Discussion
Contradictory to what we had expected to find from this study, we found that a high dose of cocoa flavanol did not lead to significant improvements in cognitive function in healthy adults. Overall, what was displayed was that there was no significant interaction between the active condition and the time passed since consumption of the cocoa flavanols, thus indicating that the cocoa flavanol did not have the expected reaction of speeding up the response times of the participants.
These findings conflict with previous research by Scholey (2009), who found that consumption of cocoa flavanol resulted in improvements on two cognitive computerised serial subtraction tasks. Although Scholey did not utilise the Sternberg task as we did,…show more content… Dark chocolate is known to contain 35-200mg of caffeine and as caffeine is widely known to impact upon alertness and concentration, having a measurable stimulatory effect upon the central nervous system (Nehlig, 2012) this may also have slightly impacted upon our results. By using capsules, we were able to keep the caffeine intake to 13.6mg for the active condition, meaning that caffeine would have no effect on our participants. Similarly, although cocoa is the most concentrated source of theobromine, it has minimal impact upon the central nervous system. Additionally, using a powdered supplement had an advantage over use of fresh cocoa beans. The content of epicatechin in beans has been reported to very greatly, with Costa Rican beans containing on average 14mg more than Jamaican beans (Nehlig, 2012). We were able to precisely and consistently measure exactly how much substance went into each capsule and thus keep our results more reliable in this context. Use of the powdered supplement also means that any positive findings could also benefit those suffering from lactose intolerance who can’t consume cocoa flavanols through eating chocolate. Additionally, chocolate is rich in fats and sugar which could mean that any potential cognitive benefits are outweighed by the negative input of
