Add up and go on. A team from the Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) has detected a new benefit from cocoa . Although more than cocoa, we should speak of a bioactive substance, flavanols , very abundant in the grains of this edible vegetable and other foods, and which have now been revealed capable of delaying the typical cognitive deterioration – especially the difficulty of remembering – associated with age.
The study also deserves attention, because it has also shown empirically that the forgetfulness that is accentuated as we get older are directly related to the stiffening of a small area of the brain called the dentate gyrus. For three months, neuroscientists at CUMC fed a diet rich in flavanols (900 mg a day) to a portion of 37 healthy people between 50 and 69 years old, while the rest only took 10 mg daily.
Then, they analyzed the images of the blood flow in their brains, and had no doubt: the jagged gyrus of those who took more flavanols showed greater metabolic activity. In addition, they scored significantly higher in the retentive tests.
" If a volunteer had a typical memory of a sixty-year-old before the diet rich in flavanols, at the end of the study he could pass in this aspect for an individual of 30 or 40 years," has gone so far as to declare Scott A. Small, one of the authors of the investigation.
This finding adds to a previous one that demonstrated the beneficial effects of flavanols on cardiovascular health.
