Here's one for chocoholics to chew on. After consuming drinks enriched with compounds found in cocoa beans for three months, the performance of people aged 50 to 69 on a memory test was akin to someone several decades younger. Problem is, if you want such a benefit from eating chocolate, you would have to eat staggering amounts.
The small study is the latest to suggest that chemicals in cocoa called flavanols can have beneficial effects on the brain. Flavanols are a type of chemical found naturally in cocoa beans, blueberries, green tea and red wine. Previous studies have suggested that mice on a flavanol-rich diet showed enhanced memory and greater blood flow to certain areas of the brain. Scott Small, a neurologist at Columbia University in New York City, wanted to see what affect a similar regime might have on the human brain.
To find out, his team instructed 19 volunteers aged 50 to 69 to drink 900 milligrams a day of powdered cocoa flavanols mixed with water or milk. This dosage was spread over two drinks each day. Another 18 people had to drink a similar beverage that contained just 10 milligrams of the compounds.
Before and after the three months, people in both groups underwent fMRI scans. Comparing the scans revealed that after the regime, the high-dose flavanol drinkers had about 20 per cent more blood flowing to a particular section of their hippocampi, called the dentate gyrus, than they did before. The high-dose drinkers also had about this much more blood flow to the dentate gyrus than the low-flavanol group. Intriguingly, this region has been linked to age-related memory decline in people.
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