Good news for chocolate lovers: a Syracuse-based study has found that regularly consuming chocolate is associated with higher cognitive abilities.

The Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study, which was published last month in the journal “Appetite,” found that people who eat chocolate one time per week perform modestly better cognitively, said Merrill Elias, a researcher and professor at the University of Maine who led the study with David Streeten, a Syracuse-based medical physician.

“Chocolate has often been thought of as bad for you health-wise because it has sugar, but indeed it is good for you because it has nutritional elements that are good for the brain and good for the body,” said Elias, who is also a former faculty member of Syracuse University’s Department of Psychology.

Elias and Streeten collected nutritional data on nearly 1,000 adults, mainly from Syracuse, for the study.

The study began in 1975 when Elias and Streeten began studying hypertension, cognitive functioning and high blood pressure. In 2000, that study expanded into a study of cardiovascular risk factors and their effects on cognition.

Elias said the study of chocolate began when Georgina Crichton, a senior graduate student at the University of Maine, wanted to look at nutrition variables in the Maine database, but there weren’t any. Crichton began researching on the study with Elias.

“One of the reasons we did the study is because the literature indicates that chocolate is good for a lot of biological outcomes,” Elias said, adding that chocolate is good for cardiovascular health.

During the study, participants came in every five years and had a medical examination and an interview. They would also take diagnostic tests and tests that measured their cognitive functioning.

Corey White, an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at SU, said there have been nutritional studies that would indicate higher cognitive performance with other foods as well. For example, he said studies have indicated that coffee can lead to higher cognitive performances due to the stimulant caffeine.

Elias said the research was conducted in Syracuse because he was employed at SU when the study began. When he transitioned to the University of Maine, the research continued in Syracuse.

Elias said he does not think the location had an impact on the results but added that he can’t know for sure because the researchers had not looked at any other samples.

“We generally hope and believe that a lot of these things aren’t dependent on exactly where the study takes place or the people that are in that study that takes place,” White said. “However, there certainly could be factors that could affect it.”

For example, White said socio-economic status has been shown to impact cognitive performance.

“I would hope that the results are broadly applicable, that it’s not specific to something in the water in Syracuse,” White said. “One of the difficulties with research like this is that we can’t tell what the causal relationship is.”

There are three possible ways to interpret the relationship between chocolate consumption and higher cognitive abilities, White said.

The first possibility is that eating chocolate makes a person better at performing cognitive tasks, he said. The second possibility is that people who have higher cognitive abilities eat more chocolate. He added that it’s equally possible that there’s a third variable that the researchers don’t know about, which relates to both chocolate consumption and cognitive performance.

“I like the interpretation that people who are smarter are the ones who are going to choose chocolate because that’s a wise decision to make,” White said.

An alternative study to better understand the association between chocolate and higher cognitive performance could be to bring in a group of people and have only half of them eat chocolate, White said. Then the whole group would perform cognitive tasks and a comparison between the two groups could be drawn.

Published on March 6, 2016 at 11:00 pm

Contact Nicole: nvalinot@syr.edu