Ingredients:

– 2 bananas (small to midsize)

– raw cacao (1 tsp)

– rice/oa

– rice drink/coconut milk or coconut water (2 to 4 dl)

Blend all the ingredients. The amount of cacao depends on how strong you want the drink/meal to be. Pour in a glass and it’s done!

Be careful – if you don’t drink coffee, this will be too strong for the first meal of the day. Cacao acts as a stimulant and might have some negative effects on the body throughout the day.

This has happened to me – not the first day, but the second one when I didn’t have this drink in the morning. I felt extremely sleepy even though I had enough and high quality sleep time. So be attentive for any kind of unusual events in your body or mind.

With all that said, it’s still a better alternative to coffee; it’s vegan, somewhat healthy and gives the energy we (sometimes) need to start the day. There is, however, an even better alternative to cacao, and that’s raw carob flour. It can replace cacao in any recipe, doesn’t have as strong taste and you don’t even notice it’s not cacao. You can find some amazing amazing recipes containing carob here.

Cacao contains, among other, caffeine and theobromine, with the latter having a similar effect to caffeine. These active ingredients are the reason for the stimulative effect and as I have already mentioned, this presents a disturbance for the normal healthy body functions. Cacao also contains oxalic acid, which is just more unnecessary thing for the body to excrete. This is just some additional info for you, as something I always stick to – consume whatever, just be familiar with everything it does to the body (good and/or bad) beforehand. To know about the possible consequences regarding something so broad as the environment and, of course, our health, our lives. <3

For some more quite interesting information on raw cacao read this: http://www.living-foods.com/articles/toxiccacao.html

http://www.livestrong.com/article/299920-is-there-caffeine-in-cocoa-powder

What are your experiences with consuming raw cacao? Anything strange, good or bad?