Health, Beauty And Weight Loss: vegetables

It is a daily fight to keep your skin healthy and smooth. But help could come from an unexpected quarter. Welcome to the world of glyconutrients!

You are 25 but look 35. Blame it on your skin! The skin is the largest organ in the body, and the most exposed. Pollution, ultraviolet rays in the Sun's light, stress, lack of essential vitamins, all contribute to wear and tear your skin.

Most people don't take proper care of their skin - either due to hectic work or due to pure ignorance. Lack of proper skin care can result in more skin-related diseases and allergies. Proper skin care is important for avoiding cold sores, spots, and skin cancer. Beauty therapies and skin care lotions are only effective up to a point when it comes to keeping your skin soft and smooth.

Exposure to sunlight causes loss of water in our body which leads to dryness of the skin. This results in the skin losing its elasticity and 'sagging.' This loss of elasticity normally happens with ageing. However, changing climatic conditions and atmospheric conditions such as ozone depletion cause the harmful ultraviolet B rays to cause more damage to our skin. This is where nutrition comes in.

In order to get the right skin, it is important to look at the part played by nutrition in skin care. That translates as getting more nutritional food into your diet. Lack of proper nutrition may result in the loss of natural oils present in your skin. Fresh vegetables, fruits, fresh juice, cereals, etc. contain vitamins essential for a healthy skin.

Vitamin E is said to be a skin-care vitamin. Apart from vitamin E, vitamins such as A and C are also essential for a healthy skin. These vitamins contain antioxidants which help the skin to maintain its natural oils. These antioxidants help to reduce the tendency of the skin to age. Ultimately they help fight the punishing effect that the climatic changes have on our skins.

But where do you get the vitamins and nutrients necessary for your skin's health? Not from your daily diet. For various reasons, people cannot get the right quantity of vitamins and other nutrients into the body through their normal diet. And synthetic vitamins are out.

Enter glyconutrients. Eight essential sugars have been discovered to be the essential building blocks for our body cells recently. There is a lot of research going on about these essential sugars and the larger group of saccharides of which they are a part, called glyconutrients. These eight simple sugars are responsible for cell-to-cell communication necessary for keeping the body's glands and organs, including the skin, healthy.

Skin care ointments and lotions containing glyconutrients are the best alternative to any beauty therapy. The intake glyconutrients is equally important for health care as well as skin care.

Consult your doctor or dietician, exercise, and drink a lot of water. And give your skin its daily dose of glyconutrients!

Photo by Tom Merton

A Personal Skin Care Program For You

A look at what you can do to develop your own skincare program.
Why is it that all of us cannot keep the skin we were born with. Well I’ve still got my skin but it has changed and, according to my mother, it has changed a lot. It would also need to have stretched a bit, well in my case stretched a lot. As we get older, things happen to our skin, like wrinkles.

Unfortunately, we find it harder to get away with having a few wrinkles. What we do notice though is skin on women, and because many men are somehow genetically programmed to be uncaring and insensitive about their skin, you spend a great deal of time and effort to make your skin look good.

Why is it then that men can get away with wrinkles but women cannot? Is there anything you can do about it? If you adopt a skin care program then this should help to affect how your skin looks and more importantly it will affect how you feel as well, and that is very important. You have to remember that the skin is the largest organ in your body and so by adopting a skincare program you are looking after yourself.

So what can you do about it? Well to start with after every shower even after you have dried yourself your skin is still damp and by applying moisturizer you are trapping moisture into your skin which is a great plus factor. Another one is to drink water and this hydration helps your skin as well.

However, if you notice that even after this your skin is always dry and sometimes a little flakey, just visit your doctor to check things out. One other reason you should quickly visit is if there is a major change such as dark, (or lighter), skin patches and any changes or growth to moles you may have. Get these checked out just to make sure you have no problems.

One thing to watch out for is the effect the sun has on your skin. The sun is at its fiercest when it is highest, which is generally at midday, so just take care. Applying a good sunscreen helps, and another thing to take into consideration is that elastin, which is a substance in your skin, breaks down under strong sunlight. This can cause the skin to sag so just be careful. It is a pity about the effects of sunlight on skin as most of us feel much happier when exposed to sunlight.

Rather than buy every skincare product on the market there is a lot you can do to help your skin by developing your own personal skincare program.

Healthy skin is helped by a healthy diet, and a healthy diet is usually a balanced diet containing fresh vegetables and fruit. Both of these have been found to contain antioxidants which can help your skin protect itself from day to day living. To get the best values from fruit and veg though it must be fresh or only lightly cooked.

Another important factor in skincare is skin hydration and this is helped by drinking a sensibly amount of water. I have seen it suggested that 4 to 8 cups a day is sensible but if you are drinking bottled mineral water check the chemical makeup of the water as some are high in sodium which means high salt levels. Do not fall into the trap that drinking 4 to 8 cups of coffee a day, (which is mainly water after all), is as good for you.

Coffee contains plenty of caffeine which helps the body to dispose of water. I had a great idea that I would drink beer instead of coffee as that is mainly water, but drinks containing alcohol, (including wine,) do not class as water either. It does not have to be bottled water either; tap water is fine as long as it is pure and clean. Not at bedtime though as drinking late at night means your body may retain this water causing your skin to stretch a little which is not something you want to happen.

Your skin also stretches when you become overweight and after a diet, and loosing weight, you will need to exercise to tone your skin into shape again. A younger person has more flexible skin but when you are older your skin is not as flexible and it becomes harder to tone your skin after loosing weight. The answer is not to try and put on weight in the first place but that is not always easy especially as we get older. However please try to keep weight gain off your skin care program as the two do not go together.

Whatever you decide to do, do some research and find out what will work best for you. One way of doing this is to talk to people selling skincare products in stores. Although their job is to try and sell you their product, they will still give you good advice. You could ask your friends as well, as some of them may be able to guide you in the right direction. Whatever you decide to do, good luck.