Last week, we visited the Musée du Chocolat (Fig. 1). Probably one of the hidden gems in Paris, the museum features an exhibit on the origins of cocoa with free chocolate samples, a live chocolate making demonstration with free chocolate samples, and a chocolate molding class with lots of free chocolate samples. Chocolate may seem like a simple dessert featured in your average Twix bar, but cocoa has been used for over 4,000 years in different cultures and products. Many people in the chocolate world regard chocolate making and molding as an art form. From personal experience, the process is much more difficult than it may seem. Our class chocolates were still delicious, but were described as “child-like” by a passing-by chocolatier (Fig. 2).
Darker chocolates have long been thought to have health benefits, similar to red wine, ranging from protection against cardiovascular disease to anti-aging effects. More recently, flavanols, present in cocoa, have been suggested to enhance cognitive function. Research questions about health effects of certain dietary choices has been gathering more attention recently in epidemiological and behavioral circles. This is mostly due to the potential for widespread use, since dietary changes are arguably the most easily implementable for the public at large. A series of studies implicated cocoa flavanols in improved function on cognitive tests, decreased mental fatigue, and mood enhancement. However, the current literature is inconsistent. Many existing studies are not well controlled, showed no significant results, or used very broad cognitive tasks.
A recent study, Karabay et al. (2018), attempted to control for confounding factors such as caffeine and sugar content of the chocolate in a “randomized, counterbalanced, double-blind, placebo- and baseline-controlled crossover design.” The novel aspect of their study was that they specifically analyzed cocoa flavanols effects on temporal and spatial attention. They first tested their participants temporally with a rapid series visual presentation (RSVP) task to look at their abilities to identify two cues presented close to one another as well as perception of an integrated cue. Next, they presented a visual search (VS) task with one target cue, one salient non-target cue, and an array of distractor items to examine the spatial attention and reaction times of the participant. They found some potentially significant results in the VS task but did not find any significant changes in the RSVP task (Karabay et al., 2018). While this does not suggest a strong effect on attentional enhancement, this study design could be applied to other participant conditions and specific cognitive tests.
Works 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. doi:10.1007/s00213-018-4861-4