Sci Rep: Eating more chocolate can improve the brain's cognitive abilities, especially for people who often handle complex tasks

Chocolate is a delicacy that many people can't refuse, but we may only be familiar with the aroma of chocolate, but we don't know that its raw cocoa is called "God's food", which not only makes delicious chocolate candy, pastries, drinks, a new study shows that the flavanol in cocoa can also make people smart.
recently, a study by researchers from the University of Illinois at Champaign and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom showed that eating more foods containing flavanols can improve people's mental agility.
paper, published in The Journal of Nature, is based on the title: Dietary flavanols improve cerebral and cognition in healthy adults.
researchers found that healthy adults were able to perform certain cognitive tasks more effectively and perform better in complex project tests after drinking flavanol-rich cocoa drinks.
, the human brain recovers faster when it experiences minor vascular damage when it is pre-ingested with cocoa flavanols.
is a subsecond of plant flavonoids, a natural plant compound found in cocoa, fruits, vegetables, tea and many other foods, while cocoa has the highest levels of flavanols.
previous studies have shown that eating more flavanol-rich foods is good for the body's blood vessels.
, researchers found for the first time that flavanols have a positive effect on blood vessels and cognitive abilities in healthy adults.
, catarina Rendeiro, a lecturer in nutritional sciences at the University of Birmingham and one of the authors of the paper, said: "Although we used cocoa in our experiments, flavanols are extremely common in a variety of fruits and vegetables.
by better understanding the cognitive benefits of eating these food groups, as well as the broader cardiovascular benefits, we can provide people with better guidance on how to choose their own diet.
study recruited 18 healthy male volunteers between the ages of 18 and 45 with normal blood pressure and no history of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
the researchers conducted two separate trials on the volunteers, asking them to take cocoa drinks with higher flavanol content and cocoa drinks with lower flavanol content, while using a double-blind study design method to prevent subjective feelings of the researchers and volunteers from affecting the results.
About two hours after drinking the cocoa drink, the volunteers accepted a standard way to challenge the brain's blood circulation, allowing them to breathe about 100 times the normal concentration of carbon dioxide in the air, creating an effect called high carbonate.
then analyzed their MRI image data and blood oxygen levels in their brains by conducting non-invasive structural MRI brain scans.
In typical responses to hypocarbon hemoglobin-containing brain MRI charts before (0 hours) and after (2 hours) of dietary intervention with low or high flavanol intake are to increase blood flow to the brain, as this increases oxygen levels for the brain and also allows the brain to emit more carbon dioxide.
," said Gabriele Gratton, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Champaign and one of the authors of the paper.
researchers measured oxygen levels in the brain's forehead cortical cortical layer, a technique that uses light to capture changes in the brain's blood flow, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, which plays a key role in planning, regulating behavior and decision-making.
Before and after dietary interventions with low or high flavanol intake, the researchers were in an environment with a 5% carbon dioxide concentration, and hemodynamics in the preletete cortical region found that most volunteers showed a stronger and faster brain oxygenation response after consuming cocoa flavanol than normal or drinking flavanol-free cocoa.
Rendeiro said: "After drinking high flavanol cocoa, the maximum oxygenation levels of the testers were more than three times higher than after drinking low flavanol cocoa, and the oxygenation reaction was about a minute faster.
" the more difficult it bes in the experiment, the more complex task challenges the researchers designed for the volunteers to manage sometimes contradictory or competing needs.
After 2 hours of drinking flavanol beverages, the participants' cognitive performance (anti-efficiency score (IES) in the improved Stroop Task was "reaction time/accuracy (in seconds)", and the results showed the participants' cognitive performance in four different situations, showing a gradual increase in cognitive needs.
' intake of cocoa flavanols, the volunteers also performed more challenging cognitive tests, which showed that high flavanol intake allowed the experimenter to correctly solve the problem 11 percent faster than usual.
, they don't show significant differences in easier tasks.
, Rendeiro explains: "Our results suggest that participants have significant benefits from taking flavanol-rich beverages, but only if the task becomes very complex.
we can link this trait to improved blood oxygenation, and if you face more challenges, the brain needs to improve oxygen levels to meet that challenge.
further suggests that flavanols may be particularly beneficial in cognitively demanding tasks.
, they also found that volunteers responded differently to cocoa flavanols.
most people showed signs of benefit after consuming flavanols, a small percentage did not.
4 of the 18 study subjects had no difference in cerebral oxygenation after ingesting flavanols, and their performance did not improve in the tests.
Rendeiro said: "Because the four volunteers already had the highest oxygenation response in normal times, this may indicate that for those who are already quite healthy, the intake of flavanols has little effect on their cognition."
, the results showed that flavanol intake was associated with improved vascular activity and improved cognitive function.
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