Blueprint Cocoa Review at 71: A Year of Cocoa in My Coffee
This one started with Bryan Johnson. Cocoa powder is in his protocol, and when I am building my own stack I pay attention to what the people running the most measured experiments on themselves are actually taking. He puts it in his post-workout routine. I put it in my coffee.
That was almost a year ago. Here is the honest report, including the part about heavy metals that most cocoa write-ups skip.
What Is Blueprint Cocoa Powder?
It is unsweetened, undutched cocoa powder selected for high flavanol content and tested for heavy metals. No sweeteners, no additives, nothing else in the bag.
Two details matter. “Undutched” means it has not been alkali-processed, which is the step that strips out a large share of the flavanols in ordinary supermarket cocoa. And Blueprint publishes a certificate of analysis for heavy metals on each batch, which I will come back to, because with cocoa that is not a marketing flourish.
The company's own comparison against ten supermarket chocolates put their cocoa at 537 mg of flavanols against 2.9 micrograms of heavy metals. Treat that as the manufacturer's number, not an independent one — but the certificates are published and you can read them yourself.
Why I Take It
Because cocoa flavanols are one of a small number of supplements where the human evidence points at blood vessels, and blood vessels are the whole game at 71. Most of what goes wrong after seventy runs through the circulatory system one way or another.
And because it tastes good. I will not dress that up. It makes my first coffee better, which means I will still be doing it in five years, and consistency beats optimization on anything you have to do every single morning.
What Does the Research Actually Show?
The largest trial ever run on cocoa flavanols missed its main target and hit something interesting on the way past.
That trial is COSMOS — the COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study (Sesso et al, Am J Clin Nutr 2022). It enrolled 21,442 older adults, women 65 and up and men 60 and up, and ran a cocoa extract supplying 500 mg of flavanols a day against placebo for a median of 3.6 years. That is my age group, which is rarer in supplement research than you would hope.
The primary result was a miss. Total cardiovascular events came in at a hazard ratio of 0.90, which did not reach statistical significance. If that had been the only number, this post would end differently.
But cardiovascular death dropped 27% (HR 0.73), and when the researchers looked only at people who actually took the pills as directed, total cardiovascular events fell to HR 0.85 and did reach significance. The investigators themselves call this suggestive, not proven, and they are right to. Secondary endpoints found after a missed primary are the softest kind of finding in medicine. But a 27% reduction in cardiovascular death in twenty-one thousand people my age is not nothing either.
Where the evidence is thinner: the vascular effects — better blood flow, modest blood pressure reductions — come mostly from small, short trials. And COSMOS used a standardized extract at a known dose. Cocoa powder in a mug is not the same thing, and I cannot tell you my scoop delivers what their capsules did.
The Heavy Metals Problem Nobody Mentions
Cacao trees pull cadmium out of the soil, and it concentrates in exactly the part of the bean that carries the flavanols. The healthy fraction and the contaminated fraction are the same fraction. That makes cocoa unusual among the things I take.
The numbers are real. Consumer Reports found measurable cadmium and lead in all 28 dark chocolate bars it tested, and in a follow-up across 48 cocoa products, 16 exceeded its levels of concern for at least one metal. A separate multi-year analysis of 72 products (Frontiers in Nutrition, 2024) found 43% over California's Prop 65 threshold for lead and 35% for cadmium.
Two things keep that in proportion. Prop 65 thresholds are labeling triggers, set very conservatively — they are not poisoning levels. And median concentrations across that 72-product analysis sat below even those thresholds, meaning a handful of bad outliers drag the averages. One serving of most products is not a problem for an adult.
But I am not eating one serving of chocolate occasionally. I am taking a scoop of concentrated cocoa solids every morning, on top of everything else in my stack. Daily and concentrated is the case where sourcing stops being paranoia and starts being arithmetic. That is what I am paying Blueprint for, and if I switched to a cheap supermarket tin tomorrow I would want to see its numbers first.
One more counterintuitive finding from that same analysis: organic products were significantly more likely to carry higher cadmium and lead. Organic is not a proxy for clean here.
My Dose and Timing
One scoop of Blueprint Cocoa Powder in my first coffee of the morning, every day, for almost a year.
Cocoa does not dissolve properly with a spoon — you get mud sitting on the bottom. I use a small handheld milk frother and it comes together in about five seconds. Same tool I use for the ketone powder that goes in another cup. If you take either of these, buy the frother.
It goes into the first of the four coffees I drink each morning, which I have laid out in my coffee protocol.
What Have I Actually Noticed After a Year?
Nothing I can point to.
No more energy. No sharper thinking. Nothing I would have spotted if someone had quietly swapped it out.
What I would say in its defense is that the outcome COSMOS found is not one you can feel. Nobody notices their cardiovascular death risk going down. That is the honest frame for this whole category of supplement — if the benefit is real, it shows up as an event that never happens, decades out, and you never get to know whether it worked. Which means the only rational way to take something like this is to keep the cost low, keep the quality high, and stop expecting a feeling.
I do not currently have a blood pressure trend clean enough to say anything about. That changes shortly — I am starting a separate experiment that requires proper daily blood pressure logging, and once I have months of that data I will be able to say something better than “nothing.”
Would I Tell Someone Else to Take It?
Yes. This is one of the easier recommendations I make, for an unglamorous reason: it is a food, it tastes good, and the largest trial in my age group points the right direction even if it did not prove its case.
Who should be careful. Anyone buying cocoa on price rather than testing, especially if they are taking it daily — the metals question is real and cheap cocoa does not come with a certificate. Anyone with kidney disease, since cadmium clearance is a kidney job. Children, who have a much lower tolerance for lead than adults do. And anyone sensitive to caffeine late in the day, since cocoa carries a small amount naturally.
If you want to try it, Blueprint Cocoa Powder. That is an affiliate link and I earn a small commission if you buy through it, at no extra cost to you.
Keep Going
Everything I take is listed with its dose on my supplement stack and on my protocols page. What I do to stay strong is on my fitness page, and every blood number I publish is on my test and stats page.
Live long and prosper,
Gary
A note from Gary: I am not a doctor, and I am definitely not your doctor. I am a 71-year-old man running a 129-year experiment on himself in public. Cocoa carries naturally occurring cadmium and a small amount of caffeine, and it can interact with how your kidneys handle other things. Talk to your physician before changing anything you take. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
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