Is there any conceivable reason why someone might be sensitive to cocoa processed with alkali but not sensitive to unprocessed cocoa? I’m wondering if I’m imagining things.
In what form was it being consumed? It’s rarely consumed without sweetening and other ingredients.
The alkali used to put the cocoa beans thru may leave trace particles on the finished cocoa.
This link says that “dutched” cocoa has had its pH altered, to neutral, and it will not react with baking soda. It MAY react with baking powder.
If you have a friend you can try a double-blind experiment to reduce, not eliminate, bias / “placebo effect”.
Are you really dealing with the exact same cocoa from the same manufacturer from the same factory; just one dutched, the other not? If your sources are more different than that, no way to know what other excipients or minor ingredients or, just dust in their plant. Heck, you might have an issue with some difference in the packaging between Brand A and Brand B.
Without veering into a discussion of health issues, I’ll say this much: I’m fond of a particular brand of whey protein powder. I usually get the chocolate flavored but for a change of pace I also get the same brand in vanilla flavor. It seems like sometimes after having one of my usual protein shakes I start feeling sick within an hour or so. It’s not pain, or nausea; it’s a profound sense of malaise, tiredness and brain fog. Yet it seems (?) that if I make a vanilla protein shake instead, or even a vanilla protein shake with added cocoa, that doesn’t happen or at least not as noticeably. Going by the ingredients list, the sole difference between the two varieties is that the chocolate-flavored contains “cocoa processed with alkali” while the vanilla doesn’t; and the cocoa I’m adding is the lighter-colored variety that says it’s just “cocoa”.
You now know as much as I do about what the heck is going on.
Clearly it bothers your system. Just don’t use it. I say (imho)
If it’s because the pre-chocolated version tastes better you may need to sacrifice taste for “feeling” better.
If all other things are equal.
Yeah, don’t use it. Easiest answer.
ETA- there’s some google noise about the tastes of different cocoas. “Dutched” or plain. It’s subjective. The heart wants what the heart wants, its true. Sometimes we have to adjust for health and well being.
Crack cocaine has different effects than cocaine that has not been “Dutched”, so yes, absolutely processed cocoa might have different effects. And this is TSDMB, we’ve got people who have hallucinations on acetaminophen – individual reactions to drugs can vary widely.
But generally, the effect of “Dutching” chocolate is to remove most of the random alkaloids that exist in bitter chocolate: you’d expect more people to be less sensitive to Dutch Chocolate. Mostly, random sensitivity to chocolate is because of ‘other’ stuff mixed in – and that might be because they are sourcing their Dutch Chocolate from a different source. It’s a fermented and processed product – there can be a lot of variation in different sources.