got to be something here that I can have. I am going to have this.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes. Then you are. Well, this one’s 95%. Maybe I will. Maybe I will do this one. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

We have all done it. I have done it. I have sat there and looked. What is the lesser of two evils here? I will take this one.

Jonathan Pantalis

Totally. I love chocolate. It is one of those things. I think that a good goal is to get your body to a point where you can handle a little bit of sugar. That was one thing I wanted to mention about the community. The thing is to go back a little bit. My initial goal was just to feel good, I wanted it to feel better, to have a clear mind. I wanted to do the things I wanted to do in life. I wanted to build and accomplish the things I wanted to accomplish without the resistance that my health issues were causing. But I realized that there are other pieces once you start feeling better; there are other things that matter in life. You want to be able to enjoy those things and not go backward. That is where I re-engineered my entire business—what I was doing with sweets and stuff. Because when I was selling those less-than-healthy sweets, I was researching how sugar is bad for you. Also, I messed up, and I live. I got to people and said, Yes, there are all these problems with sugar. I start talking about the problems of sugar and why you should not eat sugar and not eat carbohydrates and all that. I would say, Hey, you want to buy this, do you?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

In your little ethical dilemma, you are selling sugar, but you are also understanding the dangers of sugar, which is what I hear you saying. You had an ethical dilemma, and you had to solve it. We know that sugar spikes, cortisol levels, which spike blood sugar levels, which harm many systems in the body, adrenal hormones, and neurotransmitter production, disrupt your gut. There is a huge connection there. Now let us talk about when you decided to create, Living Ratio and you decided to create what I would call a functional food. functional chocolate that is good for you. What ingredients did you have to put in there? Let us talk about that because it is not just chocolate. You have things like Ashwagandha in there. When we are talking about the nervous system, brain support, and stress reduction, because we are talking a lot about stress reduction on this summit as well, Ashwagandha helps with the biological response that the body has to stress. Could you talk about some of the things that you decided to do with the chocolate company?

Jonathan Pantalis

Totally. That was a later product, That was something on the second phase of my health journey. I had a fire or I lost everything in a fire, and that caused a lot of disruption. My nervous system, even the small stuff, used to not sweat; the small stuff I could handle the most stress. But after that pivotal moment in my life, I could not handle stress so well. I started to research. Well, what can I do for my nervous system? What can I do that could keep my cortisol low so that even if I had not interacted or faced a stressful situation, I would not necessarily go off the rails because cortisol over time is so damaging for our health? When it is out of control. It is an essential function in the body. But when it gets out of control, it is very devastating. Especially when it comes to just your nerves, you just feel how you feel daily. I know that I never had anxiety in my life, but once I had those, stress regulation was out of whack. It was terrible. I thought that Ashwagandha was probably one of the best things. It is probably the best-researched and most widely taken supplement or herb. It is a diabetic herb. The history of using it goes back thousands of years, and it is probably the most researched and best option for lowering cortisol.

Just regulating cortisol. It has a bunch of other benefits too, including hormone regulation, mental focus, and all of that. It is one of those adaptogenic herbs that you can take quite a lot of and not have any negative side effects. I found that Ashwagandha is one of the things that, if we can make it taste good in the chocolate, which we did, is one of the things that you can take every single day and has a cumulative benefit. That is where I made our chocolate drink mix because most Ashwagandha tastes bad. That is, that was part of my passion. I was making something taste good because it had sugar in it. I wanted to make something that tasted good but did not have sugar in it, which is hard. A lot of people can find those things. You can go to Target or Walmart and find sugar-free products that taste good, but they are going to have sucrose, which is terrible. There are so many products that still have it, or they are going to have aspartame or something like that. That is just it; it just wrecks our health. I wanted to make something that tasted good but did not have a single ingredient in it that was going to compromise or cause a problem.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I have tried this chocolate. Do you have that around you somewhere in your office? I want to show this.

Jonathan Pantalis

I will get it at the back.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That is the Cacao Calm. I tried this, and I was blown away. It tasted like chocolate milk. You could mix it with coconut milk or almond milk, or if you do not have a dairy issue, do not mix it with regular milk. It was better than anything I had ever had from a homemade chocolate milk perspective. I was blown away. You told me it was going to be good, but I was not expecting how good.

