Here's one for chocoholics to chew on. Compounds in cocoa beans may boost older people's memory, though only if eaten in huge quantities. Flavanols are chemicals found in foods including cocoa beans which seem to enhance memory in rodents. To see if it was the same in people, Scott Small at Columbia University in New York asked 19 volunteers aged from 50 to 69 to drink 900 milligrams of cocoa flavanols in water or milk every day for three months. Another 18 people drank 10 mg a day. Before and after that period each person did a memory test in which they were shown 41 abstract shapes. Next they were shown 82 more shapes and had to pick out the ones they had seen before. From age 20 onwards, our recognition times for such shapes are known to lengthen, by about 220 milliseconds a decade.
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