I also think that nutrition science, which is deficient enough as it is, should not be mixed with epidemiology, which seems designed to detect spurious associations.
Other research:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cocoa+flavanols+cogniti...
Maybe people who ate chocolate but did not report it (because "eating too much chocolate is bad for you") tended to have lower cognitive ability - they did not realise that by reporting incorrect intake they introduced bias in the study.
From wikipedia[1]:
Theophylline is naturally found in cocoa beans. Amounts as high as 3.7 mg/g have been reported in Criollo cocoa beans.
Medical uses[edit]
The main actions of theophylline involve:
- relaxing bronchial smooth muscle - increasing heart muscle contractility and efficiency; as a positive inotropic - increasing heart rate: (positive chronotropic)[1] - increasing blood pressure - increasing renal blood flow - anti-inflammatory effects - central nervous system stimulatory effect mainly on the medullary respiratory center.
Theophylline is also a metabolite of caffeine[2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophylline 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Pharmacokinetics