To Improve a Memory, Consider

Chocolate
By PAM BELLUCK OCT. 26, 2014
Photo

Cocoa flavanol extracted from fresh cocoa beans.

Science edged closer on Sunday to showing that an
antioxidant in chocolate appears to improve some
memory skills that people lose with age.
In a small study in the journal Nature Neuroscience,
healthy people, ages 50 to 69, who drank a mixture
high in antioxidants called cocoa flavanols for three
months performed better on a memory test than
people who drank a low-flavanol mixture.
On average, the improvement of high-flavanol drinkers
meant they performed like people two to three decades
younger on the studys memory task, said Dr. Scott A.
Small, a neurologist at Columbia University Medical
Center and the studys senior author. They performed
about 25 percent better than the low-flavanol group.
An exciting result, said Craig Stark, a neurobiologist
at the University of California, Irvine, who was not
involved in the research. Its an initial study, and I
sort of view this as the opening salvo.
He added, And look, its chocolate. Whos going to
complain about chocolate?
The findings support recent research linking flavanols,
especially epicatechin, to improved blood circulation,
heart health and memory in mice, snails and humans.
But experts said the new study, although involving only
37 participants and partly funded by Mars Inc., the
chocolate company, goes further and was a well-
controlled, randomized trial led by experienced
researchers.
Besides improvements on the memory test a pattern
recognition test involving the kind of skill used in
remembering where you parked the car or recalling the
face of someone you just met researchers found
increased function in an area of the brains
hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, which has been
linked to this type of memory.
Boy, this is really interesting to see it in three
months, said Dr. Steven DeKosky, a neurologist and
visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh. They
got this really remarkable increase in a place in the
brain that we know is related to age-related memory
change.
There was no increased activity in another
hippocampal region, the entorhinal cortex, which is
impaired early inAlzheimers disease. That reinforces
the idea that age-related memory decline is different
and suggests that flavanols might not help Alzheimers,
even though they might delay normal memory loss.
But unless you are stocking up for Halloween, do not
rush to buy Milky Way or Snickers bars. To consume
the high-flavanol groups daily dose of epicatechin, 138
milligrams, would take eating at least 300 grams of
dark chocolate a day about seven average-sized bars.
Or possibly about 100 grams of baking chocolate or
unsweetened cocoa powder, but concentrations vary
widely depending on the processing. Milk chocolate
has most epicatechin processed out of it.
You would have to eat a large amount of chocolate,
along with its fat and calories, said Hagen Schroeter,
director of fundamental health and nutrition research
for Mars, which funds many flavanol studies and
approached Dr. Small for this one. (I nearly threw
them out, said Dr. Small, who added that he later
concluded that the company employed serious
scientists who would not bias the research.) Mars
financed about half the study; other funders were the
National Institutes of Health and two research
foundations.
Candy bars dont even have a lot of chocolate in
them, Dr. Schroeter said. And most chocolate uses a
process called dutching and alkalization. Thats like
poison for flavanol.
Mars already sells a supplement, CocoaVia, which it
says promotes healthy circulation, including for the
heart and brain. It contains 20 to 25 milligrams of
epicatechin per packet of powder or capsule serving,
Dr. Schroeter said; 30 packets cost $34.95. Epicatechin
is also in foods like tea and apples, although may be
less absorbable.


The Columbia study had important limitations. For
example, the only daily dietary requirements were
either 900 milligrams of flavanols with 138 milligrams
of epicatechin or 10 milligrams of flavanols with less
than two milligrams of epicatechin, so participants
could have eaten other things that played a role.
And while researchers also had half of the healthy but
sedentary participants in each group exercise four days
a week, surprisingly, the exercise had no effects on
memory or brain effects.
Dr. Small, whose research previously found that
exercise helped hippocampal function in younger
people, suggested maybe more vigorous exercise is
needed to affect older brains.
Its a very clever, interesting study, but there are some
caveats, said Dr. Kenneth S. Kosik, a neuroscientist at
the University of California, Santa Barbara. People are
going to say, It looks like I can have a lot of candy bars
and not exercise. So it needs replication on a much
larger scale.
More extensive research is planned. As for why
flavanols would help memory, one theory is that they
improve brain blood flow; another, favored by Dr.
Small, is that they cause dendrites, message-receiving
branches of neurons, to grow.
Everybodys cautious about antioxidants, but this is a
horse of a different color, a really elegant study, Dr.
DeKosky said.
Asked if he would eat more chocolate, he said, Yeah,
but the bar for me to do that is darn low.