Want To Improve Your Memory? Eat Chocolate [1]
You've already heard that eating a little bit of dark chocolate every day is good for you — it can raise your good cholesterol [2], lower your bad cholesterol [3], and has been linked to weight loss [4]. Well, now there's yet another excuse to eat your favorite, no-longer-guilty pleasure: A new study [5] suggests that a compound found in chocolate, dietary cocoa flavanols, can reverse the process of age-related memory loss.
Scientists at Columbia University Medical Center found that the flavanols increase connectivity and blood flow in a region of the brain critical to memory. Researchers asked 37 participants ranging in age from 50 to 69 to drink either a high-flavanol mixture or a low-flavanol mixture. Subjects who drank the high-flavanol solution performed better on a pattern-recognition test designed to gauge memory, and showed increased function the dentate gyrus, a part of the brain's hippocampus associated with memory.