From eating an antioxidant-rich diet to practicing robust skincare regimens, achieving healthy skin is as easy as it has ever been. Welcome to our ultimate guide to healthy skin, where we’ll be going through the actions you can take to make your healthy skin goals come true. These will not only include the things that you can do to your skin to improve it, but also lifestyle changes that will improve your overall health, with your skin becoming radiant as a result. We’ll also be going into skin types and how they may affect which skincare methods you use, as well as our natural beauty tips, before finishing with a skincare FAQ.
Best Foods for Healthy Skin
As we’ve established, what you eat can affect the health of your skin. Just as a poor diet will affect other parts of your body, your skin will also be affected in ways you may not have even noticed. Below are some examples of the foods you should be looking at if you want to improve the health of your skin.
Fatty fish like salmon and mackerel make great diet options for those concerned about healthy skin, because they’re full of omega-3 fatty acids which aid in maintaining your skin. They keep the skin thick and moisturized, and so a deficiency of omega-3 fatty acids will cause dry skin that’ll lead into other skin problems. These omega-3 fats found in fish also reduce inflammation in the skin, fighting acne and even mitigating the damage done by the sun’s UV rays.
Fish oil can help fight autoimmune conditions like psoriasis, too, and a lot of these positive skin benefits are due to fatty fish being a source of antioxidants, namely vitamin E. These types of fish are also rich in protein, which also help maintain skin integrity, as well as zinc which regulates the production of new skin cells. With all their benefits, fatty fish should be included on most people’s dishes whether they have skin concerns or not.
Along with fish, another good food to promote healthy skin are sweet potatoes due to their beta-carotene content. When ingested, beta-carotene is changed into vitamin A within the body, and it’s these valuable provitamins that are the reason you should eat them. As an aside, oranges, spinach and carrots contain the same nutrient, but the sweet potato is simply the richest source because it yields six times the daily value of vitamin A.
Beta-carotene is a carotenoid, and foods under this group contain nutrients that make your skin more resilient to outside stimuli such as harmful UV rays from the sun, perfect for fending off dry and wrinkled skin. If made a staple of your diet, beta-carotene also has the potential to add a warm complexion to your skin which gives off a healthy appearance.
Introducing soy to your diet is a relatively simple way to start treating your skin right, due to the fact that there’s multiple ways to consume soy and you can even take it in supplements if need be. With soy it’s the isoflavones that make them worthwhile to eat, a phytoestrogen that can block human estrogen in the body. This has been used for testing on women forming wrinkles and postmenopausal women, and in both cases the results were that skin elasticity was increased and collagen was added to the skin, which would alleviate skin frustrations attached to those two problems.
As for snacks that can promote healthy skin, walnuts and dark chocolate work towards that in their own ways. Walnuts are a lot like fish nutritionally, at least where healthy skin is concerned, in that they have more omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acid than any other nut and also contain some zinc in them too. Cocoa’s effect on the skin is well-documented and is best consumed as cocoa powder for thicker and more hydrated skin, and that skin gets better blood flow to it as a result. For specificity’s sake, dark chocolate is 70% cocoa or above, no less and the less sugar the better. Eating about 20 grams of high-antioxidant dark chocolate a day will introduce a supplement into your diet that will give you the familiar benefits of antioxidants such as better UV radiation resistance in your skin.
