Certification: The Newest Ceremonial Cacao Scam | #PSC 225
OVERVIEW: At the request of a friend of TheChocolateLife, Episode 225 of #PodSaveChocolate takes a look at a Certified Ceremonial Cacao Guide course offered by the US company, Naturalistico. Is it on the up and up? What is being certified … and what are the benefits of certification?
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Episode 225
You, too, can become a Certified Ceremonial Cacao Guide!
🛜 Completely Online!
🪧 Get certified in just 20 days!!
🗓️ 30-Day Money Back Guarantee!!!
💸 Pay only $97 – certificate included!!!! (Regular price $398; $2503 total value.)
Yeah. Right.
I have taken a look at so-called “ceremonial cacao” in the past, examining what claims are made for and about it. Most recently, I debunked the claims made by/for Maïa’s “ceremonial cacao.” [Spoiler Alert: If the product on offer is cocoa/cacao powder it cannot be “ceremonial-grade.”]
Clay Gordon
2026 – My primary goal in this debunk was to help people recognize the hallmarks of online scams.
TheChocolateWire
2023 – A more general look.
Naturalistico’s Claims §
🍫 Discover the Art and Spirit of Cacao Ceremonies
Are you ready to deepen your connection with the sacred plant medicine of cacao and learn how to facilitate transformative ceremonies that open hearts, promote healing, and create meaningful community experiences? Our comprehensive Cacao Ceremony Practitioner Certificate Course is designed to empower you with the skills, knowledge, and spiritual depth needed to guide heart-opening rituals with authenticity and respect for cacao’s cultural roots.
🧘♀️ Mastering Cacao Ceremony Facilitation: A Comprehensive Hands-On Course
This immersive course offers a blend of practical exercises, case studies, and reflection questions designed to ensure you understand and can apply what you’ve learned. You’ll engage in hands-on practices, such as preparing ceremonial cacao, leading intention-setting rituals, and integrating sound healing and breathwork into your ceremonies. You’ll also be tested with comprehensive assessments to solidify your knowledge and build your confidence in facilitating cacao ceremonies.
Our carefully crafted modules cover broad topics, including the spiritual and physiological effects of cacao, ethical sourcing and cultural sensitivity, trauma-informed practices, and the integration of sound and movement. With a strong emphasis on experiential learning, this course will equip you to create sacred spaces that honor cacao’s legacy and support participants in deep emotional and spiritual healing.
🔮 Unlock the Magic of Cacao
Step into a meaningful role as a Certified Cacao Ceremony Practitioner and bring the transformative power of cacao to your community. Through this certification, you’ll be empowered to create sacred spaces for healing, connection, and personal growth, inspiring transformation and unity among those you serve.
🤝 A Journey of Awakening and Connection
Enroll now and embark on a profound journey of spiritual awakening, cultural appreciation, and heartfelt connection with one of nature’s most sacred gifts. Learn to honor the rich traditions of cacao while sharing its wisdom with authenticity, purpose, and love, fostering a deep bond between yourself, your community, and this powerful plant medicine.
§ Emphases added
In Today’s Episode
I will cover the following topics:
What & Who Is Naturalistico?
Naturalistico is a for-profit online-education company selling a large catalog of $97 wellness certifications, covering trauma healing, alcohol recovery, dementia, dialectical behavior therapy (“DBT”) on one hand, and shamanism, medicinal mushrooms, and more, on another hand.
This frames its ceremonial cacao certification as one item in a mixed-categories catalog.
Its course pages are sales first and a syllabus second: pricing, urgency, and bundled bonuses occupy more of the page than the historical, botanical, social, or technical grounding of the subject matter.
While I never want to be accused of committing either a genetic fallacy, or an ad hominem, I would be remiss in not pointing out that Naturalistico’s founder (Imanuel Ross), does hold a bachelor’s degree in psychology and counseling from the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. That accomplishment does not obviously support authorship or oversight of a catalog spanning trauma, neurobiology, DBT, dementia care, shamanism, and dosing guidance for medicinal mushrooms.
