Eat Chocolate To Prevent Sun Damage

Can eating chocolate reduce sun damage? It’s always a great day when I read about chocolate being beneficial to my skin and health! A study in the “Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology” reports that eating chocolate can significantly protect your skin from UV light!

Don’t throw out your sunscreen just yet!
The article states “Cocoa beans fresh from the tree are exceptionally rich in flavanols. Unfortunately, during conventional chocolate making, this high antioxidant capacity is greatly reduced due to manufacturing processes…Our study demonstrated that regular consumption of a chocolate rich in flavanols confers significant photoprotection and can thus be effective at protecting human skin from harmful UV effects. Conventional chocolate has no such effect.”

Throw out the M&Ms!
I’ve read countless articles that say eating small amounts of chocolate that contains 70% or higher cacao is good for your health due to the high amount of antioxidants it contains. I’m not sure if the 70% dark  chocolates you can get at the supermarket (like Lindt and Ghirardelli) count, since I would assume they are made in a “conventional” way. Nonetheless, I’m still eating them for now, unless I find out they aren’t full of flavonoids like I had thought. And even if dark antioxidant-rich chocolate does help prevent UV damage, sunscreen is still essential! The chocolate just provides a little bonus to your skin – like wearing topical antioxidants. It’s a shame M&Ms and Snickers will never count as an antioxidant-rich food:(

Lots of other foods are full of antioxidants and great for your skin and health, but they aren’t as fun to talk about – berries, dark colored veggies, bright colored veggies, spices and herbs, and green tea are just a few super healthy foods. On a side note, did you know that chocolate/cacao is grown on trees? When I was a kid growing up in Hawaii, I went on a field trip and was shown a “chocolate tree” but I didn’t believe that’s really where chocolate came from. We tasted the seeds and they were bitter and horrible, so it wasn’t until years later I found out chocolate really does grown on trees (and it’s the sugar that makes it taste good!)

The original sun damage / UV protection study was published in volume 8, issue 3 of the “Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology.”

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