Is Chocolate Cake for Breakfast Good for You?

This video is recirculating, claiming that chocolate cake for breakfast could be good for us.

The study cited from Syracuse, was the Maine-Syracuse study, and did NOT find that eating chocolate can improve memory and cognitive function.¹ There was no experiment.

Rather, within a cross-section of older adults, the authors reported a mean z-score for two groups. Those who reported eating chocolate once per week were only 0.09 standard deviations above the mean, while those who never/rarely ate chocolate were just below the mean at -0.15. Clinically speaking, these are pretty much the same as the mean.

In comparison, another study found that those with higher fluctuations in blood sugar (like from eating cake for breakfast) were not 0.1, but 1 standard deviation below the mean for cognitive function versus those with better glycemic control.²

Or those with lower aerobic fitness can be, not 0.3, but 3 standard deviations below the mean for cognitive function versus those with higher aerobic fitness.³

So, if cognitive function is something you want to improve, skip the chocolate cake, eat a healthy, fiber-rich breakfast, and go for a walk.

References

1. Crichton, G. E., Elias, M. F., & Alkerwi, A. A. (2016). Chocolate intake is associated with better cognitive function: The Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study. Appetite, 100, 126-132.
2. Rizzo, M. R., Marfella, R., Barbieri, M., Boccardi, V., Vestini, F., Lettieri, B., ... & Paolisso, G. (2010). Relationships between daily acute glucose fluctuations and cognitive performance among aged type 2 diabetic patients. Diabetes care, 33(10), 2169-2174.
3. Swardfager, W., Herrmann, N., Marzolini, S., Saleem, M., Kiss, A., Shammi, P., ... & Lanctôt, K. L. (2010). Cardiopulmonary fitness is associated with cognitive performance in patients with coronary artery disease. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 58(8), 1519-1525.