People keep asking me about caffeine in chocolate. For some reason, there is an urban legend about chocolate having large amount of caffeine in it.
Being a scientist, I decided to rely on scientific data rather than folklore. The most credible link I could find was here. The author of that site found an article published in “The Biochemist” in 1993. That article describe a chemical analysis performed on several grains of cocoa. The analysis did not find the presence of caffeine in the cocoa.
According to the author of the site, chocolate is safe for people with caffeine allergies (this claim has not been evaluated by us and I recommend that if you do indeed suffer caffeine allergy, get yourself checked before eating chocolate). There are other sources claiming that there is about 0.2% caffeine in cocoa. None of these sources sites a scientific paper. However, even if cocoa does contain 0.2% of caffeine, this is about one eighth of coffee.
The bottom line is that even if there is caffeine in chocolate, it is in minute quantity and should not be a concern.
Go ahead and enjoy!
