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(I was eating dark chocolate a while back to lower my cholesterol but
the extra calories made it problematic. Of course you can eat
unsweetened chocolate but it tastes horrible.)
NY Times, Oct. 27 2014
To Improve a Memory, Consider Chocolate
By PAM BELLUCK
Science edged closer on Sunday to showing that an antioxidant in
chocolate appears to improve some memory skills that people lose with age.
In a small study in the journal Nature Neuroscience, healthy people,
ages 50 to 69, who drank a mixture high in antioxidants called cocoa
flavanols for three months performed better on a memory test than people
who drank a low-flavanol mixture.
On average, the improvement of high-flavanol drinkers meant they
performed like people two to three decades younger on the study’s memory
task, said Dr. Scott A. Small, a neurologist at Columbia University
Medical Center and the study’s senior author. They performed about 25
percent better than the low-flavanol group.
“An exciting result,” said Craig Stark, a neurobiologist at the
University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the research.
“It’s an initial study, and I sort of view this as the opening salvo.”
He added, “And look, it’s chocolate. Who’s going to complain about
chocolate?”
The findings support recent research linking flavanols, especially
epicatechin, to improved blood circulation, heart health and memory in
mice, snails and humans. But experts said the new study, although
involving only 37 participants and partly funded by Mars Inc., the
chocolate company, goes further and was a well-controlled, randomized
trial led by experienced researchers.
Besides improvements on the memory test — a pattern recognition test
involving the kind of skill used in remembering where you parked the car
or recalling the face of someone you just met — researchers found
increased function in an area of the brain’s hippocampus called the
dentate gyrus, which has been linked to this type of memory.
“Boy, this is really interesting to see it in three months,” said Dr.
Steven DeKosky, a neurologist and visiting professor at the University
of Pittsburgh. “They got this really remarkable increase in a place in
the brain that we know is related to age-related memory change.”
There was no increased activity in another hippocampal region, the
entorhinal cortex, which is impaired early in Alzheimer’s disease. That
reinforces the idea that age-related memory decline is different and
suggests that flavanols might not help Alzheimer’s, even though they
might delay normal memory loss.
But unless you are stocking up for Halloween, do not rush to buy Milky
Way or Snickers bars. To consume the high-flavanol group’s daily dose of
epicatechin, 138 milligrams, would take eating at least 300 grams of
dark chocolate a day — about seven average-sized bars. Or possibly about
100 grams of baking chocolate or unsweetened cocoa powder, but
concentrations vary widely depending on the processing. Milk chocolate
has most epicatechin processed out of it.
“You would have to eat a large amount of chocolate,” along with its fat
and calories, said Hagen Schroeter, director of fundamental health and
nutrition research for Mars, which funds many flavanol studies and
approached Dr. Small for this one. (“I nearly threw them out,” said Dr.
Small, who added that he later concluded that the company employed
serious scientists who would not bias the research.) Mars financed about
half the study; other funders were the National Institutes of Health and
two research foundations.
“Candy bars don’t even have a lot of chocolate in them,” Dr. Schroeter
said. And “most chocolate uses a process called dutching and
alkalization. That’s like poison for flavanol.”
Mars already sells a supplement, CocoaVia, which it says promotes
healthy circulation, including for the heart and brain. It contains 20
to 25 milligrams of epicatechin per packet of powder or capsule serving,
Dr. Schroeter said; 30 packets cost $34.95. Epicatechin is also in foods
like tea and apples, although may be less absorbable.
The Columbia study had important limitations. For example, the only
daily dietary requirements were either 900 milligrams of flavanols with
138 milligrams of epicatechin or 10 milligrams of flavanols with less
than two milligrams of epicatechin, so participants could have eaten
other things that played a role.
And while researchers also had half of the healthy but sedentary
participants in each group exercise four days a week, surprisingly, the
exercise had no effects on memory or brain effects.
Dr. Small, whose research previously found that exercise helped
hippocampal function in younger people, suggested maybe more vigorous
exercise is needed to affect older brains.
“It’s a very clever, interesting study, but there are some caveats,”
said Dr. Kenneth S. Kosik, a neuroscientist at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. “People are going to say, ‘It looks like I
can have a lot of candy bars and not exercise.’ So it needs replication
on a much larger scale.”
More extensive research is planned. As for why flavanols would help
memory, one theory is that they improve brain blood flow; another,
favored by Dr. Small, is that they cause dendrites, message-receiving
branches of neurons, to grow.
“Everybody’s cautious about antioxidants, but this is a horse of a
different color, a really elegant study,” Dr. DeKosky said.
Asked if he would eat more chocolate, he said, “Yeah, but the bar for me
to do that is darn low.”
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