Jonathan Pantalis

I think at this point I am just there for other chocolates. We have different flavors. If you like it, you might like it. If you don’t, you don’t. But with this product, I am. This is the best-tasting chocolate drink I have.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Can you be sure of your time when you show that bag again while you talk because they will only see it while you are talking because we are in speaker view on this? Go ahead and explain it while you show it.

Jonathan Pantalis

Sure. This has us breaking down the ingredients now because it is very simple. I think we only have seven ingredients in there. The secret to the flavor is the vanilla that we use. We use vanilla, and the only people in the world using this particular vanilla are from a small farm in Madagascar. It is interesting because vanilla and chocolate are both fermented foods, so good vanilla is properly fermented. The flavor is developed through the fermentation process. Vanilla is an orchid. It is a very interesting plant, but it is one of the few plants that has flavonoids that interact with the endocannabinoid system so much, like CBD or anything else, but now it is one of the only other things that has that interface. Vanilla has a psychological and actual effect on our nervous system in our body.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That is why maybe, that is why my body loved it so much because it was there.

Jonathan Pantalis

We put a lot of vanilla in here; there is no other product in it, and we are the only people using that vanilla. I know that for a fact. Also, for sweetness, we use monk fruit, which is probably the safest and best sweetener that we can use. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

No, not probably. It is. Period. End of the subject. Drop mic. Full stop.

Jonathan Pantalis

That was also an interesting thing because a lot of people have tried monk fruit and they have had a bitter aftertaste or it didn’t taste good. It takes a lot of time to find a monk fruit. What is that you have?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It was cut with something, wasn’t it?

Jonathan Pantalis

Well, it could be something, or it could be a lot of it is chemical maltodextrin, but the most common thing is just poor harvesting or timing because monk fruit only grows in China. It is very fragile. It is not bad that it comes from China, but it is a very fragile fruit. It is a grape. It grows on vines. Just the same way, vineyard grapes grow in the vineyard, with the same appearance. If you saw a monk fruit field, it would look the same as a vineyard. But if monk fruits are harvested at the wrong time, they are going to have a bad taste. It is just as simple as that. It is just wine or something like that. It is the grapes that are picked at the wrong time and in the wrong way. I know there are a lot of nuances to that. I am to pick it up at 3 a.m. or something. The sugars are at a certain point with wine, so monkfish are very similar. It took me a long time to track down a monk that had a flavor profile because if you taste a pure fruit extract, which monk fruit extract is made by juicing the monk fruit, filtering it multiple times, and then drying it out,

It is not made with chemicals. It is not, for example, Sucralose. I always pick on it because it is so common in quest bars or anything like that. It is very replaceable for sugar. Sucralose is a chemical process where they attach chlorine to sucrose; it is chlorinated sucrose, and it has been proven to kill your gut bacteria, which makes sense because it is chlorinated sugar and it is boiling mine. How could somebody know that and still eat it? It is just that maybe there are not a lot of studies showing why it is bad, but there are enough to lead us to believe that it is very toxic. I love monk fruit for that reason, but I could go on and on about each ingredient because everything we do, which is my passion, involves sourcing and finding the cleanest ingredients. I want to make sure every single thing has a purpose and a benefit and is the best it possibly can be. It might cost a little bit more, but for me, I want to show an example of everything done to the highest level.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is precisely why I am bringing you into this community and talking about your products because I vet everything that I bring in, and I make sure that it is not going to create any toxic load in people’s bodies. This is where your perfectionism, which you mentioned earlier, is so beautiful. This is where perfectionism works to your advantage. Now, perfectionism can also be quite damaging to people because it is so hard to achieve but this is where we love perfectionists. In the few minutes we have left in this first part of our talk, I want to make sure we talk about some of the other products because, in my community, we want to give people a win on starting to shift their eating mindset, and relationship with food so that it becomes natural, easy, and they never feel deprived. I want to talk about these guys.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You are half gone because I have been coveting them for this interview, so I could show them, and I have to prevent myself from eating them.

