Lots of people invest heavily in maintaining healthy, youthful-looking skin: pricey moisturizers and cleansers, facial masks, spa days…all to retain that healthy glow.
But healthy skin doesn’t necessarily require pricey creams and soaps – you just need to watch what you put in your gut.
Your skin is, essentially, the canary in the coalmine of your digestive health. Eat too much sugar or greasy, fatty foods and you’ll not only start to feel bloated and unpleasant, but you’ll probably notice an impact on your skin – breakouts, dryness, and blotchiness, or an unhealthy, peaky color to your natural pallor. Skin conditions like rosacea or acne can be a sign of something more serious going on deep in your gut.
Restoring And Maintaining Good Gut Health
Many people simply take for granted that symptoms like bloating and gas are “normal” – but it’s harder to ignore it when symptoms of a dysfunction in your gut manifest on your skin.
Fortunately, restoring and maintaining a healthy gut is not only something that will benefit every aspect of your health – including your skin – but it is relatively easy to do.
1. Diversify Your Diet
The truly ambitious can do food allergy testing, starting with an elimination diet and slowly adding specific foods back into the mix to see if they have a reaction – but most people can stick with drinking plenty of water and eating plenty of foods that are natural anti-inflammatories, like turmeric(1).
2. Eat REAL Food
Plenty of veggies, whole grains like quinoa, lean protein and healthy fats, which can come from wild-caught fish, grass-fed beef, coconut oil, and avocados. Fruits and veggies provide much needed vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.
3. Add More Probiotics
To truly get serious about the connection between a healthy gut and healthier skin, probiotics are essential – acidophilus, bifidus, and other key good bacteria. Oral probiotics have been proven to reduce skin inflammation(2).
Probiotics can be found in fermented foods like yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, tofu, and kombucha. If you want to promote the growth of healthy gut bacteria, it’s hard to go wrong with these foods.
4. Reduce Stress Levels
The final major stumbling block to a healthier gut and healthier, more radiant skin is a particularly insidious one – stress. Stress affects every system in the body, and stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol can wreak havoc on your skin.
To reduce your stress levels, try mindfulness-based stress-reduction exercises – daily meditations which have been proven to be effective in reducing stress levels(3). After all, beauty isn’t just skin deep – it involves every system in your body, from your skin to your gut.
sources:
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19594223
[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19300508
[3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15256293