Hot Chocolate Can Improve Brain Health

Hot Chocolate Can Improve Brain Health

Recent research suggests that chocolate can improve cognitive skills and all together brain health for seniors.

The study was published in the online issue of Neurology and was conducted by the Harvard Medical School. The researchers recruited 60 people that averaged an age of approximately 73 years and who didn't suffer from dementia or other types of serious mental illnesses.

The subjects were given a diet supplement of two cups of hot chocolate a day for a month while researchers kept track of the blood flow to their brains as they undertook memory and cognitive abilities tests.

Farzaneh Sorond explained that the blood flow is very important in the functioning of a healthy brain as different areas need larger amount of blood to complete different tasks.

He also added that the relationship called neurovascular coupling may have a great importance in the treatment and prevention of degenerative brain diseases as Alzheimer’s.

While the testing didn't show many changes for the subjects with normal blood flow, it showed an 8 percent improvement for those who had poor blood flow. This isn't the only fantastic result, it appears that all participant significantly improved their scores for cognitive abilities tests lowering their previous time from 167 seconds to 116 seconds.

While it isn't clear what about the chocolate created the improvement, researchers suggest dark chocolate that has less sugar and milk in its composition is preferable to the sugar and dairy filled one.

Posted by George Daniels on Sunday August 11 2013, 2:14 AM EST. Ref: ctvnews. Link. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, Health. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0