Eating chocolate improves brain function, study shows
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By Kim Da-hee
Eating chocolates makes you smarter, research shows.
The study, published in the journal Appetite, said people who ate chocolate at least once a week had improved memory and abstract thinking.
Psychologist Merrill Elias began a study of more than 1,000 people in New York City in the 1970s to examine the relationship between blood pressure and brain performance.
In 2001, Elias decided to ask participants in the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS) at the University of Maine about their dietary habits as additional questions for the research.
Believing the study would be an opportunity to examine the effects of chocolate on human brain, Georgina Crichton, a nutrition researcher at the University of South Australia, joined the research.
After carrying out cognitive tests of those who ate chocolate at least once a week and those who ate it less than once a week, the team found that eating chocolate helped improve brain function.
Those who ate chocolate more than once a week had improved memory and abstract thinking.
“The benefits are found in daily tasks such as remembering a phone number, or your shopping list, or being able to do two things at once, like talking and driving at the same time,” Crichton said.
To make sure whether it was simply a case of smarter people tending to like chocolate more or not, the team analyzed the results of cognitive ability tests on 333 participants over several years.
The team concluded that cognitive ability did not predict whether a person would be a chocolate eater or not.
Elias said, “Our study definitely indicates that the direction is not that cognitive ability affects chocolate consumption, but that chocolate consumption affects cognitive ability.”