Food, Supplements, Skincare: The Role of Each in Your Beauty Regimen

I have spoken in several articles on this blog about my passion for the skin-health connection and how I believe that so much of our skin quality, clarity, and health is a reflection of how our body is fed and functioning on the inside. But when it comes to the questions of what benefits we can attribute from our diet (and supplements to go along with it) versus the products we apply topically, it can be hard to know what does what and how critical each component is.

Food: Everyone from doctors to homeopaths to aestheticians to fitness trainers to even our caregivers growing up stressed the important of a healthy, well-balanced diet filled with lots of fruits and vegetables, ample amounts of proteins while curtailing sugars and refined carbs. Of course, this general thought process behind eating leads not only to a healthy body but better-looking and more resilient skin. And while every body's needs will be unique and individual unto them, food is the baseline building block of what it means to have healthy skin. Nutrients that are crucial to skin's health (Vitamin A and many of the B vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids to name a prominent few) are often the most bioavailable (meaning your body recognizes them and can have a better chance of absorbing them efficiently) through food items, most especially when they are in their most natural, unprocessed, and, in a lot of cases, even raw form. Indeed not just in addressing healthy skin maintenance but more importantly deep-seeded or recurring skincare concerns, making changes to your diet or at least working at reducing your intake of foods that may cause skin flare-ups can be the answer for many people. For more info on some common inflammatory foods that can lead to or exacerbate a number of skin concerns, check out my article here,

Supplements: While ideally, our bodies would be able to get and maintain every nutrient they need through food alone, this is not always the easiest or most doable for everyone. As time has gone on and farming practices have also become more industrialized, the soil most everywhere on our planet is becoming more stressed and weakened. This leads to a gradual but comprehensive depletion of nutrients in the soil as you may have heard. More specifically real problem may be better traced back to the overproliferation of antibiotics and "bad" bacteria to the ratio of necessary fungi and other helpful strains of bacteria and microbes needed to break down the minerals, metals, and nutrients contained in the soil to be infused into the food we eat. You can read more about this looking up information from the second edition of Environmental Soil Chemistry written by Donald Sparks that shows similar data from soils all around the world. Simply put, research suggests that the presence of these helpful fungi is not as plentiful as it should be, and they are not being amply replenished due to the rapidity of industrial farming and the overuse of certain kinds of synthetic-based pesticides and antifungal chemicals, which kill both the funguses we don't want on our plants but also the ones that we need to have in our soil.

For this reason, any of the crops we grow are not as nutrient-dense as they once were. Add to this plants being either genetically-modified to produce more or otherwise bred to have more appealing qualities rather than for nutrition (such as fruits being bred more to have an overabundance than they once did for a more pronounced and attractive flavor) and it becomes clear that the body isn't always getting what it needs from food.

These scenarios make taking supplements a wonderful practice for total well-being. As with everything, the type and amount of supplements you might need is completely individual, but a great place to start, especially in talking of skin health, is a multivitamin and one particularly woth ample Vitamin A (for cell renewal), Vitamin C (for collagen boosting), Zinc and B3 (for clarity and redness and reduction ). Also, another thing to possibly consider would be a trace mineral supplement. Trace minerals, such as copper, magnesium, and selenium, are things that nearly every human has some deficiency in because of our soil's weakened ability to take in these small but vital amounts of these nutrients.

Skincare: We now come to the part of skin wellness that all of us beauty enthusiasts know and love. Even in spite of the quality of our skin being a reflection of the well-being of the inside, topical skincare definitely has its place. Skincare products are important for supporting the skin in the ways of cleaning the surface, moisturizing and protecting its barrier, doing minor spot treating, and so forth. I think of it as the proverbial, quick-acting icing on the cake of skincare to refresh, re-enliven, and nip the most surface-level signs of stress in the bud.

The journey to glowing, healthy skin in the long-term is an ongoing one. Making sure you pack as many tools in your bag to diversify your approach in food, supplements, and skincare is a great path to success!