“When you chase a pimple, you want to dry it up to make it go away, but you’re not solving the problem of why it exists. This suggests that you can get at the problem by diet,” says Bergfeld. Still, not everyone is convinced that diet and acne are so directly related. “Skin reflects general health, so I tell all of my patients to eat a balanced diet, but you don’t need to avoid specific foods,” says Joshua M. Wieder, a dermatologist in private practice and an associate clinical professor at UCLA. Wieder says he might tell his patients about Mann’s and Danby’s studies, but more data is needed before he’ll go any further than that. “These are small studies which need to be substantiated by looking at larger populations across genetic groups,” he says. To date there has been surprisingly little research on the connection between diet and acne. “Nutritional studies are notoriously difficult to run,” explains Treloar. “You need to have a large enough sample group, and you need to control what people are eating.” Mounting studies is also challenging, she adds, in an age when pharmaceutical companies are the major force behind new research. “It’s hard to get funding, because it’s hard to come up with a product that somebody’s going to make money on.”
But there is one bright spot on the horizon. That 1969 study focusing on chocolate may not have used the proper methods, but the scientists did get one thing (sort of) right, says Treloar. Pure cocoa powder and dark chocolate, if it’s at least 70 percent cocoa and doesn’t contain too much sugar, may actually alleviate acne. Cocoa contains antioxidant chemicals called flavonoids that have slight anti-inflammatory effects and improve blood flow to skin cells. Bittersweet chocolate never tasted so good.
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