Daffodil International University
Health Tips => Health Tips => Topic started by: maruppharm on November 09, 2013, 01:00:28 PM
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Telling children that they'll get pimples is one way to encourage them go easy on the chocolate - but is it true?
When it comes to Easter eggs, every child has a favourite strategy.
Some stash their hoard, tormenting their siblings for months with their untouched rows of chocolate goodies.
Others descend on their eggs like a fox on a bird's nest, scattering scraps of foil and shards of broken chocolate all over the carpet.
This category of child may well prompt the smug response from nearby grown-ups "You'll get spots!" At which point, another, even smugger, adult may well respond: "Actually, that's a myth!"
But is it a myth? It would be more accurate to say that it is a matter of scientific debate.
Multiple factors contribute to the prevalence of acne - the skin disease characterised by spots or pimples - including family history, age and possibly stress levels.
Until the 1960s, the view that chocolate exacerbated the problem was widely held in the scientific community. It was thought that acne sufferers had an impaired tolerance of glucose, the sugar which our bodies convert carbohydrates into for distribution in the bloodstream. Popular textbooks of the 1940s and 1950s counselled against sugary food and drink - including chocolate - as part of acne treatment.
But a very influential 1969 study by JE Fulton and his colleagues G Plewig and AM Klingman appeared to scotch any association between chocolate and acne.
The researchers took 65 participants with mild-to-moderate acne and divided them into two groups. One group was given a chocolate bar enriched with 10 times the normal amount of cocoa. The other group was given a placebo bar (without the extra cocoa). The groups were told to eat the bars daily for a month.
After a three-week break, the two groups switched bars. The researchers, who examined the patients weekly, decided that chocolate had no effect on acne development.
This study made a big impact, and has been cited dozens of times in other journal articles. But it has recently been roundly criticised.
"This study, to my mind, is invalid," says Amy Brown, associate professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, one of seven signatories to a 2011 letter criticising the Fulton study, printed in the journal Clinics in Dermatology.
"The very first problem is that it was made possible through the Chocolate Manufacturers' Association of the United States of America - that's number one," she says.