Two Cups Of Cocoa A Day Can Help Improve Brain Function

I believe that cocoa products like chocolate, hot cocoa, low fat chocolate desserts (like my favorite chocolate pudding), etc. should be considered the most delicious and the most liked natural remedies for a multitude of various health conditions. Health benefits of cocoa are truly various and very powerful, that is why low sugar and low fat cocoa products are widely advertised and promoted as effective solutions for reducing bad cholesterol and lowering blood pressure, preventing negative effects of oxidative stress and slowing down degenerative processes in our body linked to aging, reducing the risks for many common types of cancer, reducing the risks of brain disorders and preventing Alzheimer’s disease, one of the most dreadful and terrible diseases linked to aging, and so on. The mentioned benefits of cocoa have very solid and strong scientific prove and were tested repeatedly by numerous research groups and scientists around the world.

The only thing to keep in mind is: if you want to harvest these benefits and use cocoa as a unique natural remedy to prevent numerous unwanted health conditions, you should only use high quality cocoa or the best available cocoa products. In particular, you should use high quality chocolate with at least 70 per cent of cocoa, experts say. According to the findings of a recently published study, using just two cups of hot cocoa can be a great solution for elderly people to reduce the risks of brain disorders and substantially improve brain function. Those are the conclusions of the scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who have recently completed their experimental work and published their findings in Neurology magazine. As the experiments involving 60 aging participants (aged 73+) have shown, aging people with poor blood flow to the brain can benefit from cocoa and improve their thinking skills very effectively.

With the objective to find out whether consuming hot cocoa will help the participants improve brain function and particularly their thinking skills, the participants were divided in two groups. The members of one were given two cups of hot cocoa every day within one month. The members of other group were given similar kind of cocoa beverage but very low in natural flavonoids. At that, members of both groups were cautioned of consuming any other type of cocoa product during the experiment. In one month, it was found out that those participants who had poor blood flow and consumed two cups of high quality hot cocoa managed to improve their brain function significantly. In addition to that, they have demonstrated much higher scores in thinking tests. In particular, during the test on connecting specially sequenced dots or remembering certain sequences of objects on the computer screen such participants managed to improve their average score from 167 to 116.

At the same time, unfortunately, those participants who had satisfactory and good blood flow could not demonstrate any significant change and improve brain function. However, the researchers say that more experimental work is necessary in order to look closer at the situation regarding a lack of cocoa effects on people with healthy blood flow. “The next step is that we need a larger sample and we need more people with impairment at baseline… (to) see if we can demonstrate the same finding in a larger group,” Dr. Farzaneh Sorond, one of the study leaders, commented on the research. This study is one in the line of many previous studies, which, in particular, have found that consuming high quality chocolate with high content of cocoa can help reduce the risks of hypertension and a stroke. Those who need more information about the study can check out this page and look at the official report.

Author Info: Hi! My name is Carla and I am a 5th year medical student at HYMS. I am interested in alternative medicine and I have done months researching the topic of herbal medicine. Besides, I like interviewing people and learning more about their experiences with one or another type of herbal treatments. I am willing to contribute to this site with my knowledge, and I would be happy to help you out to the best of my ability with any specific questions or problems related to alternative medicine.

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