Compound in cocoa found to reverse age-related memory loss
October 26, 2014
By Fredrick Kunkle
In case anyone needed another reason to love chocolate, a new study suggests that a natural compound found in cocoa, tea and some vegetables can reverse age-related memory loss.
The findings suggest that the compound increases connectivity and, subsequently, blood flow in a region of the brain critical to memory, the researchers said.
The study — published online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience and partly financed by a chocolate company — found that flavanols reverse mild memory loss in older adults. Using brain scans and memory tests, the latest study built on previous work showing that flavanols extracted from cocoa beans had improved neuronal connections in mice’s dentate gyrus, a part of the brain involved in memory formation.
But hold that chocolate bar. The researchers also warn that the compound found in cocoa exists only in minuscule amounts in the average chocolate bar compared with the amount used in the study, so gorging on chocolate in the name of health and improving one’s memory could backfire.
“It would make a lot of people happy, but it would also make them unhealthy,” Scott A. Small, a professor of neurology and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Taub Institute at Columbia University Medical Center, said Friday.
Small said that even more important, the new study offers the first direct evidence that memory deteriorates with age because of changes in the dentate gyrus, a region of the hippocampus. Previous studies had shown a link between changes in this region of the brain and normal, age-related memory loss, but the Columbia University study asserts a causal link.
“It more firmly establishes that this is the anatomical source of age-related memory loss,” Small, the study’s senior author, said. He said the study also offered yet more evidence that diet and healthy lifestyles that increase blood flow to the brain can slow or reverse age-related cognitive decline.
The study involved 37 healthy subjects who ranged in age from 50 to 69. On a random basis, they were given either a high-flavanol diet, consuming 900 milligrams a day, or a low flavanol diet, consuming 10mg per day. Brain scans, which measure blood volume in the dentate gyrus, and memory tests were used to evaluate the effect of the diet. Small said the typical candy bar contains about 40mg of flavanols.
Researchers said that if a person had the memory of a typical 60-year-old at the beginning of the study, after three months, on average, that person’s memory would function more like a 30- or 40-year-old’s. The researchers also cautioned that more work is needed because of the study’s small sample size.
The compounds appear to enhance connectivity and metabolic activity in the dentate gyrus. Aging appears to reduce the synapses, or connections, between neurons in that part of the brain. That decline, however, is not related to severe memory loss and cell death in Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias, Small said.
Most cocoa-processing methods in use today remove many of the flavanols found in cocoa. But the chocolate maker Mars produced a cocoa flavanol test drink specifically designed for the research, which the company also subsidized.

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Chocolate can create same high as opium: Links found between obese people and drug addicts
•Study looked at natural brain chemical of enkephalin
•It’s an endorphin with similar properties to opium
•US researchers found it surged as rats ate M&Ms;
•Drug then stimulated brain area releasing chemical
•After that, number of M&Ms; eaten more than doubled

20 September 2012
By Mark Duell

It’s certainly a good excuse to have when you’re slumped on the sofa and feel like you’re simply obliged to finish off that shiny tin of Quality Street.

Chocolate has an effect on the brain similar to opium, according to a study that found amazing comparisons between obese people and drug addicts.

In the study, a natural brain chemical called enkephalin – an endorphin with similar properties to opium – surged as rats began to eat M&M; chocolates.

When a drug was used to stimulate the dorsal neostriatum – the brain area releasing the chemical – the number of M&Ms; eaten more than doubled.

In the brain, enkephalin binds to molecular ‘receptors’ sensitive to opiate chemicals to reduce pain and produce pleasurable feelings.

Previous research mostly linked the dorsal neostriatum to movement, and recent work suggested it also plays a role in reward-driven behaviour.

But study leader Dr Alexandra DiFeliceantonio said the extraordinary findings showed comparisons between and drug addicts and the obese.

She said: ‘This (study) means that the brain has more extensive systems to make individuals over-consume rewards than previously thought.

‘The same brain area tested here is active when obese people see foods and when drug addicts see drug scenes.

‘It seems likely that our enkephalin findings in rats mean that this neurotransmitter may drive some forms of overconsumption and addiction in people.’

The findings of the University of Michigan researcher and her team have been published in the US journal Current Biology.

In their paper, the scientists concluded: ‘Opioid circuitry… could in this way participate in normal motivations and perhaps even in generating intense pathological levels of motivation to overconsume reward in binge eating disorders, drug addiction and related compulsive pursuits.’

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It’s Chocolate Time…Yay!
March 28, 2012
by Samuel Shiro

That’s right, now nobody should feel guilty when throwing a kilogram of chocolate down their necks because scientists have supposedly discovered that those who eat the most chocolate are actually the thinnest people in our society. Chocolate makes you thin? Huzzah!
This is something I was sceptical about at first because my first thought was that those who are thinnest will eat the most chocolate because they know it won’t make them fat. However, a fat person wouldn’t touch the stuff through fear of giving themselves a third butt cheek.
The study was published in the journal of the Archives of Internal Medicine and outlined a study carried out by the University of California, in San Diego, and came to the conclusion that chocolate makes you thin.
As for the exact results, it showed that of a study involving just under 1,000 Americans, those who ate chocolate a few times a week were thinner, on average, than those who only ate chocolate on occasion. The study looked at a number of factors when putting together these results, including diet, Body Mass Index (BMI), and calorie intake.
Scientists are putting these results down to the fact chocolate doesn’t encourage the creation of fat, despite the fact that it has a lot of calories. Even though these results only prove that there might be a link, it could lead to a complete change in the way we view weight gain and weight loss when it comes to food.
Chocolate has also been demonstrated by scientists to have some other benefits for the body, other than the urge to eat more. One of these benefits comes from dark chocolate, which contains many antioxidants that can help fight disease and get rid of the harmful free radicals in our body that harm our cells.
But this shouldn’t be new for those who have looked into the subject at all because this was discovered long before this study came to light. The Raw Food Movement were the ones who first came up with this when a book called The China Study was released. They demonstrated that mass amounts of sugar in things like chocolate and fruit doesn’t have a negative effect on one’s weight at all.
This means that chocolate doesn’t contribute to weight gain – otherwise how could it be possible for people to live entirely off of sugary fruits and vegetables? Even though this is only just coming to light in mainstream science now, what we have to remember is that this has already been touched upon in the basement of global science many times before. Yes, chocolate makes you thin, but it will be a long time before it’s made official in the mainstream world.

