Yes, it is correct. Chocolate can genuinely help you live a longer life. A recent study published in the journal Aging connected chocolate and green tea consumption to an extended life span in the elderly. A mouse study found that drinking green tea and eating a cocoa-rich diet may decrease age-related neuromuscular changes associated with sarcopenia – the progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass and function. Sarcopenia is one of the most common causes of muscle mass loss. Sarcopenia is predicted to affect 5-13 per cent of older persons aged 60-70 years on average. For people aged 80 and up, the figures rise to 11-50 per cent.
What Is Sarcopenia?
Sarcopenia is thought to be the primary cause of physical performance deterioration in the elderly. Sarcopenia's impaired muscle function reduces older persons' life quality and raises their risk of unfavourable health outcomes such as disability, fall-related injuries, morbidity, and mortality.
Sarcopenia is characterised by morphological and molecular alterations in several components of the neuromuscular system, including spinal cord motoneurons and neuromuscular junctions, in addition to skeletal muscle atrophy.
The Research
The study, published in the journal Aging, looked at the effect of two flavonoid-rich diets including either green tea extract (GTE) catechins or cocoa flavanols on age-related regressive changes in mice's neuromuscular system.
Dietary flavonoids derived from green tea or cocoa were found to considerably increase the survival rate of elderly mice as well as avoid several regressive structural changes associated with senescence in specific cellular components of the neuromuscular system.
The researchers explained that both diets clearly preserved neuromuscular junction innervation and maturity, delayed the senescence process of skeletal muscle, and enhanced its regenerative capacity, as inferred from the more youthful cellular phenotype of myofibers and the apparent reduction of myofiber degeneration/regeneration cycles. Furthermore, GTE, but not cocoa, decreased age-related microgliosis while increasing the fraction of neuroprotective microglial phenotypes.
"Our findings suggest that specific plant flavonoids may be advantageous in the dietary treatment of age-related neuromuscular system degeneration," the researchers wrote.