Good news, lovers of chocolate. Your favorite snack/dessert/way of life is officially helping your brain work better. Not only is delicious, sweet chocolate delivering on the healthy promises that our ancient ancestors knew about, but the benefits are likely more important than we ever realized. Probably because our brains simply aren’t as sharp as they could be since we’re not eating enough fudge.
Science incoming!
…caffeine and theobromine, both of which have been associated with improving alertness and cognitive function (Smit et al., 2004 and Mitchell et al., 2011). The amount of cocoa in chocolate ranges from approximately 7–15% in milk chocolate, to 30–70% in dark chocolate. One hundred grams of dark chocolate contains approximately 100 mg of flavanols, while 100 g of unsweetened cocoa powder without meythlxanthines can contain up to 250 mg of flavanols.
Basically, this means the darker the chocolate, the sweeter the brain juice. Ditch that milk chocolate; darker blends of cocoa provide far more benefits.
Now you can declare to anyone in earshot that your brain is recovering when you’re taking time away from homework.
Or that you’re gaining back some much-needed cognitive function as you sip a delicious (dark) hot chocolate. Mmmmm yeah. Delicious cognitive function…
Hey, check out all these flavanols benefitting information processing speed and working memory!
Just eat it. It really makes you see improvements in attentional tasks after two months of consuming an intermediate to high daily dose of cocoa flavanols. It may be annoying to have to eat all of those flavanols, but sometimes you have to suffer in order to get your body and brain in order. Right?
Nice methylxanthines if you ask me.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BCRLsROJ17I/
Out with the never-ending stream of chocolate hearts. It’s time we as a society embrace the chocolate brains.
(Via Science Direct)
