Does eating fatty food or chocolate spoil your skin?
Dr Saleyha Ahsan answers a popular question that many of us have asked: Do fatty foods or chocolate really cause spots?
Unfortunately chocolate, with high levels of sugar and dairy protein in milk, may not be doing your complexion any good at all.
We tend to think that the grease in our food could ooze out of our pores and cause bad skin. But actually that’s not the case and, surprisingly, there’s no evidence of fatty diets causing spots. However, there is something else, apart from changes in teenage hormone levels, which it seems might lead to bad skin: high levels of blood insulin. And there are two ingredients in chocolate - sugar and dairy proteins - which will cause your blood insulin to rise.
Small trials which got teenagers to reduce the sugar in their diet did result in lowered blood insulin and improvements in their skin. These results are promising but more research and larger trials are needed.
When it comes to spotty skin the science may not quite be there yet. But we do know that fatty foods are off the hook.
