Something Bitter for Your Sweetheart’s Skin
Wrestle Away Wrinkles with Dark Chocolate
Wrinkle-resistant skin is just a square (OK, maybe two) away.
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, many of my procrastination-prone readers, I’m sure, are wondering what to get for their sweetheart.
Well, if you want to keep your baby-faced beau or gal pal looking as great tomorrow as he or she does today, dark chocolate may be just what the dermatologist ordered.
Sure, it’s not the most original idea, but here’s my reasoning (and yes, it is health related):
According to scientists from the European Dermatology Association in London, the flavonol content of dark chocolate can help prevent the formation of unsightly wrinkles that result from overexposure to the sun’s UV rays.
The health benefits of dark chocolate are well documented, here and elsewhere. Here, the emphasis has been on eating small amounts of dark chocolate (ounces, not pounds) to improve heart health and prevent heart disease. But for more than 3,000 years, dark chocolate has been used for an array of conditions, like constipation, fevers and dysentery.
Assertions like these—that chocolate is good for our skin—seems to contradict what many of us have experienced when eating chocolate. For most of us, when we satisfy our chocolate craving, zits and pimples aren’t far behind—despite being well beyond our teenage years.
Well, the European Dermatology researchers aren’t talking your typical Hershey’s Kiss or Chocolate Bar. They’re talking about the high flavonol variety of dark chocolate, or to be more specific, the chocolate that’s more bitter than it is sweet.
(In case you were curious, it isn’t chocolate that leads to zits; it’s how much sugar those chocolates have that leads to zits).
So as you go about looking for the dark chocolate that’s best for your love’s skin, the higher the cocoa percentage is, the better (70 percent cocoa content and up). Or if you’d rather taste than read, the bitterer it is, the higher the flavonol content (remember, bitter does not mean it should taste bad; it just shouldn’t be overly sweet). Your typical candy bar is low in flavonols simply because people would rather eat a sweet than bitter chocolate bar.
Fortunately, there are well-known commercial varieties of high flavonol content dark chocolate. Dove and Lindt are two chocolate companies that offer high flavonol dark chocolate.  In fact, these are the same kinds of chocolate used by researchers from the European Dermatology, according to Newsmax.
Sources:
newsmaxhealth.com
newsweek.com
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Posted: February 10th, 2010 under chocolate, Wrinkles.
Tags: Dark chocolate health, health benefits dark chocolate, health benefits of dark chocolate
