hi I'm Aviva gold Barbara the six o'clock scramble and today I'm going to show you how to use one of my very favorite ingredients cocoa nibs last year I got involved with a film called fed up and I learned a lot about how we're eating too much added sugar and our diets and I've always had a little bit of a problem with eating too much sugar and having sugar cravings in kind of a sugar addiction so I decided to get most of the added sugar out of my life and I actually created a Facebook group which I can direct you to where it's all people who want to reduce or eliminate added sugar in their diets well I love chocolate I didn't want to lose chocolate for my diet so I discovered an ingredient called cocoa nibs and cocoa nibs are made from chocolate beans they're part of the process of producing chocolate but it's before they add the sugar so they're very chocolatey they're a little bitter if you eat them straight so I wouldn't recommend that but they take the place of chocolate or chocolate chips and a lot of recipes as long as you find other natural ways to sweeten them so I'm going to show you a few of my favorite ways to use these wonderful cocoa nibs you can find them in a lot of natural food stores even the big supermarkets are getting them now because they become so popular so one of the things I like to do is since they're chocolate it seems like maybe they should be a dessert but there's no sugar so they don't have to be a dessert so I start my day with cocoa nibs in my yogurt and what I do is I take some frozen pitted cherries and I microwave them so that they get soft and juicy and then I mix in some plain unsweetened Greek yogurt then I sprinkle in like a teaspoon of cocoa nibs and mix that all together and it's like I'm having this chocolate cherry yogurt for breakfast and it's so healthy and so good cocoa nibs not only do they not have any sugar but they're super healthy for you their antioxidants and they have flavonoids and they have fiber and they're dairy free so there's nothing not to recommend cocoa nibs that I can think of so that is one of my favorite ways to eat them and then another thing that I do for a snack is I first of all you can add cocoa nibs to a lot of different foods you can put them in when I make granola I add them to that if you're making chocolate banana ice cream out of frozen bananas an unsweetened cocoa you can put that on that for a crunch but one of my favorite afternoon snacks is to slice up a banana and top it with a tablespoon I find there's too much time between lunch and dinners like seven hours I can never make it that long so I try to eat something healthy that won't fill me up too much so I take a banana I slice it up I add a tablespoon or so of almond butter unsweetened almond butter of course and then you can slice in some strawberries on here I sprinkle on some cinnamon which is another healthy very flavorful kind of sweet ingredient and I sprinkle on some cocoa nibs and I have this really decadent really healthy filling little snack so you can mix that all together and it's got the crunch and the creaminess and the saltiness from the peanut butter I love it so as I said you can also take some strawberries if you like that combination and slice those right in there too and you've got a great little snack or even a dessert if you like that for dessert so here's another thing that I do it's kind of silly but if I just need a quick high-protein snack like a late night if I ate too early and I'm really hungry before I go to bed I will just take a teaspoon of almond butter or peanut butter and I will sprinkle on some cocoa nibs right on the spoon and I will eat them like that and for some reason it is so delicious and so satisfying if I eat this it's going to be really hard for me to talk afterwards but I'm going to try it anyways mmm so now I can't talk is it peanut butter or the almond butter in this case but anyways this is a bead of gold bar with the six o'clock scramble and I just want you to remember and I want me to remember that we are never too busy to eat well