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November 14, 2006
Some “chocoholics” who just couldn’t give up their favorite treat to comply with a study to test blood stickiness have inadvertently done their fellow chocolate lovers – and science – a big favor.

Their “offense,” say researchers at Johns Hopkins led to what is believed to be the first biochemical analysis to explain why just a few squares of chocolate a day can almost halve the risk of heart attack death in some men and women by decreasing the tendency of platelets to clot in narrow blood vessels.

“What these chocolate ‘offenders’ taught us is that the chemical in cocoa beans has a biochemical effect similar to aspirin in reducing platelet clumping, which can be fatal if a clot forms and blocks a blood vessel, causing a heart attack,” says Diane Becker, M.P.H., Sc.D., a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Becker cautions that her work is not intended as a prescription to gobble up large amounts of chocolate candy, which often contains diet-busting amounts of sugar, butter and cream. But as little as 2 tablespoons a day of dark chocolate – the purest form of the candy, made from the dried extract of roasted cocoa beans – may be just what the doctor ordered.

Researchers have known for nearly two decades that dark chocolate, rich in chemicals called flavonoids, lowers blood pressure and has other beneficial effects on blood flow. The latest Hopkins findings, to be presented Nov. 14 at the American Heart Association’s annual Scientific Sessions in Chicago, identified the effect of normal, everyday doses of chocolate found in ordinary foods, unlike previous studies that found decreased platelet activity only at impractically high doses of flavonoids equivalent to eating several pounds of chocolate a day.

“Eating a little bit of chocolate or having a drink of hot cocoa as part of a regular diet is probably good for personal health, so long as people don’t eat too much of it, and too much of the kind with lots of butter and sugar,” says Becker.

In the study, 139 people Becker – whom Becker somewhat tongue in cheek calls “chocolate offenders” – were disqualified from a much larger study looking at the effects of aspirin on blood platelets. The Genetic Study of Aspirin Responsiveness (GeneSTAR) was conducted at Hopkins from June 2004 to November 2005 and enrolled more than 500 men and 700 women participants nationwide.

Shortly before aspirin dosing began for the subjects, they were told to stay on a strict regimen of exercise and to refrain from smoking or using foods and drinks known to affect platelet activity. These included caffeinated drinks, wine, grapefruit juice – and chocolate.

The non-compliers – who admitted to eating chocolate – were a diverse group who got their flavonoid “fix” from a variety of sources, including chocolate bars, cups of hot cocoa, grapes, black or green tea, and strawberries. And while they were excluded from the aspirin study, Becker and her team scoured their blood results for chocolate’s effect on blood platelets, which the body recycles on a daily basis.

When platelet samples from both groups were run through a mechanical blood vessel system designed to time how long it takes for the platelets to clump together in a hair-thin plastic tube, the chocolate lovers were found to be less reactive, on average taking 130 seconds to occlude the system. Platelets from those who stayed away from chocolate as instructed clotted faster, at 123 seconds.

In another key test of urine for waste products of platelet activity, primarily urinary thromboxane (11-dehydro-thromboxane B2), scientists found that chocolate eaters showed less activity and waste products on average, at 177 nanograms per millimol of creatinine, versus an average of 287 nanograms per millimol of creatinine in the group that abstained.

Participants ranged in age from 21 to 80; 31 percent were black and the rest were white. In total, more than 200 different tests of platelet reactivity were performed and analyzed in the study. Because whole blood contains other cells that affect platelet aggregation, testing was repeated using a purified version of test samples made up of strictly platelet-rich plasma.

None of the “offenders” had previous histories of heart problems, such as a heart attack, but all were considered to be at slightly increased risk of heart disease because of family history. Fifty percent of women participants were postmenopausal.

“These results really bring home the point that a modest dietary practice can have a huge impact on blood and potentially on the health of people at a mildly elevated risk of heart disease,” says study co-author Nauder Faraday, M.D., an associate professor at Hopkins. “But we have to careful to emphasize that one single healthy dietary practice cannot be taken alone, but must be balanced with exercise and other healthy lifestyle practices that impact the heart.”

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EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL TUESDAY, NOV. 14 AT 5:30 P.M. ET

(Oral presentation #11865, Room S106b, Chicago Convention Center)

Besides Becker and Faraday, other investigators in this research were Lisa Yanek, M.P.H.; Taryn Moy, M.S.; and Lewis Becker, M.D.

(Presentation title: Casual chocolate consumption and platelet activity.)

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Chocolate as Medicine?
Researchers are examining the effects of chocolate on heart disease risk. Read the complete article: Cocoa fights heart disease. For more information, visit the Cholesterol Center or Diet & Nutrition Center. Or, view all Cholesterol News or Diet & Nutrition News.

You Really May Be Addicted To Chocolate. Brain scans show changes similar to cocaine addicts, study finds.