Make Your Brain 30 Years Younger?!?
By
Natalie Moore
Posted March 22, 2017
Dear Living Well Daily Reader,
Remember when you could finish the newspaper crossword puzzle in less than an hour… or answer those Jeopardy! questions before the contestants buzzed in?
But these days you’re lucky to keep the grandkids’ birthdays straight.
And what’s more worrisome — it seems like you’re memory is only getting worse.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Because Ivy League researchers have found a simple way to make your brain feel 20 or even 30 years younger.
And all you have to do is eat a “forbidden” food you probably gave up ages ago.
Researchers from the Columbia University School of Medicine have found that a special compound in cocoa… that’s right, delicious real CHOCOLATE… may be able to roll back the odometer on your brain.
Cocoa is rich in healthy flavanols, compounds that have been shown to benefit both your brain and your heart.
For this latest, three-month study, Columbia researchers asked 37 middle-aged and senior volunteers to consume a drink every day that contained up to 900 mg of cocoa flavanols.
And these flavanols were like a fountain of youth for the brain.
By the end of the study, the volunteers’ brains looked healthier on scans, and they were performing better on memory tests.
“If a participant had the memory of a typical 60-year-old at the beginning of the study, after three months, that person on average had the memory of a typical 30- or 40-year-old,” said lead researcher Dr. Scott A. Small.
A brain that feels 30 years younger in just 90 days? From drinking chocolate? Sign me up!
Now, of course, you can get flavanols from eating chocolate. But to hit the 900 mg used in the study, you’d have to chow down on an awful lot of chocolate bars.
But the good news is that you can buy cocoa flavanol supplements, so you don’t have to worry about all that sugar or calories.
Just go to www.cocoavia.com and search “flavanols.”
Live well,
Natalie Moore
Managing editor, Living Well Daily
Ed. Note: Please send your feedback: feedback@livingwelldaily.com – and click here to like us on Facebook.
Sources
[1] Dietary Flavanols Reverse Age-Related Memory Decline
Written By Natalie Moore
Natalie Moore is a dedicated health researcher with a passion for finding healthy, natural, and science-based solutions. After a decade of direct healthcare experience in western and natural medicine, she was involved in public health research before joining Living Well Daily.
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