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Hands-down best news of the week: Light to moderate drinking
can actually help people over 60 improve their memory, according to a
new study published in the American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias.
And as if that wasn't enough, another new study suggests that chocolate
could have a similar effect. That's right, your favorite indulgences
are good for your memory. (If you want to quit while you're ahead and
stop reading health news forever, we wouldn't blame you.)
When researchers analyzed more than 650 surveys of men and women,
they found that light imbibers scored 15% higher on episodic memory
tests than nondrinkers. Episodic memory is what scientists call the
recall of past events and the emotions tied to them. In other words, a
15% higher score could be the difference between remembering that
someone threw you a surprise 30th birthday party and remembering the
actual feeling of surprise and delight from that moment, explains lead
author Brian Downer, a postdoctoral fellow at University of Texas
Medical Branch's Sealy Center on Aging. Downer and his team also
analyzed corresponding MRIs and found the area of the brain crucial to
converting short term memories to long term memories—the
hippocammpus—was 10% larger in people who drank moderately compared to
abstainers.
Natural aging and certain diseases (like Alzheimer's) damage the
hippocampus and cause it to shrink, both of which work to prevent people
from remembering new information or calling up memories, Downer says.
Light drinking actually helps limit this decline, possibly because
alcohol activates particular proteins that help preserve the
hippocampus. At the same time, drinking may also be acting as a marker
of healthier people, Downer adds, since less-healthy older adults on
certain prescriptions may have to abstain because alcohol can interact
with their medications.
What's in your glass isn't nearly as important as how many you have,
Downer says. The brain benefit is only in light to moderate drinking,
which translates to one drink a night for women, two for men. Guzzling
more can be harmful to your brain, inhibiting the release of those
helpful proteins and actually increasing your risk for certain types of dementia, he says.
The chocolate finding, meanwhile, is promising but a little harder to
put into practice. A new study from Columbia University Medical Center
found that raw cocoa can actually help reverse memory damage caused
during aging by as much as an astounding 20 years. Researchers point to
an abundance of naturally occurring compounds called flavanols in the
sweet stuff, which help to improve connections in the part of the
hippocampus responsible for episodic memory.
Before you sprint to the grocery store, know that the processed
chocolate on our supermarket shelves has almost none of these flavanols,
and even raw, unrefined cocoa (which is usually only found in the
organic section or specialty health food stores) only has roughly 100 mg
of flavanols per cup, so you'd have to drink 9 cups a day to replicate
the study's results (and get roughly 40 times your daily recommended
sugar intake in the process). Until sciences finds a way to make the
memory-boosting power of cocoa more readily available, keep hitting
happy hour, and try these 8 tips to improve your memory.
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