2023-06-03 14:41:32
Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — Adding 500 milligrams of the antioxidant flavanols found in green tea, apples, berries, cocoa and more to your diet daily may slow age-related mental decline, and possibly improve it, according to a new study.
Age-related mental decline is usually subtle. Experts explain that this condition affects the speed of thinking, the ability to maintain attention, and the difficulty in finding words. It should not be confused with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia.
“Older adults who consumed food not rich in flavanols had lower levels in tests of memory function of the hippocampus,” said Dr. compared to individuals who consumed higher levels.”
The hippocampus is a part of the brain that regulates learning, spatial navigation, and memory storage and consolidation.
Johnson said in a statement that when subjects were given a daily supplement containing flavanols derived from cocoa, their performance on an age-related word recall test improved.
However, any effect on memory was modest, “and limited to individuals with a lower quality diet at the start of the study,” Dr. David Bruno, an expert in psychology at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement.
What are flavanols?
Flavanols, also called flavan-3-OLs, help give fruits and vegetables their bright colours. Each plant may contain more than one type of flavanol, as well as essential micronutrients that complement each other. This is the main reason why many nutritionists recommend “eating rainbow foods” to get maximum benefit.
All flavanols are biologically active, naturally occurring substances that influence processes within the body. In 2022, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommended a daily intake of 400 to 600 milligrams of flavanols. The association cited studies that showed the compounds may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Unlike carbohydrates, fats, protein, vitamins, minerals and water, flavanols are not essential for survival. Gunther Conley, study co-author and professor of food science and nutrition at the University of Reading, UK, said flavanol structures are very similar to fiber and are essential for good health.
He added: “Fiber is not essential for survival, but it is really important that people consume adequate amounts of it to maintain cardiovascular health and prevent cancer.”
Conley added that the study’s findings on flavanols may be “the first indication that the benefit of consuming them is similar (to fiber), may be true here.”
Eating chocolate will not work
Despite the fact that the study tested 500 milligrams of flavanols derived from cocoa, that doesn’t mean you can get similar results by eating 500 milligrams of chocolate.
“What doesn’t have a lot of flavonoids is chocolate,” Conley explained.
Conley explained that in order to extract as many flavonoids as possible from the dark cocoa, the extraction process was intensively “optimized” in the lab.
“The best way to consume 500 milligrams a day is to eat a combination of different foods that contain flavanols,” he said.
Conley noted that many foods contain enough flavanols to meet this daily level, such as berries, apples, grapes, nectarines and pears. Green tea is an excellent source, if only if you drink it.
“It’s really all about the green tea, not the green tea extract,” he stressed. “Large amounts of green tea extract (can) cause problems,” he noted.
Mixed opinions
The new research is an addendum to a much larger study of more than 21,000 adults over the age of 60 conducted in March 2022 and titled the Cocoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study, or COSMOS. The cocoa supplement and partial grant funds were provided by Mars Edge, Inc. It is part of the Mars Corporation.
In the new study, 3,562 adults were divided into two groups. The first group took a placebo every day for three years. The second is a 500-milligram daily pill packed with flavanols from cocoa, including 80 milligrams of epicatechin, a flavonoid that has long been studied for its positive effects on muscle strength and blood flow in the brain.
More than 1,300 study participants underwent urine tests at the start of the study to determine the levels of flavanols in their system.
All participants underwent a basic cognitive assessment, in which they were asked to learn 20 words on a computer program. The research participants had three seconds to study each word before the next word appeared. Immediately afterwards, the participants were asked to write down all the words they could remember. The test was repeated every year for the three years of the study.
At the end of the first year, study co-author Dr. Scott Small, professor of neuroscience and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University in New York City, said the study subjects who took the 500-milligram pill per day, who experienced the lowest levels of flavanols ” They normalized their flavanol levels.
He said their flavanols helped restore their age-related mental decline to levels similar to people who were “high in flavanols at baseline”.
Some experts interpreted the results of the study differently.
“The study fails to provide evidence that increased intake of flavanols is beneficial,” said David Curtis, Professor Emeritus of the Institute of Genetics at University College London, who was not involved in the study.
“Even in the group that initially had low consumption of flavanols, those who had taken flavanol supplements for years had similar memory function performance as those given a placebo, and any differences were within the range of chance,” he continued in a statement.
The study data showed that by the third year, people with the lowest levels of flavanols at the start of the study, then taking the cocoa supplement, had remembered 7.94 words out of 20, compared with 7.63 in the placebo group, a difference of about a quarter of a word.
That small difference didn’t matter, said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.
In fact, the majority of study participants did not show any statistically significant benefits on memory from taking cocoa supplements, which means that the experiment “Failed” to achieve the desired result.
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