Researchers have come up with some very interesting results exposing women to ultraviolet light after ingesting chocolate over time.
When I first heard about using chocolate as a sunscreen, the inevitable images were of women at spas covered with chocolate mud packs. I'd already seen pictures of spa goers in Japan bathing in pools of chocolate -what a waste of good chocolate!
The sunscreen idea is actually tied to the flavonoids (varieties of antioxidants that research has shown can help prevent heart attacks) in chocolate, and comes from a somewhat flimsy experiment on only a couple dozen women. They drank chocolate every morning, half of them received chocolate powder with added flavonoids, the other half received much less flavonoids.
The "results" came from exposure to ultraviolet light at the beginning and end of the trial period. The researchers compared how quickly they became red before and after they ingested the flavonoid-rich or flavonoid-deprived chocolate. Those who had drank more flavonoids got less red than they did with the same length of exposure to the ultraviolet light before flavonoids.
Since we all know that ultraviolet rays can cause skin cancer, does this study suggest that drinking cocoa regularly can help make up for those days that you forget the sunscreen?
Not necessarily. Most chocolates are not that rich in flavonoids, and often the flavonoids are destroyed in the processing. The cocoa used in this experiment was supplied by the Mars company, and currently is not available on the market. The company does offer a candy, CocoaVia, in flavanol-rich portions that deliver fewer than 100 calories per serving.
I expect that we'll see this in the future. The whole article about this research can be read here, it is actually very interesting reading:
The part that really interested me is this: "For the women getting larger doses of flavonoids, blood flow in the skin doubled over the course of the trial in tissue 1 millimeter below the surface, and increased by 37.5 percent in tissue 7 to 8 mm deep." Combined with the visible, tangible results: "...after 12 weeks of consuming the flavanol-rich cocoa, the women's skin was 16 percent denser, 11 percent thicker, 13 percent moister, 30 percent less rough, and 42 percent less scaly than it was at the beginning of the experiment."
That is so cool. If any researchers are reading this...I'm available for experiments...meanwhile, I'll continue with my own...
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When I first heard about using chocolate as a sunscreen, the inevitable images were of women at spas covered with chocolate mud packs. I'd already seen pictures of spa goers in Japan bathing in pools of chocolate -what a waste of good chocolate!
