Getting Nutrients To Your Skin : SuperFoodsRx

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Getting Nutrients To Your Skin

By Geoffrey R. Harris, MD

Your skin is radical. Actually, it is full of free radicals that rip through each of your skin cells--damaging DNA, causing inflammation, and prematurely aging the skin.

Giving your skin what it needs to manage free radicals is the key to helping prevent skin cancer, wrinkling, and irregular pigmentation (like sun spots and freckling.) SuperFoodsRX is all about providing your body the tools it needs to manage free radicals. But, eating your super foods is not the only way to give your skin beneficial antioxidants and to slow the aging process.

Ask any dermatologist and they will tell you that the skin is the largest organ in the human body. And this important organ has the tough task of protecting us from our environment. Importantly, the skin has double duty; it has to deal with free radicals from normal cellular metabolism and manage the free radicals created from ultraviolet light and injury/inflammation. A good way to demonstrate the added effects of the sun on your skin is to cross your arms and compare the top of one forearm to the underside of the other. It is easy to see the difference between the more exposed skin and the more protected skin. This difference in pigmentation, freckling, wrinkling, and texture is due to the additional burden of managing the damage from the environment on the more sun-exposed skin.

The key to minimizing the damage from the environment and the sun is twofold. The first important way to minimize environmental injury is prevention. Wearing sunscreen, a hat, long sleeves, and avoiding outdoor activities during the peak sun hours between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. are some easy ways to prevent skin aging. The second way to minimize damage is to provide the skin with antioxidants that help prevent cell damage. The antioxidants and micronutrients in food that help from the inside can also be used topically to provide skin protection and prevent aging.

There is a developing body of research about foods, vitamins, and phytonutrients and their effect on the skin. Research focuses on quantifying the visible skin damage from an induced chemical or ultraviolet injury and the corresponding microscopic changes from the skin injury. Most of the studies compare the skin injury in normal subjects with the skin injury of subjects after being given a nutrient either internally or topically.

As a physician, I already recommend eating the vitamins, nutrients, and foods described in the Superfoods Rx books for cancer prevention, skin health, and anti-aging. As more information comes to light through additional studies, I am also recommending topical nutrients to improve skin appearance.

Vitamin C is the most well-known antioxidant. There are many benefits to vitamin C in the diet. For the skin, vitamin C seems to work in conjunction with vitamin E. Studies have shown a decreased redness response after ultraviolet light exposure in subjects who received vitamin C and vitamin E supplementation when compared with subjects who did not receive supplementation. Basically, vitamin C and E supplementation decreased sunburns. (***Please understand that taking vitamin C and E does NOT completely prevent sunburns. You still need sunscreen. The beneficial effects of vitamins and nutrients to skin health are not a substitute for sunscreen.) The studies show that supplementation with vitamin C and E helps improve the skin’s response to ultraviolet light. It is this response to ultraviolet light that causes the redness, inflammation, and DNA damage that leads to aging and skin cancer. There is still injury in the subjects who took a supplement with the vitamin C and E, however, the skin responded better to the injury when subjects had been taking the antioxidants.

Many cosmacueticals have been adding vitamin C (ascorbic acid) to their formulations. Topical vitamin C is absorbed through the skin and has been shown to improve ultraviolet induced skin damage, pigmentation, and wrinkling. I recommend it to my patients. The most important factor in choosing a topical vitamin C is to find a topical product that provides a stable vitamin C in usable concentrations.

There are many other nutrients and food extracts that prevent skin damage with both oral and topical usage. Lycopene, a carotenoid found in high concentrations in tomatoes, is another antioxidant that has been shown to have benefit in preventing UV-induced skin damage when used topically. Studies of topical lycopene have shown it has a greater ultraviolet protective ability than a product containing a mixture of vitamin E and C. Topical spinach extract, pomegranate extract, green tea extract, soymilk, and broccoli sprout extract have also each been shown to decrease the development of skin cancers in mice exposed to carcinogens.

The research is becoming clear that the same “superfoods” that nourish our bodies from the inside can be used on the outside to improve the skin’s response to environmental damage and prevent aging.

What Is So Bad About Free Radicals?

Free radicals are molecules which are an undesirable by-product created from oxygen during cellular metabolism, a process in which every cell in our body uses oxygen to create energy for normal functioning. Free radicals are unstable molecules that try to become stable by “oxidizing” and thus damaging other molecules. Free radicals need to become stable quickly, and if not controlled, they can damage important molecules in the cell (like DNA, enzymes, or cell membranes). The body has complex processes to manage these unstable free radicals so that DNA and crucial proteins are not damaged. Damage to DNA and proteins can lead to inflammation, cell death, or cancer. Aging is also a result of damage from free radicals.

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