Remember where your car is parked — with chocolate?
There is so much hype about chocolate, and for good reason. It makes most of us feel good, probably in part by liberating dopamine in the brain – the signal that indicates a pleasurable, or rewarding choice. Its caffeine helps us to wake up, and there is quite a bit of it. Chocolate is also packed with flavonoids: in particular, catechin and epicatechin, and dark chocolate has about four to five times as much of these nutrients as milk chocolate. An article in the Journal of Neuroscience by Fred Gage’s research group found that supplementing the diet of mice with epicatechin actually helped them to retain a memory longer. In the study, some mice were assigned a diet rich in epicatechin, and others a regular mouse diet. Both groups had to find their way around a water maze to a hidden platform. Both groups learned where the maze was at the same rate, but the mice fed epichatechin could make their way through the maze a week after training stopped, whereas the control mice couldn’t. This kind of reminds me of the quandary I get into after working in the hospital for 30 hours straight on an overnight shift — where is my car parked? Will chocolate help me find the way – I’ll let you know!