Accreditation Claims
What does “CEU Credits via NCCAP” mean?
It means the continuing education units (CEUs) you earn are approved (pre-approved) by the National Certification Council for Activity Professionals (NCCAP) for use toward NCCAP continuing education requirements (typically for their activity professional certifications).
Is NCCAP accredited?
NCCAP is not a college/university accreditor in the way regional or national higher-education accreditors work; it’s a certification organization for activity professionals that manages continuing education approvals. CE requirements/approvals are handled via their certification standards and approved CE providers/courses, not through higher-ed accreditation terminology.
Also, some course vendors market NCCAP as “accepted in all 50 states,” but that’s about acceptance for professional certification requirements, not accreditation of a school.
What educational/other institutions accept NCCAP CEU credits?
Acceptance is usually determined by each employer, licensing body, or credentialing/certification organization that has CE requirements. Acceptance is shown/claimed by:
- NCCAP itself (i.e., NCCAP pre-approved/approved CEUs) are intended to count toward NCCAP CE requirements.
- The NAAP Credentialing Center (NAAPCC) is listed as accepting the kind of NCCAP pre-approved CE courses in at least one provider’s approvals page.
- NCTRC (National Council for Therapeutic Recreation Certification) is listed as accepting hours in at least one provider’s approvals page, with conversion to “points.”
What does “Certification by 3 international bodies (IPHM, CMA, and CPD)” mean for someone in the US
Naturalistico says courses/certificates are “accredited by International Practitioners of Holistic Medicine (IPHM; UK), The Complementary Medical Association (CMA; UK), and Continuing Professional Development (CPD).”
CPD refers to ongoing learning/work-related education that helps professionals maintain or update skills and knowledge (analogous to CE/CEU in the US). There are multiple CPD-related organizations and services worldwide; “CPD” by itself is a generic term, not a single body. One prominent CPD-credentialing/accreditation service is CPD Standards Office (UK).
For someone in the US, this certification has several practical implications:
- It can be used as a credentialing/quality signal
Employers, wellness organizations, and some insurance/credentialing processes that recognize these bodies may treat the certificate as evidence that you completed training meeting that body’s standards. - It usually does not substitute for US state professional licensing
In the US, if the role you want requires a license (e.g., psychotherapy, counseling, nursing, medicine, etc.), an international wellness/continuing-education “accreditation” generally won’t replace those legal requirements. - Acceptance depends on the organization you’re dealing with
In the US, acceptance is mostly about their policy: whether they recognize IPHM/CMA/CPD-linked training for hiring, contracting, continuing education requirements, or insurance underwriting.
What’s Missing From the Course Modules?
- The module descriptions on the website are absent any mention on the topic of what makes ceremonial cacao ceremonial cacao.
Who are the “Team and Speakers Guiding You Towards Success” (the Instructors)?
- Spoiler Alert: It’s not possible to know who compiled the course materials from the website.
- Thing to think about: The Team consists of practitioners certified across six continents. What does that actually mean?
- Spoiler Alert: From what we can learn of The Team, none of them has any clear, direct, experience in ceremonial cacao. They include an NLP (neurolinguistic programming “master”), an herbal specialist, a peak performance coach, a yoga and meditation instructor, a clinical dietician, and a lecturer in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral sciences. There are links to LinkedIn profiles for five of the eight listed team members – a close read of Dr Abola’s employment history, educational experience, and 32 cited “certifications” is, enlightening?
What Are Some Indicators Naturalistico (and this course) Might Be a Scam?
- Pay only $97 – certificate included!!!! (Regular price $398; $2503 total value.)
