Rejoice: Researchers are saying that chocolate is good for your brain

GOOD news, chocoholics. Researchers have discovered that chocolate is actually good for your memory and organisational skills.

FORGET fish — it seems that it’s chocolate that’s brain food.

Chocolate is good for your memory and other cognitive skills, according to researchers from the universities of Maine and South Australia.

Those who ate the sweet treat at least once a week were “positively associated with cognitive performance, across a range of cognitive domains,” according to findings published last month in the journal Appetite.

More frequent chocolate consumption was “significantly associated” with better performance on a battery of tests and measures of mental acuity, including visual-spatial memory and organisation, working memory, scanning and tracking, and abstract reasoning, the researchers note in the study.

“The present findings support recent clinical trials suggesting that regular intake of cocoa flavonols may have a beneficial effect on cognitive function, and possibly protect against normal age-related cognitive decline,” the researchers concluded.

Researchers, who conducted the long-term study of about 1000 people from 2001 to 2006, could not specifically say why chocolate does a brain good, but suggested its cocoa flavonols somehow are at play, as are methylxanthines, plant-produced compounds known to enhance a variety of bodily functions.

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This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission

Originally published as Rejoice: Researchers are saying that chocolate is good for your brain