When we talk about what causes the skin’s aging process, we’re talking about two primary things: exposure to the sun and advanced glycation end products (AGEs). The latter typically forms when a combination of fat or protein with sugar occurs. While the above factors cannot be entirely controlled, you must ensure your skin ages gradually. This includes ensuring your daily meals consist of a healthy diet and the proper application of sunscreen.
Watching your diet is more challenging than it sounds. However, you must arm yourself with the necessary information on the types of food that you eat and how they affect your skin. This article does justice to that, as we shall examine the various foods that speed up the aging of your skin. Although, one must take note of the fact we are all unique beings, and diet control is not a one-size-fits-all. Therefore, you need to ensure that your diet is moderate, at best, featuring a reasonable amount of the ingredients that will help boost your overall health -aging skin or not.
Types of Food That Speed Up the Aging Process
- Spicy Foods: These types of food make your blood vessels swell and break, which may lead to bruise-like marks on your face with a purple hue. For women that have experienced menopause and suffer from rosacea –a skin condition– ingesting spicy foods can trigger such skin conditions. Spicy foods also increase your body temperature, which leads to intense sweating. This sweat, when further mixed with the bacteria on your skin, can lead to breakouts and scars on your skin.
- Margarine: Margarine is unsuitable for the skin because it contains trans fat. This leads to an increase in “bad” cholesterol, causing inflammation in the body.
- Soda and Energy Drinks: Energy drinks and sodas have adverse effects on your skin. This is because sodas and energy drinks age the cells in your tissues. The extra fizz entails your body ingesting more calories, and when combined with the bacteria in your mouth, it can cause tooth decay.
- Frozen dinners: Frozen dinners can also cause your skin to age quicker because they feature more sodium than your body needs. This leads you to drink more water than you need and causes the extra water to move to parts of your body that have lesser amounts of salt. Ultimately, your body becomes puffy and swollen.
- Alcohol: Alcohol dehydrates your body, and understanding that your skin is 63% water. It leaves your skin feeling dry and defenseless against wrinkles.
- Processed Meats: Meat lovers will scrunch their faces at the sight of this, but in reality, processed meats contain sodium and a host of other chemical preservatives which you can use to store them for a longer period. However, these preservatives are bad for your body. These chemical preservatives can cause inflammation within the body, which may lead to other complications, including heart disease, stroke, etc.
- Fried Foods: Foods that are deep fried in oil promote unstable molecules that may damage your skin, making it look older than it originally is.
