All you chocolate nuts will be thrilled to learn that yet another test has validated chocolate's talent and "heroic" qualities. A new study shows that chocolate not only helps you fight heart attacks and strokes, but it also improves your memory, abstract thinking and cognitive ability.
The study began in the mid-1970s when psychologist Merrill Elias began to keep a tab on the cognitive abilities of more than a thousand people in New York. His aim was to check the link between blood pressure and brain performance.
Over the decades, he tracked people's habits and expanded the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS) to examine cardiovascular risk factors, including diabetes, obesity and smoking.
Examining the impact of chocolate on health had never been part of his original study. Elias realized only two-and-a-half decades later that this sweet, as part of the subjects' daily diet habits, did seem to share a rather rich relationship with the human brain. The question regarding chocolate was included only in the sixth wave of the team's data collection during the five years between 2001 and 2006.
"We found that people who eat chocolate at least once a week tend to perform better cognitively," Elias said. "It's significant - it touches a number of cognitive domains."
The analysis was led by Georgina Crichton, a nutrition researcher at the University of South Australia, who examined its impact on the human brain, behavior and on habitual consumption. The team tracked its effect on a 1,000 people, collecting significant cognitive data on their actions.
Crichton, along with Elias and Ala'a Alkerwi, an epidemiologist at the Luxembourg Institute of Health, undertook two analyses. In the first one, the team compared the mean scores of diverse cognitive tests of participants who recorded that they ate chocolate less than once a week, as well as others who said they consumed it at least once a week.
The study showed "significant positive associations" between chocolate intake and cognitive performance, also adjusting for diverse variables such as age, education, cardiovascular risk factors and dietary habits.
Excitingly, chocolate was significantly associated with superior "visual-spatial memory and [organization], working memory, scanning and tracking, abstract reasoning, and the mini-mental state examination."
The improvement was related to daily tasks, "such as remembering a phone number, or your shopping list, or being able to do two things at once, like talking and driving at the same time."
In the second analysis, the team examined whether eating chocolate led to better cognitive ability or worked the other way around. That is, did the people who had better performing brains gravitate toward chocolate?
Hence, the team studied more than 300 participants who had been part of the "first four waves of the MSLS as well as the sixth" that had added a dietary questionnaire. If better cognitive ability made people eat more of it, there ought to have been a link between their cognitive performance before answering the questionnaire and their chocolate consumption. However, the experts found that it did not work that way.
"It's not possible to talk about causality because that's nearly impossible to prove with our design," Elias said. "But we can talk about direction. Our study definitely indicates that the direction is not that cognitive ability affects chocolate consumption, but that chocolate consumption affects cognitive ability."
The findings will be published in the May edition of the journal Appetite.
