Is chocolate a memory booster or not?

Compounds in cocoa beans may boost older people’s memory, says New Scientist (1 November 2014). Researcher Scott Small at Columbia University in New York tested the affect of flavanols on older people (Nature Neuroscience, doi.org/wn6).

Flavanols are chemicals in some foods that have been found to enhance memory in lab rats. So could it be true for people too? Flavanols are also found in cocoa beans – the essence of chocolate. Small asked 19 volunteers aged 50-69 to drink 900 milligrams of cocoa flavanols in milk or water every day for three months. Another group of 18 people drank 10 mg of cocoa flavanols for the same period of time.

Before and after the drinking period, each person in both groups was subjected to a memory test in which the person was shown 41 abstract shapes. Following the abstract shapes the volunteers were shown 82 more shapes. They had to select the shapes that they had seen before in the first showing. Small used this test because from the age of 20 years people have a lengthened recognition period for shapes – by about 200 milliseconds for each decade as people age.

Small’s results revealed that the high flavanol group reacted to the shapes 630 milliseconds faster on average than the low flavanol group. It was as though, Small says, they were three decades younger than the others.

There’s just one slight problem. Small says you’d have to eat “so much” chocolate or cocoa beans that, even though your memory may improve, your health won’t. But he doesn’t say how much is too much!

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