Chocolate – Can It Make You Smarter?

We’re always excited by any studies that show the health benefits of chocolate. The obvious ones everybody knows; it tastes great, smells great, looks great and makes us feel great. But, as we touched upon in our Valentine’s Day blog post last week, chocolate has some more surprising and lesser-known characteristics. Now, it appears that chocolate can be directly linked to intelligence.

Franz Messerli, a professor at Columbia University, recently undertook studies to determine the correlation between cocoa and intellect.

Compiling his findings into a scatter graph of Nobel Laureates per 10 million in population against the chocolate consumption per kilogram per year; the picture painted was striking. One thing we all know is that Swiss Chocolate is up there with the best, one thing we might not have known until now is that the Swiss are also a remarkably gifted people as a nation. Sitting pretty at the top of the graph, the Swiss have both the highest number of Nobel Laureates and most chocolate consumed per capita.

Sweden come in at a very close second in number of Nobel winners, but consume far less chocolate. Whilst this threatens to debunk the theory, remember that the Nobel prize is evaluated in Sweden! Perhaps there’s a little home advantage. Switzerland is by no means the exception to the rule, with Denmark, Austria, Norway and the United Kingdom (go London!) all boasting around 20 Nobel Laureates per 10 million and a common consumption of more than 7kg per year per capita.

Numbers and statistics are great to look at, but they don’t tell the whole story. There is science behind this claim, with a drop in cognitive performance being significantly slowed or reversed when treated with the ‘flavanol’ or ‘flavonoid’ substance. A common sign of dementia and ageing, cognitive performance responds dramatically to the high flavonol content of cocoa, and therefore chocolate! The University of Oslo also found that, behind wine, chocolate was most influential in increasing cognitive brain function in the elderly.

Needless to say, we’re accepting chocolate fountain hire bookings for all Universities, Academies and Thinktanks throughout London in 2013…