Cocoa Flavanols May Boost Memory

Coffee, berries, apples, grapes, nectarines, pears and cocoa are all good sources of flavonoids and some of these should be eaten daily. I personably drink coffee, green tea, and chocolate every day!

If your diet is low in flavanols — antioxidant compounds found in foods such as green tea, apples, berries and cocoa — adding 500 milligrams a day to your diet may slow and possibly improve age-related mental decline, according to a new study.

Age-related mental decline is typically subtle. The condition impacts thinking speed and the ability to sustain attention and causes issues with word-finding, and it should not be confused with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, experts say.

“Older adults consuming lower levels of food-borne flavanols scored less well in tests of hippocampal memory function than individuals consuming higher levels,” said Dr. Ian Johnson, emeritus fellow at the Quadram Institute in Norwich, a center for food and health research in the United Kingdom. He was not involved with the study. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that regulates learning, spatial navigation, and storage and consolidation of memory.

When those same people were given daily supplements with flavanols derived from cocoa, however, their performance on an age-related word-recall test improved, Johnson said in a statement. He was not involved in the study, which was published Monday in the journal PNAS Neuroscience.

Flavanols, also called flavan-3-ols, are compounds that help give fruits and vegetables their bright colors. Each plant may contain more than one type of flavanol, as well as necessary micronutrients that complement each other. That’s a key reason many nutritionists recommend “eating the rainbow” to get the most benefit.

All flavanols are bioactives, naturally occurring compounds that affect processes within the body. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommended in 2022 a daily intake of 400 to 600 milligrams of flavanols. The association cited studies that showed the compounds may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Despite the fact that the study tested 500 milligrams of flavanols derived from cocoa, that does not mean you can get similar results from eating 500 milligrams of chocolate.

“What really doesn’t contain a lot of flavonoids are chocolates,” Kuhnle said.

In order for researchers to extract as many flavonoids from the dark cocoa as possible, the extraction processed was intensely “optimized” in the lab, Kuhnle explained.

“The best way to meet 500 milligrams a day is by consuming a range of different flavanol-containing foods,” he said.

Many foods do contain enough flavanols to meet that daily level, Kuhnle said, including berries, apples, grapes, nectarines and pears. Green tea is an excellent source — but only if you drink it.

“This is really about green tea, not green tea extract,” he stressed. “Extreme amounts of green tea extract (can) cause problems. People think, ‘Oh, if I’m on x, that’s fine, twice the amount of x is better, and 10 times is even better.’

“That’s one reason to always be cautious about supplements: It’s incredibly easy to increase amounts beyond what is sensible and beyond what is useful,” Kuhnle said.

In addition, when it came to optimizing levels of flavanols, there was “no advantage in going above these 500 milligrams and it’s achievable by diet, so there’s not really any need to go to supplements,” Kuhnle said.