Jonathan Pantalis

But which box is that the autumn box or the holly box?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

The autumn box. As I have this under my nose, I smell pumpkin. I smell pumpkin spices. If you are a pumpkin spice lover and you do not want the chemicals, this is where to go. I am pumpkin everything, and this was the fall box, so it had hazelnut and pumpkin and all kinds of flavors. Then I know that at the time of filming this right now is December. I know your holiday box has come out. What is in that?

Jonathan Pantalis

The holiday box. This is the label. I love this label.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. Cute. What is in there? What do you have?

Jonathan Pantalis

We have an eggnog flavor. We have gingerbread, and we have orange spice, which is a cool one. Then we have sea salt and dark chocolate. We love that our truffle collections are sugar-free. They are clean. They are usually the best ingredients in the last box. With the hazelnut, we use a hazelnut from a small farm in Oregon. We are using mass-sourcing, finding the very best elements in everything we do, and this.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

But I just want to say that the artistry of this is, you have to put it here. This is so beautiful. Just the way it is, as a gift, when you gift this. Then this one had salt on it. I love the salt. It is just that they are artisanal, and everything’s hand-decorated.

Jonathan Pantalis

That is everything. The orange on that truffle. It is decorated with turmeric, which is not food dye. If you go to Europe and you find these fancy little bonbons, they are all colored with dyes, titanium dioxide, and this and that. I did not want to do that. I wanted to create the same experience without all of the things that were not good. It is a very complicated and obsessive product. But we have been doing this long enough that we have over 100 flavors. What I do is rotate every single month; we do a different collection. In January, we are going to focus on medicinal mushrooms. We are going to focus on the Reishi mushroom, the Chaga mushroom, the Cordyceps mushroom, and the Lion’s Mane mushroom. It will have four flavors. Each flavor will feature a different mushroom and also a different, The cordyceps is an almond butter, a cinnamon spice cinnamon almond butter truffle. The Lion’s Mane has macadamia nuts that are crunchy in there. Everything has its own. The Chaga has hazelnuts, and some do not do that. We have a different chocolate hazelnut, but we have a Chaga with a creamy center. 

There are all these different flavors and versions. But every month, we try to make something special like this one. For example, on Valentine’s Day, we are going to do Rose, Raspberry, Strawberry Hazelnut, and Dark Chocolate Sea Salt. Every month we use different, and it varies year on year, but we have this very limited collection released, and it sells out sometimes in days, in a week, but it always sells out fast.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is cool. You have the standard stuff that you can get every day from chocolate bars. You have the cocoa powder that you can make comforting and satisfying drinks out of. Then you have this collection of truffles that just comes up every month, and, I know everybody is wondering, how do we get this? We are going to pause here. We are going to share with people how to get it, and we are going to continue this conversation. Now there is a clickable link on this page where you are watching this video, where you can go to The Living Ratio, and then also, where can we find Living Ratio if people just want to go and type it in?

Jonathan Pantalis

Sure. You can go to livingratio.com, but for you guys, we are doing a special with the exclusive truffle membership. If you want to be a member, it is $20 off your first month. That is what we are doing for you guys because it is.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

The link that they click on any of the summit pages, will just take them directly to that?

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Perfect. It is all embedded. They do not need a coupon code. Nothing. Okay. Perfect. You see, I love that you make everything so easy. Perfectionism is possible.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Jonathan, I want to thank you so much for joining us today for this talk on chocolate, functional chocolate, and the nervous system and how you can make food healthy and fun and, have a substitution instead of deprivation. For our audience. I hope you found our conversation fun, insightful, and helpful. If you are a summit purchaser, stay here, because we are about to dive even deeper into this discussion with Jonathan. If you are not, click on the button on this page to get access to a continuation of this conversation and many others, and get the tools you need to reclaim your health.

Jonathan Pantalis

Thank you. See you.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

If you are watching this continuation of my talk with Jonathan Pantalis, thank you for being a valuable member of our community. We are going to dive back in. Jonathan, we were just talking about the truffles. We were talking about cocoa powder. We did not get into the chocolate bars. As we are talking, you are starting to reveal some of the very special ingredients that you put into these products and what they do. I did not even realize that it was turmeric on top of this until just now. I find it very meaningful that you curate these products in such a special way that everything is functional and supportive. Can we talk about some of the other things that you have created and what you have put into them? I have it here. I have the coconut cream chocolate. There is only one tiny little piece left in this because it is hard to eat it. I think this may be one of my favorite ones.

