Chocolate is good for your eyes!

Happy Easter. With any luck you may have been given an egg or two and if you’re anything like me you may now be contemplating just how bad it is to eat 2 Easter Eggs in 2 days. Surely it is only right to eat them whilst it is Easter weekend and get back out running next week, besides there is always the race to finish them before your other half finishes theirs and starts munching yours!

So here is my advice to stop us all feeling guilty about a little over indulgence – CHOCOLATE IS GOOD FOR YOUR EYES! Yes, you heard it correctly, research has been shown that chocolate can improve your eyesight in dull lighting conditions by up to 17%!

The bad news if like me you prefer a milky bar egg to a dark one- it is only dark chocolate that leads to this result and only dark chocolate with a high flavonol content (some manufacturers will list this, others don’t). So see if you can trade your white eggs for dark ones and you will be doing your eyes a power of good.

One likely reason that dark chocolate gives your eyes a boost is because flavonols (the anti-oxidants also hailed as making red wine not all bad for us) help to aid blood flow in the body, according to lead researcher David Field, Ph.D., at the University of Reading. "The retina uses a lot of energy, but doesn't have a very good blood supply. So flavonols improve the peripheral blood flow to the retina, and better blood flow equals more energy.’ Thus better eyesight in dull light (where the peripheral retina takes over). Therefore as your optometrist I prescribe at least one whole dark egg before you even think about leaving the house. Let me know how you get on. Happy munching.