Chocolate flavanols give ageing brains a boost

Your addiction to that 3 pm chocolate bar may not be just a way to alleviate boredom - it could also give your brain a much-needed boost. Evidence is increasingly suggesting that chocolate flavanols improve cognitive function.

Scientists suggest this could be a way to stave off age-related cognitive deterioration. As the world’s population ages and life expectancies increase, this could be vital to ensuring quality of life and longer-term productivity.

A collaborative study conducted by Italy’s University of L’Aquila and Mars found that a diet rich in cocoa flavanols can play an important role in maintaining cognitive health as we age.

The controlled, randomised, double-blind study saw participants aged 61-85 years assigned a daily drink with either high, intermediate or low cocoa flavanols for eight weeks. Prior to the study, and eight weeks later, participants’ cognitive function was assessed.

Those participants who consumed the drinks with intermediate or high cocoa flavanol drinks exhibited significant improvements in overall cognitive function. As the participants had no prior evidence of cognitive dysfunction, the researchers suggest that even cognitively healthy people can benefit from regularly including cocoa flavanols in their diets.

But it’s not just brain power that improved with the flavanols - cardiometabolic markers such as insulin resistance and blood pressure also improved in participants given the intermediate- and high-flavanol drinks.

“It is clear from our latest research and other recent studies that cocoa flavanols have profound effects on the body, and specifically the brain. Now we’d like to know how they work and how long the effects last,” said Dr Giovambattista Desideri, lead author of the paper.

“If these further studies confirm the findings that brain health can be improved by consuming dietary flavanols, it may have the potential to affect the daily lives of millions of people worldwide.”

The research was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.