Skincare

 Print This Post

body’s ability to avoid skin and other problems caused by environmental onslaught and to fight infections.

34.     Ultimately, all carbohydrates are broken down into sugar, therefore, we don’t actually need to eat sugar itself or in sweets, cakes and ice-creams. Rapid rise in blood sugar, mainly due to sugar-rich foods, leads to inflammation, which is the basis of ageing. Sugar hastens the dehydration of collagen and elastin, both key skin proteins. In other words, it actively ages you. The sugar leads to glycation process that makes sugar molecules bind to your protein fibres, which are flexible collagen and elastin fibres that form the base for a person’s skin. The sugar attacks these fibres, making them less elastic and more brittle, so they break. Losing this elastic resilience of the youthful skin produces sagging, deep wrinkles and makes one look old. Dietary sugars have been observed to mess with the symmetry of the skin cells which leads to increased folding, causing wrinkles and general ageing of the skin. Dr. Fredric Brandt says, “removing sweet from the diet can make a person look 10 years younger!”

 Dieting Blunders

35.     Fad or crash dieting decreases your body’s immune function in the long term. Does dieting age the skin? The answer is yes! A study in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition involving 4,025 middle-aged and older women on diet found wrinkling among 22% women, dry skin in 29% and thinning skin among 13%. Those who consumed the most carbohydrates and fat had more wrinkled skin. Women who reported eating the most foods high in vitamin C and linolic acid (soyabean oil, leafy green vegetables, nuts) had the healthiest looking skin, with the least amount of wrinkling, dryness and thinning. If you allow yourself to become overweight or obese, your skin has no choice but to stretch to accommodate extra fat. As you (hopefully) lose that extra weight, you may suffer not only from stretch marks, but also from having excess skin. Thus excessive weight loss after dieting loosens the skin, making it more vulnerable to wrinkles and sagging under the force of gravity. Therefore, one should avoid fad or crash diets and try to lose weight gradually with proper diet and exercise.

 Smoking and Alcoholism

36.     Tobacco smoke contains or produces on burning about 4,000 toxic chemicals, about 60 of which including arsenic, methanol and DDT are