Chocolate as Brain Food

Surprising as it may seem, chocolate contains antioxidants that help protect the brain from aging and disease, as well as other psychoactive chemicals that make you feel good. In fact, Harvard researchers recently declared that people who eat chocolate live on average one year longer. The probable reason: chocolate’s rich content of antioxidants.

In a recent chemical analysis of chocolate, the Univer­sity of California’s Dr. Waterhouse found that it contains polyphenols—the same class of antioxidants that are in red wine, tea, and fruits and vegetables. In fact, he deemed the phenols in chocolate more potent antioxidants than those in red wine, in some cases almost twice as potent.

Dr. Waterhouse detected 205 milligrams of phenolics in an ounce-and-a-half chocolate bar—about the same as you get in a five-ounce glass of red wine. Two tablespoons of cocoa, typically used to make a cup of hot chocolate, has 145 mg of phenols. Dark chocolate has the most; white chocolate has none. Eating dark chocolate and drinking red wine together would boost antioxidant activity beyond that expected from simply adding the antioxidants of each, says Dr. Waterhouse.

Recent Japanese tests identified the precise antioxidants in cacao liquor, one of the major ingredients of chocolate, as various catechins, long known to be the active antioxi­dant agents in both green and black tea. In fact, Japanese researchers found that antioxidant polyphenols made up a remarkable 7 to 13 percent of cacao liquor obtained from several countries. This means, they said, that chocolate may guard against the awful “lipid peroxidation” that can warp and destroy the fatty membranes of brain cells as well turn blood fats toxic. Further tests showed that phenols extracted from chocolate did suppress free radical damage to cells in human blood samples.