Forget the carrots. A nice cup of cocoa can improve your eyesight.

Thirty healthy young adults showed a 13 per cent improvement in the sharpness of their vision two hours after eating 35 grams of a special dark chocolate, as compared with eating white chocolate, a study at the University of Reading found.

The flavonols in cocoa have long been known to improve blood flow, thinking and blood pressure in some cases. This is the first study that has measured the specific effect of those flavonols on vision, study author David Field told the Star on Wednesday.

“We were most interested in effect on the ability to pick up contrast, to pick an object out of its background,” Field said.

“This aspect falls off quite rapidly after age 60. It’s why older people will give up night driving first. My aunt who lives in Vancouver has done that.

“In extreme cases, older people will suffer a fall because they can’t tell the curb from the sidewalk.”

Further studies will look specifically at the effect on older people, and will look at other high flavonol foods such as blueberries, wine and green tea.

All we know at the moment, a single dose causes an improvement,” he said. “We don’t know if the effect would continue.”

Commercial milk chocolate bars have very little cocoa flavonols, said Field. While dark chocolate has a bit more, the heat of manufacturing kills much of it.

Field and his team used a special dark chocolate powder produced by bulk chocolatiers Barry Callebaut that is high in flavonols. And commercial chocolate bars are “a very dense form of calories” and high in saturated fat.

“Very few good things are purely good for you, be it chocolate or wine. If you have too much, then it’s bad for you.”

Because high-flavonol cocoa is known to increase blood flow, Field expected an increase in motion detection. But the increase was small.

He wasn’t expecting such a jump in vision sharpness, which could be traced to increased blood to the retina. But scientists aren’t sure yet.

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“It is really early days with this research. I don’t want to make any strong claims at all.”

Still, Field does sprinkle some of that high-flavonol cocoa powder on his Weetabix in the morning. “It’s quite nice.”