Chocolate,caffeine, and cacao
Do you know how chocolate came to our life to make us smiley as you pop into your mouth?
Sweet,creamy,very delicate flavor,and if you look around the super market,you find many kinds of flavored chocolate,many kinds of chocolates such as dark chocolate,semi sweet chocolate,white chocolate,baking chocolate,many kinds of % of cacao in chocolates.
As you may know,the higher the percentage of cacao in the chocolate,the less sweeter. I personally likes dark chocolate,darker the better.My favorite will be probably the dark chocolate with about 80% cacao in the chocolate bar.
According to “Field museum”,the chocolate’s center ingredients “cacao” was discovered 2000 years ago.
Believe it or not,first people who discovered the secret of cacao was from Maya years. They grew trees in backyard and made it to paste after harvesting them.Then,they made frothy drink out of it by adding some more ingredients to it. So, chocolate drink was first to be discovered before actual chocolate bars/candies you are familiar with. (To read more,click here)
From 1500’s to 1800’s,Spanish people imported this cacao to their home country and started making the chocolate sweetened up by adding cinnamon or sugars. Then,after 1800’s with more machines were invented for manufacturing and,the more familiar chocolate in modern days;the chocolate candies or bars started appearing. (To read more,click here)
Chocolate is probably one of the kids’ favorite candies to eat but is it good for dogs??
Answer is “NO”. Reason behind this is with secret of Chocolate:the cacao bean. Cacao bean has chemical that dog cannot process.It contains “methylxanthine alkaloids ” in the form of theobromine and caffeinea.
Of course,more smaller the dog body is,the more easy to get reaction with smaller amount of chocolates from toxic chemical.I have heard of dog ate whole bag of “kiss” chocolate with no incident,but chocolate is better out of the reach of your furry friends. Better place to keep is freezer. Your dogs probably cannot open freezer,and you get nice chilly chocolates. I like keeping my chocolate in freezer now and then. My parents love “Lindtz” chocolate,and we bring those chocolate back to home when we go back to Japan,or we send them by mail and they keep the chocolate in freezer and eat it little by little.
One thing to note is that different kinds of chocolate contains different amount of toxic chemical(methylxanthine alkaloids).
According to streetdirectory.com, followings are amount of chemical present in the chocolate.
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White chocolate 1mg/oz
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Hot chocolate 12 mg /oz
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Milk chocolate 44-66 mg/oz
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Semi-sweet chocolate 260 mg/oz
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Dark chocolate 450 mg/oz (wow!)
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Baking/bitter chocolate or cocoa powder varies as much as 150-600 mg/oz.
To 16lb dog,one pound of milk chocolate is enough to be toxic level.It is said to be toxic level if dog ingested methylxanthine alkaloids 100mg-200mg/kg of body weight.
Sign of toxic level are to be told as diarrhea,vomiting,panting hard,exessive thirst or urination,hyper activity etc etc (To read more,click here)
If you were not sure if your dogs were fine or not,I will recommend to call to ASPCA emergency line.The number is at (888) 426-4435. A $60 consultation fee may be applied to your credit card.ASPCA home page is here.
Also,cocoa mulch,tea,coffee are not good as well to be ingested. If you would like to give them something special without cacao bean scare,try something with Carob.
Carob is similar to chocolate, but it has no toxic chemical for dogs in them.
Many dog bakery does Yogurt dipping but,yogurt dipping is made from Yogurt chip which has “Sugar” in the first ingredients (simply melt them,and dip the biscuits),and many make carob biscuits for dogs but they use sweetened carob chip which has “Sugar” in the first ingredients in the list or add sugar to sweetened up.
We,Yassy’s Gourmet Dog Kitchen, used to offer Wet Nose biscuits that had unsweetened carob in it. We didn’t put sugar in the biscuits.We ,in fact, offer non sugary, simple,healthy ingredient biscuits without fillers. It is simply because we believe that adding sugar is unnecessary for canine furriends.
You can view variety of dog biscuits we make to order at the link here.
