Taking place this week and now in its eleventh year, Chocolate Week has become one of the nation’s favourite food-themed weeks. The whole seven day cocoa bonanza has seen tasting sessions and events take place across the length and breadth of the country and it all concludes this weekend with the annual Chocolate Show London, which will be held at the Olympia National Hall.

Organised by the duo of Sylvie Douce and Francois Jeantet, the celebration’s showpiece event originally took place in Paris. But due to the show’s popularity (and people’s natural affinity to chocolate) the Chocolate Show expanded to cities around the world including Moscow, New York, Tokyo, Cairo and London, attracting some 6.5 million visitors in the process.

That figure doesn’t surprise us because a lot of people like chocolate.

Believe it or not, but chocolate has been intertwined with humankind for centuries if not millennium and for many years it was believed to be a medicinal elixir. Most famously, the Aztecs and Mayans used chocolate to treat illnesses as far back as the 1500s.

Contemporary reports indicate that the Aztecs liked to use cacao to hide the bitter and unpalatable flavours of other medicinal ingredients and Mayan manuscripts seem to point towards cacao-based ointments being used to treat rashes and fevers.

And it’s from these Central American tribes and cultures that chocolate first entered our Western diets, but once again it was, predominantly, strictly medicinal. Some doctors thought it was a wonderful cure-for-all ingredient, others saw it as a specific treatment for certain ailments. One doctor, Antionio Colmenero de Ledesma, even said that chocolate “cleaneth the teeth, and sweeteneth the breath, provokes urine, cures the stone, and expels poison, and preserves from all infectious diseases.”

Now it might be surprising to believe, but there’s actually some credence to these claims. Today we might associate chocolate with being a sugary, guilty and appetising pleasure, but the bars that we consume today are a world away from chocolate of yesterday. Yes it had a high calorie count, but that could have been an aid to patients battling draining diseases such as smallpox.

Whether it legitimately could have been used to prevent other illnesses is another thing entirely….

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