On Monday, we went to a chocolate museum, which went well with the paper we were writing at the time about the effects of cocoa flavanols on attention. At this museum, we started out learning about the history of chocolate and got to taste samples periodically throughout the museum. Milk chocolate is usually my favorite, but the white chocolate samples were equally good here. At the end, we even got to learn how to make our own! The process was extremely messy but a lot of fun at the same time. We had to make chocolate shells, add in some filling, and cover the end with more chocolate. My first tray was ruined because we waited too long to pour the chocolate, so it was extremely hard to pour. Luckily, we were allowed to try again with another tray.
Figure 1. Me and my roommates with the chocolate we made!
There was chocolate all over everyone’s hands and on the table. The table chocolate served as a good snack while we were waiting for our chocolate trays to cool down. This visit was my favorite so far, because I have always loved chocolate a lot since I was young.
I always tend to crave chocolate when I feel stressed, and I eat the most of it when I am studying for exams. This made me want to look into whether chocolate has any effect on memory. After searching pubmed, I found a study by Grassi et al. (2016) called “Flavanol-rich chocolate acutely improves arterial function and working memory performance counteracting the effects of sleep deprivation in healthy individuals.” The study measured variables relating to cardiovascular health and cognitive performance. Investigators found that in sleep deprivation conditions, chocolate that is flavanol-rich was effective at increasing working memory accuracy to a level comparable to working memory after a full night of sleep. However, cocoa flavanols did not have any significant effect on psychomotor vigilance task performance. Grassi et al. (2016) also discovered that cocoa flavanols reversed increases in arterial stiffness that were caused by sleep deprivation.
Figure 2. A sleep derived brain on the right compared to a control. (https://phineasgage.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/youll-feel-better-in-the-morning-sleep-deprivation-disconnects-the-emotional-brain/)
Authors of this paper also reviewed what other researchers have found about cocoa flavanols and cognition. Other researchers that have done longitudinal studies showed that flavonoids seemed to be associated with a decreased risk of dementia, better cognitive outcomes in a ten year period, and dose-dependent effects on cognition in older populations (Grassi et al., 2016). Maybe my love for chocolate isn’t such a bad thing after all!
References
Grassi, D., Socci, V., Tempesta, D., Ferri, C., De Gennaro, L., Desideri, G., & Ferrara, M. (2016). Flavanol-rich chocolate acutely improves arterial function and working memory performance counteracting the effects of sleep deprivation in healthy individuals. Journal of Hypertension., 34(7), 1298-1308.