Hans Sloane’s Invention of Chocolate Milk
Hans Sloane was born in Ireland in the year 1660. He had a keen eye for studying nature, especially what we would today call botany, or the study of plants and plant life. This fascination led to him becoming a physician after studying in London and touring in France. During that time, he studied anatomy, botany, and medicine and was awarded a doctorate of physics. His insatiable thirst for adventure and discovering new things about the natural world led him to join other scientists in the quest for new plant life, especially that which would cure many diseases.
In 1685, at the age of 25, Hans Sloane became a fellow of the Royal Society, which had been formed the same year that he was born. Two years later, he also became a fellow at the Royal College of Physicians. He was given the opportunity to become a physician to the Second Duke of Albermarle and travel to Jamaica to further his botanical and medicinal research. The voyage took three months, and he remained in Jamaica for a year and a half. After returning to Britain, he published a work on the different plant species that he had discovered. One of them was cacao, which was becoming wildly popular in continental Europe but had yet to reach Britain.
The local people that Sloane encountered in Jamaica drank a brew of cocoa mixed with water. Sloane found the concoction to be nauseating, but he realized that if he substituted milk for water and added sugar, the result was more than palatable. It was irresistible, not only to him and the people of his era but many people even today. Chocolate milk today is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. People from schoolchildren to their parents and grandparents enjoy drinking cold glasses of the refreshing beverage. On cold days, many prefer to drink its warmer version, hot chocolate.
When Sloane introduced his concoction to a British audience, he touted it as a health food. However, he wasn’t far off the mark, because nutritionists today recommend dark chocolate, which is high in antioxidants, for everything from stress reduction to oxidative stress to aging. The chocolate milk that he distributed, though, was in a much less processed form that what many people drink today; it would have consisted of dark chocolate with probably less sugar than what is found in school lunches today. However, plenty of people are perfectly content with the idea that their favorite treat is actually a health food.
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