Chocolate Makes You Smarter

Who doesn’t like chocolate? Although you all feel guilty when you realize that you’ve just finished the whole pack of M&Ms, research shows that on top of reducing the risk of strokes and protecting your skin from the sun, chocolate actually improves your memory and abstract thinking as well.

Psychologist Merrill Elias decided to ask participants of the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study about their diets. Georgina Crichton, a nutrition researcher at the University of South Australia, lead the research analysis; she recognized that the study presented an opportunity to examine the effects chocolate have on the brain.

The participants took cognitive tests and the mean score was higher for the participants who ate chocolate at least once a week. The results showed that eating chocolate was linked with superior brain function. Mr. Elias said that the benefits are such as “remembering a phone number, or your shopping list, or being able to do two things at once, like talking and driving at the same time.”

In order to prove that chocolate actually improves brain functions and making sure it wasn’t that smarter people simply tend to eat more chocolate, the researchers studied 333 participants with tested cognitive abilities at an average of 18 years. Mr. Elias suggested that “our study definitely indicates that the direction is not that cognitive ability affects chocolate consumption, but that chocolate consumption affects cognitive ability”

However, Mr. Elias emphasized that they weren’t suggesting people stuffing their faces in chocolates all day and all week, nor replacing regular meals with chocolate. What we can say for now is that you can eat small amounts of chocolate without guilt because it brings benefits, but for those to occur, you should maintain a normal healthy balanced diet.

Edited by Sooahn Ko

The original document is available at http://www.koreadaily.com/news/read.asp?page=2&branch=NEWS&source=&category=lifenleisure&art_id=4081935