How Sugar Consumption Ages Skin
We all know the devastating effects that excess sugar consumption can have on our waistlines and even on our mood stability and ability to focus and concentrate, but what about our rate of aging when it comes to the youthful appearance of our skin? It’s something we probably haven’t given a lot of thought to, considering most of the emphasis on anti-sugar consumption is related to maintaining weight and promoting even moods.
However, new research is confirming something that many skin care specialists have thought to be true, and that is that sugar is a very big enemy of our skin’s elasticity, anti aging and wrinkle defenses, youthful glow and wrinkle control. And why is that?
The process by which sugar destroys the skin’s healthy, youtful appearance is called glycation, and here’s how it works. When you eat sugar, it creates harmful molecules by attaching to key proteins in your blood stream. These unhealthy cells then accumulate throughout the blood stream and begin to destroy healthy skin cells systematically, until the skin becomes drab, tired, stretched, and more wrinkled in appearance.
The worst part of what they do is destroy the natural substances in your skin called collagen and elastin, and when this happens, they break down and become brittle and more fragile, which leads to the dullness and increased wrinkles and breakdown of elasticity and resistence of the skin.
Remember the days of youth when your skin cell turnover was fresh and your skin had the glow that only youth can give? This glycation process helps speed the aging process of the skin and takes away that fast cell reproduction even faster than if it were just the aging process itself occurring.
In essence, you are helping to speed the aging process of your skin, and skin care products can only help so much. Too bad too, because I love sugar, especially chocolate, and cannot imagine a life with minimal sugar. However, knowing this, I will try to limit the sugar intake for a little while. This is also really interesting because when I’ve been on diets that are extremely low in sugar, or only allow natural sugars such as those from fruits and vegetable, I do notice that my skin looks better than it ever has, so this does make perfect sense.
