A top nutritionist has revealed that we should eat one snack everyday to boost our skin health.
Speaking to Caroline Hirons on her Glad We Had This Chat podcast, health expert Emily English shared how our diets help play a crucial role in maintaining our skin.
The nutritionist began by looking at how we can ensure that our ‘foundation layer’ of skin can be given protection by what we eat, and pinpointed how we need to shift our focus onto foods that help produce collagen in our bodies: “It’s like a race to preserve collagen, when it comes to nutrition, the older we get, when we hit our mid-20s, 1.5 per cent of our collagen, we lose every year.”
With vitamin C being a crucial part in collagen production within our body, Emily named one 59p snack that will do exactly what we need: “Weirdly, a red pepper is the highest vitamin C containing food. So if you want to snack on something to look after your skin, (try) red pepper crudités.”
According to Healthine.com collagen is “a type of protein. In fact, it’s the most abundant structural protein in animals. A structural protein is one that makes up the structure or framework of your cells and tissues.”
While Emily drew particular attention to red peppers, she also emphasised the importance of other foods that can play their part in boosting our skin health: “It’s also worth noting all of the lovely kind of antioxidants and colour in our food, so if we’re speaking about skin foods, colour is everything, particularly our Carotenoids. So, anything that is red or orange.”
She added: “I love my anthocyanins and purple foods, it sounds all a little bit fancy and a little bit woo woo, but all of these colour compounds are incredibly anti-inflammatory and they will go and sit within the skin and it will again, help protect the collagen and prevent its breakdown from any sort of environmental stresses or stress and create this kind of lovely anti-inflammatory environment.”