Jonathan Pantalis

That one is good, known as special. That one we use, grind and take down is the best coconut in the world because that is what we do. We try to find the best of everything, but a lot of coconuts. When it is dried, it produces fat. That is how coconut oil is made. You are not getting a whole coconut. You are not getting all the fat, and it can sometimes be rancid. We find the freshest, full-fat, shredded, dried coconut. It is just gently dried. Then we add it to our factory. We take that shredded coconut and go through this slow, stone milling process where the coconut is rolled over a stone at low temperatures for four days until it turns into this completely creamy, silky coconut butter. It does not have a coconut taste. I do not know how to describe it. It has a very creamy, very subtle flavor. If you do not like having a strong coconut flavor, which I do not like.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

But it does not taste like coconut at all; I cannot even tell it is in it. It is funny because it says 55% coconut cream chocolate. I am expecting it to taste coconut and there is zero coconut essence.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes. It does not have a strong coconut taste at all. It has much to do with the quality of the coconut, and the quality of the fat in there. There is a gentle process. When you cook it, it brings out that coconut flavor. When you have to overprocess, it brings out more of that coconut flavor, and there are different types of coconut. But the type we choose just has this subtle, creamy essence to it. Now, the other part of it that I did not mention much is the chocolate itself. The period of chocolate matters a lot, and a lot of companies are just sourcing milk or whatever, just this huge, mass-produced chocolate that they shipped over in burlap bags. It might get exposed to moisture and humidity along the way.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Mold mycotoxins grow.

Jonathan Pantalis

I have been in this for long enough that I can tell if there is mold or what type of bacteria might be in there because chocolate is a fermented food. Just to backtrack a little bit more, the process of making chocolate is the bean. The pods are harvested, and inside the cocoa pod are beans. The cocoa beans are coated in this. This is a pulp. It is a pulpy white pulp that is high in sugar; traditionally, in some cultures, they just eat the pulp and spit out the beans that we value so much. It is fun. But anyway, that pulp is kept on the beans, and then that is spread out, usually in the sun, and it goes through this fermentation process. It goes through a lactic acid fermentation, and then eventually the acetic acid bacteria die when ethanol starts to take over, just like alcohol or any other fermentation. Is it a fermented food? But if it is not done, then there can be other molds that grow in there. I can personally taste that in different chocolates, sometimes penicillin. 

It is, maybe not as harmful as mold is, but you can taste that more penicillin mold. It is maybe blue cheese or something like that. What a lot of the big chunk companies do is go through this process of winnowing and crunching and all this to cook off those bad flavors. It does not always work. But the poor-quality beans will often have a very acidic flavor to them, or they will have a moldy mildew flavor to them. What we do differently is just get beans that are properly fermented and then quickly dried and turned into nibs at the source because then they can be shipped sealed, airtight, and fresh versus the pulp, the beans. That is the flavor being reactivated by roasting them. We do not roast them now. They are dried at a temperature that is high enough to kill the bacteria. But no over-roasting can cause all sorts of harm—not cause, but it can make inferior chocolate taste better. That is, it was necessary back in the day when Hershey’s and all these big companies were making these.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Name it out, Jonathan. Let us talk about it.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes, well, that is, I was researching the history of Hershey’s not too long ago. This is fresh in my mind, but what they figured out is that chocolate was not able to be mass-produced until they cracked the code on that. That is when all these other methods started to become necessary in the chocolate production process because the beans were just not of the same quality. They had to get mass quantities. The mass quantities had to be processed in a way that they could make it taste good. The other piece besides roasting is conching, which is when the chocolate is exposed to oxygen for multiple days. They are intentionally oxidizing the chocolate, which is, as you might know, oxidizing anything that has a lot of fat, which is probably not good for it. They are intentionally exposing the chocolate to tons of air and heat to burn off and cook off all these bad flavor notes. All these different pieces of the chocolate-making process are just unnecessary. If you start with the stuff, you are starting with quality first. 

