As the afternoon hits, do you find yourself feeling lethargic and unable to concentrate?
Eating dark chocolate may give you a boost, as a study found it can increase attention levels and make a person more alert.
And following their remarkable discovery, the US researchers have developed a recipe for a new chocolate bar that can not only help concentration – but also lower blood pressure.
It has long been known that chocolate is a vasodilator, meaning that it widens blood vessels and lowers blood pressure in the long run.
Dark chocolate with high levels of cacoa can lengthen attention span and increase alertness, a study found
But it also contains stimulants, so Professor Larry Stevens, of Northern Arizona University, and his team, wanted to see if chocolate could also give people an attention boost.
They recruited 122 people between the ages of 18 and 25 years old.
They then carried out electroencephalography (EEG) scans of their brains while the volunteers carried out thinking and memory tasks, to see if eating chocolate, and other placebo snacks, affected their brain activity.
Each person received 1g of dark chocolate for each kg of body weight. So a person weighting 10st or 63kg would have been given 63g of chocolate.
That is the equivalent to just under one and a half bars of Dairy Milk, or nine squares of chocolate.
The snack was packaged so as the people were blind as to what they were tasting.
The researchers found those who ate the 60 per cent cacao chocolate were more alert and attentive after consuming it, compared to those who ate a placebo.
Professor Stevens said: ‘A lot of us in the afternoon get a little fuzzy and can’t pay attention, particularly students, so we could have a higher cacao content chocolate bar and it would increase attention’.
Only dark chocolate, with a high cacao content, will give the boost in alertness and attention, he said.
A normal chocolate bar, with high sugar and milk, would not yield the same results.
However, the researchers found eating dark chocolate also raised the people in the study’s blood pressure.
They wanted to find a chocolate bar that would provide all the attention-boosting effects, but without raising blood pressure.
In one experiment, they combined the 60 per cent cacao chocolate which included L-theanine, an amino acid found in green tea that acts as a relaxant.
They recorded an immediate drop in blood pressure in those who ate this type of new chocolate.
Researchers created a new recipe of dark chocolate mixed with L-theanine, an amino acid found in green tea that acts as a relaxant, which can lower blood pressure as well as boosting concentration
‘L-theanine is a really fascinating product that lowers blood pressure and produces what we call alpha waves in the brain that are very calm and peaceful,’ Professor Stevens said.
‘We thought that if chocolate acutely elevates blood pressure, and L-theanine lowers blood pressure, then maybe the L-theanine would counteract the short-term effects of chocolate in raising the blood pressure.’
This combination hasn’t been introduced to the market yet, so will not be available from shops.
However, he called the new chocolate bar ‘remarkable’ and said it could help millions of patients with high blood pressure across the US.
‘People don’t generally eat chocolate and think it’s going to be healthy for them,’ he said.
‘The potential here is for a heart healthy chocolate confection that contains a high level of cacao with L-theanine that is good for your heart, lowers blood pressure and helps you pay attention.’
He added that Hershey, a large chocolate manufacturer in the US, is interested in the recipe, and hopes the study will encourage other manufacturers to explore the health benefits of dark chocolate and L-theanine.
