Sorry, but I can’t help myself…. a story published in NY Times recently found that chocolate improves memory in healthy 50-69 year olds. Partially-sponsored by drug company (Mars, maker of lots of chocolate products) and published by Nature Neuroscience, they found that drinking a high-flavanol drink with flavanols extracted from cocoa beans (especially with epicatechin) improved memory.
Details:
–37 healthy volunteers aged 50-69 given either high-flavanol diet (900mg/d) vs. low-flavanol diet (10 mg/d) for 3 months, with reference being one bar of chocolate containing 40mg/d
–Memory improved 25% (by pattern recognition test: testing, for example, issues like remembering where you parked your car or the face of a person you just met), equivalent to the memory of a 30-40 year old if one had the memory of a normal 60 year old.
–Flavanols associated with increased metabolic activity in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus and important in memory formation, which is generally reduced with aging, but no change in the entorhinal cortex of the hippocampus which is affected by early Alzheimers.
So, I thought it was important to bring this up in the context of the last week’s Halloween. One caveat is that most cocoa-processing methods remove a lot of flavanols (so hard to know which candy bar works best). But the dose in the study is equivalent to eating 300 grams of regular dark chocolate (approx. 7 average-sized bars) or 100 grams of baking chocolate or unsweetened chocolate powder (again, depending on how it was processed).
Geoff