Fact: “Nine out of ten people like chocolate, the tenth person always lies.” All right, maybe that statement isn’t quite fact, but I’d like to think it is!
Walking around any street in Paris, you can probably find a Chocolatier store filled with gourmet homemade chocolate and other related treats. On Monday June 11th 2018, my Neuroscience class and I attended a chocolate museum and were able to make our own chocolates at Le Musee Gourmand Du Chocolate. As I walked into the museum, I was consumed by all of the rich chocolate smells. Free samples were everywhere and I filled my stomach with tens of the little round treats. My classmates and I walked into the chocolate making room, put on aprons, and watched the chocolate connoisseur carefully and skillfully scoop a full ladle of melted dark chocolate into a pre-maid star mold. He scraped the top layer off and quickly flipped the mold over to drain the chocolate in order to create a perfect outer coat. It was then our turn to (try to) follow suit.
Boy were we a mess. Chocolate was everywhere, on hands, on faces, all over the counter. We were obviously not doing a great job and were even described to be “worse than the children before us.” Despite our difficulty, we all had a great time and were able to bring a full bag of our sloppy yet tasty chocolates to bring home.
My fellow students and I recently read and wrote a review on how consuming cocoa flavonols could have an affect on temporal and spatial attention (Karabay et. Al, 2018). Researchers sampled 48 university students who all experienced four different conditions (baseline, placebo, low dose, and high-dose flavanol) then two different tasks to measure temporal integration and attention and spatial attention. It was found that cocoa flavanols enhances the efficiency of spatial attention while the results for the other measurements did not seem significant (Karabay et. Al, 2018).
Like my visit to the Fromagerie, I had never really thought about how a certain diet could affect the brain, especially chocolate at that! As much fun as I had, I was also thinking about the science behind the ingredients of the chocolate we were making and how it could potentially have some cognitive benefits despite the limited results. The article helped justify filling my stomach with chocolate that day which I am very thankful for!
Source:
Karabay, A., Saija, J. D., Field, D. T., & Akyürek, E. G. (2018, May). The acute effects of cocoa flavanols on temporal and spatial attention. Psychopharmacology, 235(5), 1497-1511. doi:10.1007/s00213-018-4861-4