The Study
Enhancing dentate gyrus function with dietary flavanols improves cognition in older adults
This study is like a fair test where some people got special chocolate and others got regular chocolate, and then they all took a memory game. The ones with special chocolate got better at the game — so we think the chocolate probably helped, but we’re not 100% sure because we don’t know if everyone was fooled into thinking they got the special kind.
Analysis score
Maximum 90 for a randomized controlled trial.
Where the score came from
Scientists gave older adults a special high-flavanol cocoa drink every day for 3 months and tested their memory and brain blood flow.
Where does this study sit?
Reviews of RCTs (Meta-analyses)
Max 100Randomized Trials
Max 90Reviews of Cohort Studies
Max 85Cohort Studies
Max 72Reviews of Case-Control Studies
Max 63Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional & Case Series
Max 50Expert Opinion
Max 540 / 100
Quality score
Participants are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups, minimizing bias. The gold standard for testing whether an intervention causes an effect.
Key takeaways
Summary
Based on the study abstract and findings.
- 1Yes — improving memory by over half a second is meaningful for daily tasks like remembering where you put your keys.
- 2People who drank the special cocoa improved their memory by 630 milliseconds on a pattern-matching task.
- 3Their brain's dentate gyrus showed more blood flow.
- 4Exercise didn't help.
Score breakdown, methodology, conflicts of interest, evidence analysis & raw study data
Publication
Journal
Nature Neuroscience
Year
2014
Authors
A. Brickman, Usman A. Khan, F. Provenzano, Lok-Kin Yeung, W. Suzuki, H. Schroeter, M. Wall, R. Sloan, S. Small
Related Content
Claims (4)
Eating cocoa with flavanols might boost blood flow to a part of your brain that helps you form memories, like when you're trying to remember names or facts.
Eating foods rich in flavanols, like dark chocolate or berries, might help older people remember details better by boosting a specific part of the brain that separates similar memories—but it doesn’t help them remember things after a delay, which uses a different brain area.
As people get older, a part of the brain called the dentate gyrus tends to lose blood flow and gets worse at helping us tell similar memories apart—like remembering where you parked today versus yesterday—and this is different from what happens in Alzheimer’s disease, which starts in a different brain area.
If you're between 50 and 69 and eat a daily dose of cocoa flavanols for three months, you might get better at remembering small differences between similar things—and your brain’s memory area might get more blood flow, helping fight off some of the memory slowdown that comes with aging.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making health decisions.