Foods for Healthy Skin by Susan Evans, MD

You've heard the saying, “You are what you eat.” This is even more true when it comes to the condition of your skin. When you eat badly, your skin is one of the first places it will be noticed. Your skin relies on you to provide the necessary building blocks for proper collagen production, wrinkle prevention, moisture, and a healthy glow.

What Can Food Do For Me?
The foods that you eat are the very foundation for the health of your skin, giving it the necessary nutrients to fight both disease and the signs of aging. Stress, a diet of processed foods and the consumption of nutrient-poor foods will promote disease and physical signs of aging. By eating the right foods, you'll look and feel younger than you ever believed you could.

Feed Your Skin
By eating the proper foods you can almost guarantee that your skin will be plump, youthful, and glowing. A recent study done in the UK demonstrated just how much our diets influence and change our appearance. Those who ate from a nutrient-poor diet containing bad fats and processed carbohydrates had more pronounced wrinkles in their skin and experienced both a lack of luster and suppleness. Those who ate a richer diet, especially in vitamin C, were shown to have radiant skin and the appearance of their wrinkles was significantly reduced.

Vegetables
Veggies are full of nutrients like antioxidants, vitamins C and E, beta-carotene, flavonoids and much more. The less you do to a vegetable, the more nutrients you'll ingest. Stack the cards in your favor by eating dark leafy greens like spinach and kale, which has been touted to make old skin grow again like new. The deeper the color of the vegetable, the more nutrients you'll get.

Legumes
Eat your beans. These have been called the “magical fruit” and indeed they are. All sorts of beans provide fiber, magnesium and protein. The nutrients in all variety of beans help neutralize the damaging compounds that harm your skin and prevent skin damage and signs of aging.

Fruits
These are the antioxidant powerhouses! Blueberries, blackberries, and watermelon are excellent choices, very rich in vitamin C. Papaya with its papain enzyme is an excellent skin smoother, both included in your diet and as an ingredient in skin products. Cherries, dates, mangos, acai, pumpkin, and pomegranates will feed and nourish your skin in ways you never imagined. By adding extra fruit to your diet you're essentially saying goodbye to those wrinkles. Again, be sure to eat fruit that is as deeply colored as you possibly can.

Fish
Adding fish to your diet benefits your skin in that fish is a good source of two important types of fat, DHA and EPA. These are good fats that are very important to the health of your cell membranes.

Olive Oil
There has been a study that suggests that when older people replace bad fats such as butter and margarine with olive oil, their skin shows fewer wrinkles.

Sugar
I know that this article is more about what you should do for your skin, but talking about sugar is important. Avoid it at all costs. Sugar and its associated highly processed foods increases the tendency of your skin to wrinkle as they form compounds that prevent your collagen from working correctly by keeping your skin smooth and firm. Whenever you have the choice, choose fruit in its natural form to satisfy that sweet tooth.

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