Chocolate Is Great For Your Skin

November 18th, 2007 | Skin Care

I was reading a book the other day about clear skin and diet. One of the ’super foods’ mentioned, surprisingly, was raw cocoa powder, which is chocolate. Yes, chocolate is packed full of goodies including a heap of antioxidants, protein, omega 3, calcium, zinc, iron and magnesium (which is great for girls with PMT because magnesium is muscle relaxing and stress relieving). In it’s raw form it’s actually a really great food to eat and highly beneficial for your skin.

But, this doesn’t mean you can pop down to your local store and gorge on chocolate bars and mugs of hot chocolate. The problem with most commercially sold cocoa is the chemical processing that the cocoa pod is put through to turn it into cocoa powder. Most chocolates and hot chocolate premixes also contain refined sugar and other nasties like artificial preservatives and additives which you don’t want in your diet because they can make your skin worse, not better.

The good news is, you can buy cold compressed organic cocoa powder from most health food stores, and it tastes and smells great. You will need to sweeten it in some way though because it has a slightly bitter taste. I’ve been making chocolate banana smoothies out of it by combining a banana, honey, rice milk and the cocoa powder in a blender. It tastes really yummy and chocolately and it’s also uber healthy. It’s great to think that something so delicious is good for my skin.

You can also add the powder to baking and …well really anything that you’d normally add cocoa too. I’m going to try making a hot chocolate with it with honey or xylitol as the sweetener. Yum, something to look forward to.

Look out for this product in your health food store. It’s the best one I’ve found: Cacoa Power

Fran

Fran Kerr is the founding editor of High on Health. To cure your acne, sign up to Fran's FREE acne cure mini-course or download her latest how to guide, Eat Away Your Acne.