People normally consume cacao in many ways for its pleasant aroma and tasty flavor. Many of them use it as a lighter alternative to coffee, because of its lower caffeine content. Moreover, there’s a large amount of research suggesting that there are great health benefits of this exotic plant-powder consumption, including both mental ones, as well as physical ones. One of them is its considerable impact on memory, both for healthy people and for people with mild cognitive impairment
There’s a growing body of evidence that blood flow in the brain impacts our memory. It is quite logical: the more blood in the brain, the more oxygen for its cells and, consequently, the more energy for cognitive operations. Harvard neuroimaging study has shown that seniors who drank two cups of hot cacao a day for one month had better blood flow in the brain, especially in the parts associated with memory and cognition (e.g. the dentate gyrus). These study subjects did better on memory and thinking tests than the group who didn’t drink cacao. The authors of the study concluded that cacao may play an important role in preventing diseases like Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia, reversing the cognitive health.
An other study, which included subjects who already suffered from mild cognitive impairment (difficulty with memory, language, thinking, and/or judgement), had as the main variable the amounts of antioxidants in cacao, called flavonols. Namely, 90 elderly people drank a cacao drink that contained low, medium, or high levels of these antioxidants for eight weeks. The subjects who got medium or high amounts of flavonols showed considerably better results on mental skills tests, in comparison with the subjects who consumed low amounts of flavonols. These results suggest that flavonols could have an important impact on maintaining cognitive functions, besides cardiovascular system protecting effects, which were also shown in many studies.
The cacao bean contains more flavonols than, for example, green tea or blueberries. And there are so many sweet and creative ways you can consume it: as a hot drink, as an addition to your oatmeal, pudding, cakes, or in a form of dark chocolate. But be careful with the chocolate with high levels of sugar and fat – it could have a contra-effect on your cognitive, and other mental and physical functions in the body. Besides saving your thinking skills, cacao intake is a great way to balance your mood swings, prevent premature aging, diabetes, skin cancer, improve your metabolism, save your liver and pancreas function, get healthier skin and hair, as well as improve your overall happiness – not only for its tasty flavor, but also for anandamide, or so-called bliss molecule.
