Chocolate and Brain Function

Chocolate and Brain Function

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Before Reading the text, do the next activities.

Look at the pictures and say what you remember in relation with them.

Light or dark not all chocolate is equal, it depends of where are coming. Some of them have a stronger flavor and sometimes they are sweetened with cookies, nuts, almonds, caramel, etc.

The photo showing a coffee refers to how much quantity of caffeine has the chocolate, which is the same that coffee has.

Read the tittle and then write what you imagine the text is.

Is a question about the chocolate in relation with brain because everybody knows chocolate brings us so much energy but high quantities of sugar too. Maybe this article try to shows us the other hand of chocolate where it can helps with our brain function.

Search the next words and do a list.

1. Words that you know:

Study, appetite, memory, abstract, improve, report, effects, weight, health, measures, people, dairy, chocolate, meat, eggs, breads, rice, fruit, vegetables, nuts, coffee, water, dark, milk, researches, rarely, brain, attention, cognitive, performance, working, relationship, certain, low, density, higher, blood, glucose, pressure, poor, sugar, guilty, fat, compounds, alertness, function, active, amounts, diet, account.

1. Cognates

Chocolate, memory, abstract, factors, general, consume, variety, vegetables, alcohol, participants, different, results, functions, experience, visual, organization, cholesterol, diabetes, protein, cardiovascular, natural.

Technical words

Peer-reviewed

abstract reasoning

elderly

lipoprotein

flavonoids

theobromine

regardless

Read the text fluently and write what you understand.

Always it thought that chocolate is a source of sugar, fat and bad compounds for health but this study shows us that we are a bit wrong, making different tests of spatial memory, abstract reasoning, working memory and attention, the chocolate-eating people obtained better scores than the non- chocolate eating group.

Both groups have a normal diet and they are ordinary people so the study was made in equal conditions. In the results some of them shows better health conditions (high chocolate consume) but this group had higher levels of cholesterol too so we don’t deposit trust completely in chocolate.

The words that you don´t know, underline them and do a list with the next information.

1. What you imagine the words mean.

Peer- reviewed: Before the review

Consumption: other way to call “consume”

Intake: contrary to “take”

Stroke: a problem

Skew: change the results

Elderly: the majority

Overall: in general

Regardless: a bit of something

Diminish: Similar to decrease.

Search and write the really meaning of the words. Do a list.

Peer- reviewed: the ​process of someone ​reading, ​checking, and giving his or her ​opinion about something that has been written

Consumption: the act of consuming

Intake: the ​amount of a ​particular ​substance that is ​eaten or ​drunk during a ​particular ​time

Stroke: a sudden occurrence of something

Skew: not straight or symmetrical

Elderly: people who are old

Overall: Including everything

Regardless: In spite of everything; anyway

Diminish: make or become less

Read again the text and write you have understood.

To test this, an experiment would ask people to eat a chocolate-rich diet or a no-chocolate diet for a reasonable amount of time, and then carry out the brain function tests. This would be a way of establishing whether chocolate can improve cognitive performance.

Another issue is that the participants were retrospectively self-reporting their food intake in response to a questionnaire. People can easily misreport or underestimate their consumption.

In fact, the lower scores on the brain function tests by people who consumed less chocolate could reflect a group that was less able to accurately report their food consumption. Chocolate helps for a better brain function and have energy during the day but is not scientifically proven.

Point of view.

This type of study is great for showing the relationship between diet and health. But correlation does not equal causation. To really get to the bottom of this issue, we need carefully designed experimental