Just to break down our method one more time with the chocolate. We start with properly fermented beans that are peeled and dried at the source, sealed and fresh, and then shipped to us. We take those fresh nibs and grind them in a stone grinder for two or three days at very low temperatures until it is silky smooth. Then we might add the coconut cream to it, sweeteners, etc. But it is a very delicate, very gentle process, and there are very few companies that do it this way. A lot of companies use the bean bar method, which is a little bit different or more nib-two bar, but we need to control the process. I do not know of any other company on the market. It is not exactly how we are doing it. A lot of them are getting liquor or paste from the source, and then they are blending in the sweeteners from there. But for us, we want to control the whole process because we can control the flavor and consistency when we grind it in stone ourselves. The traditional way to make chocolate is by stone grinding it. One is better nutrition in flavor, two; it is just the nutrition, the traditional method, that just makes, I do not know, it just has a magic to it. You can taste that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is our passion to hear a true chocolatier talk about his craft and how special it is. People do not realize this. What goes into making a high-quality, artisanal product that does not harm your body, that is good for you, supports your nervous system, supports your detox and your healing goals, and gives you that indulgent little special treat? You can, and I can; these are so good. I can eat one or two, and I am good. I do not need to sit here and eat a box because they are so. Yes.

Jonathan Pantalis

I will say one more thing. The reason why our chocolates are so filling too is also because of their center. We use MCT oil in most of them, and MCT oil helps with, as you probably know, a lot of it. I know exactly what you teach, but capric acid is good for killing off a lot of diseases in the body and also provides quicker energy from fat.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Your mitochondria need those fatty acids to produce energy, which is a much more effective energy source than carbohydrates. Now, in the last few moments that we have here, any final words you would like to say? I am just so thrilled that we connected and that you have created something that does not harm my people. It does not harm my family, my community, or my patients, and they can feel good about having zero guilt with this whatsoever because it is real food and it is processed in a way that is thoughtful and safe. What would you say in your final words to our audience, who I am sure has been hanging on every word of this whole chocolate process?

Jonathan Pantalis

Well, I could go on and on about the ingredients, but I think that it is one of the things that, if you try our chocolate, you will realize that it is one of those things that can allow you to enjoy life. Months down the road in your journey, you will realize that adding those little things, Cocao Calm is a very easy drink to add to your coffee or tea if you need to.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Put it in coffee. It makes a mocha.

Jonathan Pantalis

Yes. How versatile it is, whether it is adding this in or just keeping a box of this handy so you are not a victim to cravings, so you are not going to go and grab chips or grow out of one or two of these truffles. You will realize that just having these tools is going to make it so much easier that, months from now, you will be able to be on track with your health goals. Then you are not compromising, but you are also not depriving. It is so important. I want you to build and enjoy life. I think chocolate is a wonderful part of life. Why go without if you can have benefits? We do not even talk about the benefits of chocolate. But I know we do not have time, so maybe we will do it again soon.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well, I bet they can find out about the benefits of chocolate on your website, which is.

Jonathan Pantalis

This is true. It is a livingratio.com. Then what we see is that for people to get their $20 off membership.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. Click a link on this page, and it is automatically applied. You can get their truffle membership, which is what I have here, which is so good. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for pouring in. At the time that this airs, it is going to be February. It is going to be just past Valentine’s Day. But I know you have exciting stuff coming up for March, April, and May. Do you have it? Can you give a hint of any of the things that are coming? Do you know yet or are you still in the?

Jonathan Pantalis

I know that in April, we usually do lemon cream, and then in March. I believe it is Mother’s Day, I think we have a, or is it May?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

May is Mother’s Day.

Jonathan Pantalis

March will probably be a spring-themed box. I do not think we have the flavor set yet. But in April, we do the same thing, which is lemon cream and vanilla bean.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I want the lemon cream chocolate.

Jonathan Pantalis

It is trying to make an Easter feel of it, but we will probably have strawberry coconut butter coming back at this time of year. Well, strawberry hazelnut will probably have a few other very interesting flavors coming. We will have some limited releases. We do limited releases when they sell out; they are available for a day or so. then we have our monthly collection, which is, they last maybe a little few days longer. But anyway, we will have a bunch of new stuff and exciting flavors, which I cannot wait to share with everyone.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So good. Thank you so much. Until next time, everyone. Take good care. Bye now.

Jonathan Pantalis

Bye.