- Upsell, upsell, upsell! (pricing, urgency, and bundled bonuses)
The exact table structure (below, and the "$2,503 total package value" line) shows up verbatim on other, unrelated courses – Health and Wellness Coach, Psychedelic Integration Coaching, Self-Sufficiency Certification, Neuroplasticity Coaching, Ericksonian Coach – confirming it’s a site-wide marketing template that might not apply to every course. - Naturalistico’s own FAQs page states: “The professions for which our courses prepare you are part of the unregulated occupations in most countries. This means there is no official recognition.” That directly undercuts “Certified in the United States – Our Certification Protects and Insures Your Practice.” Naturalistico’s own fine print admits what its marketing implies isn't quite true.
- The table comparing Naturalistico and IFC/PAAC is the equivalent of “One of these things is not like the others,” and Naturalistico is the odd-one-out.
▶️ ICF is the International Coaching Federation, a globally recognized professional-coaching credentialing body. ICF certification requires supervised coaching hours, mentor coaching, and a competency exam.
▶️ PAAC is the Professional Association of ADHD Coaches — a narrow credentialing body that certifies ADHD-specific coaching, usually alongside or on top of general ICF training. PAAC has nothing to do with holistic or ceremonial practice generally.
- While not related to the Cacao Ceremony certification, the Trauma Healing Coach Certification module topics include EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Prolonged Exposure Therapy, and Cognitive Processing Therapy, techniques normally restricted to licensed clinicians because poorly applied exposure work can re-traumatize someone rather than help them. DBT (Dialectic Behavior Therapy) was originally developed for patients at high risk of self-harm and suicide; real DBT training exists specifically to make sure the person delivering it can proceed safely. Naturalistico teaches (and certifies) these as coaching skills, with no prerequisites, to anyone willing to invest $97 and a week of study.
In Conclusion
Source Quality Rating
Peer reviewed: No. Author credentials: company-listed instructor bios, none specific to cacao or cocoa subject matter. Publication reputation: commercial wellness-education platform selling dozens of “similar” certifications, not a specialist authority. Recency: page states it was updated 22 July 2026. Methodological rigor: not applicable, it’s a marketing page rather than research. Overall quality: C, informative for evaluating the product’s marketing claims, but not a reliable primary source for cacao history or science.
One pattern that connects Naturalistico to Maïa is the substitution of authority-laden, confidently authoritative sounding language for verifiable sourcing.
Maïa invented a cardiologist and a research institute. Naturalistico lists instructor titles, (NLP Master, Herbal Specialist, Peak Performance Coach), that sound credentialed but aren’t obviously connected to the subject of ceremonial cacao. Ceremonial-cacao marketing broadly, borrows terms like “5,000-year secret” and uses them as if they were settled history rather than a genuinely contested research question. The trend across the wellness-certification and cacao-supplement markets alike is toward flattening complexity into a single confident claim, which is efficient marketing and thin history in roughly equal measure.
The importing of New Age practices – sound healing, breathwork – and unrelated topics – trauma-informed practices – that tie into other Naturalistico course offerings is a clue to a lack of concern about treating the source material with cultural respect.
The TL;DR
Is Naturalistico’s Certified Ceremonial Cacao Guide course a scam? It bears, in my opinion, many of the hallmarks of being one.
Errata
“Thank you Keith…” probably refers to Keith Wilson, aka “the Chocolate Shaman,” a key figure in the modern ceremonial cacao landscape.
There is no obvious connection that I can find between “Liam Browne Awaken” and Naturalistico, but there are many overlaps between the IG reel above and what is mentioned in the Naturalistico course materials.
NONE of them has any historical referent prior to 1960s New Age mysticism. Not one.
Future Episodes
Cocoa and Health – new research, with regular ChocolateLife contributor, Keith Ayoob.
Celebrating(?) the 25th anniversary of the signing (on Sept 19, 2001) of the Harkin-Engel Protocol with confirmed special guests Terry Collingsworth and Miki Mistrati.
Episode Hashtags
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#cocoa #cacao #cacau
#chocolate #chocolat
#PodSaveChoc #PSC
#LaVidaCocoa #TheChocolateLife
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