This past Monday, we visited the Musee du Chocolat, which was a chocolate museum. We were very stressed that day, because we had an important paper due the next day. Now you might be asking, if you were so stressed, why are the people having fun in the picture above? This chocolate making was so fun and such a stress buster! There was so much going on and since the chocolate we were making hardened with passing time we were rushing and it made for a great bonding moment. I think I can say for everyone involved that we didn’t really want it to end because there were so many laughs and great memories made. The molds were very sexy because they looked like a knock of of Patrick from Spongebob. We made praline filled chocolate surronded by dark chocolate. For some reason, staying in that air conditioned room made all of our worries melt away. It was an amazing experience and we made some delicious chocolate! On top of that, we got to go through the museum, which depicted a history of chocolate and how it was made. We also got to see the variations of cocoa beans as well the pollinators that fertilized them. I learned that chocolate didn’t become sweet until relatively recently, which made me extremely appreciative that I was born in this day and age, where chocolate is sweet and not bitter (if you can’t tell, I have more of a sweet tooth). We even got to taste chocolate from certain time periods! How cool!
However, this museum and chocolate making was not just a stress reliever. It was also not just for fun, which we had a lot of! Chocolate also contains cocoa flavanols, a part of the cocoa plant, which has been shown to potentially enhance cognitive function. Cocoa flavanols also specifically increases spatial cognition, which is a subset of cognitive function (Karabay, 2018). This finding isn’t just in one paper, however, and is backed by a variety of sources (Massee, 2015; Scholey, 2010). Although this may not enhance my ability to write a paper or study for an exam, it is pleasing to hear that I am receiving cognitive enhancement from eating chocolate. It really can’t hurt to eat chocolate either, however! Guess who ate a lot of chocolate before writing his paper! Let’s just hope I did well, because to be absolutely honest, I didn’t feel any different in terms of my cognitive abilities.
References Cited:
Karabay, A., Saija, J. D., Field, D. T., & Akyürek, E. G. (2018). The acute effects of cocoa flavanols on temporal and spatial attention. Psychopharmacology, 235(5), 1497–1511. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-018-4861-4
Massee, L. A., Ried, K., Pase, M., Travica, N., Yoganathan, J., Scholey, A., … Pipingas, A. (2015). The acute and sub-chronic effects of cocoa flavanols on mood, cognitive and cardiovascular health in young healthy adults: a randomized, controlled trial. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2015.00093
Scholey, A. B., French, S. J., Morris, P. J., Kennedy, D. O., Milne, A. L., & Haskell, C. F. (2010). Consumption of cocoa flavanols results in acute improvements in mood and cognitive performance during sustained mental effort. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 24(10), 1505–1514. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881109106923