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 study’s memory task,
said Dr. Scott A. Small,
a neurologist at Columbia University Medical Center and the study’s
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. “It’s an
initial study, and I sort of view this as the opening salvo.”
He added, “And look, it’s chocolate. Who’s going to complain about chocolate?”
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