Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Chocolate Appears to Improve Brain Health

  If you love chocolate, you'll likely love this story.  Researchers say chocolate isn't only pleasing to the taste buds, it's also good for the brain.  Although the study applies to older Americans, the findings could be reason enough for chocoholics of all ages to feel a little less guilty the next time they indulge in their favorite treat.
(Los Angeles Times)  
 In a study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology, researchers reported that chocolate may help improve brain health and thinking skills in the elderly. The Boston-based team found that older people who initially performed poorly on a memory and reasoning test and also had reduced blood flow to their brains showed improvement after drinking two cups of cocoa every day for a month.  The researchers had set out to test whether chocolate could increase blood flow to the brain during problem solving, boosting performance, after finding in earlier studies that consuming chocolate high in the antioxidant flavanol was associated with better brain and blood vessel functioning. They recruited 60 elderly subjects for the new study. Since they suspected that flavanol would improve the subjects’ thinking skills and blood flow, they randomly assigned subjects to drink either flavanol-rich or flavanol-poor hot chocolate.
  The participants drank two cups of hot chocolate every day for 30 days.  Before and after the study period, they completed a memory and reasoning test, which assessed their ability to recognize patterns in a series of letters on a computer screen. Additionally, the researchers used ultrasound to indirectly measure the blood flow to subjects’ brains, as well as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI,  to examine subjects’ white matter — the nerve fibers that connect different parts of the brain.
People who performed poorly on the initial cognitive test — about a third of the participants — also had reduced blood flow to their brains and widespread white matter damage. Those who scored high on the test had signficantly better blood flow and more intact white matter, indicating that blood flow, cognitive functioning and brain structure were linked.
  At the end of the 30 days, the team found that drinking hot chocolate benefited only the subjects who had poor cognitive and neurovascular function to begin with.  After the hot cocoa regimen, those individuals showed an 8% improvement in blood flow and a roughly 1 minute faster reaction time on the cognitive task. There was barely any improvement among those who had started out with normal blood flow and cognitive skills.
To the scientists’ surprise, there weren’t significant differences in the neurovascular or cognitive changes between the flavanol-rich and flavanol-poor groups — suggesting that something else in the chocolate was causing the improvements. The researchers plan to identify and test this component in future trials, said study leader Dr.  Farzaneh A. Sorond, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.  After identifying the substance, the researchers may even be able to produce it in pill form, said Dr. Costantino Iadecola, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, who was not involved in the study.
 Although the study results may tempt some to add chocolate to their diet,  Sorond noted that the participants’ food intake was strictly regulated to offset the excess fat and sugar in hot chocolate. For people seeking to keep their brains healthy, she recommends an intervention already known to improve cognitive function: exercise.

1 comment:

  1. That very last sentence really resonated with me. It's easy to look for a simple solution like eating chocolate to avoid doing what we know we should do. No matter what super-foods we find, exercise is still essential for optimal health. I'm definitely speaking to myself today!

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