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“Retention is a big problem for me right now. Research and read it tonight, and forget it tomorrow. If I print it, I forget where I put it. If I make a note to remind me where it is, I forget to look at the note or lose it.”

You probably didn’t see the article on FR about the new study done with elderly people and hot chocolate. I copied it and sent it to my friend in the Texas hill country since she has the same problem you do. Drink two cups a day of hot chocolate. I am doing it, too, although my memory is good this is insurance. Here is the study:

“In the new study, the team from Harvard randomly assigned 60 elderly people to drink two cups of flavanol-rich or flavanol-poor cocoa every day for a month.

There weren’t any overall differences between the high- and low-flavanol groups in terms of cognitive abilities, so the researchers looked a little deeper. They found that people who had compromised blood flow to the brain and white matter damage at the beginning of the study did show a difference after drinking the cocoa for a month: Blood flow in their brains improved by about 8%, and the time it took them to complete a working memory test dropped from 167 seconds to 116 seconds.

The problem is that not only do we not know exactly how cocoa does this, but we don’t really even know what compound in it is responsible.

While the authors don’t think cocoa’s effects have to do with the flavanols, they do say that in the future, “regular cocoa consumption may be a strategy to minimize (perhaps even reverse) cerebral vascular pathology in neurodegenerative disorders, regardless of its flavanol content.””

Yes, I had read some stuff about cocoa too. There is some place where they use it with water to make a cocoa drink good for brain and all manner of other stuff that I can’t exactly remember.

I do drink hot chocolate in the winter time, and other stuff in the summer. Cocoa can not hold a candle to oxygen. My brain needs oxygen, and REM sleep in the deepest 4th stage and it doesn’t get it.