To keep your skin looking healthy, you need to maintain a diet that is well-balanced nutritionally. While healthy eating may not produce striking results, not eating a healthy diet will cause your skin to age much faster.
Watching Blood Sugar
Glucose is the primary energy source for the central nervous system. This means that blood glucose level, often called blood sugar, is critical in human physiology. If sugar levels drop in blood below a set point for a prolonged period of time, then fainting can occur; it can also lead to comas and even death. Highly elevated sugar levels in the blood, such as those seen with people living with diabetes, are also harmful. However, the short-term issues that are related to diabetes are generally less dramatic.
Blood sugar levels have an important effect on the aging process. Glucose is not only an essential fuel for cellular use but is also a potentially damaging substance when it comes to tissues and cells. Glucose can react with DNA, proteins, and other important molecules. This reaction is known as glycation. The most severe consequence of glycation is known as cross-linking with is when chemical bridges are formed between large molecules and proteins. A substance that has been cross-linked is generally more rigid, more likely to tear or crack, and also sustains a loss of elasticity. An excellent example of cross-linking is what happens if you leave a rubber mat out in the sun to dry. It gets hard and often cracks. In the body, cross-linking is a symptom of aging. It can cause hardening of the arteries, stiff joints, and wrinkles. Unsurprisingly, people with diabetes suffer from high levels of cross-linking due to their elevated levels of glucose. In people with diabetes, cross-linking can be identified as increased levels of skin damage and heart damage. Even blood sugar levels that are raised in small amounts can cause signs of aging. Glucose intolerance, otherwise known as carbohydrate intolerance, means that a person is a borderline diabetic. Carbohydrate intolerance is a widespread condition that affects close to 50% of the populations of developed countries. In most carbohydrate intolerant people, normal blood sugar levels between means are at unacceptably high levels immediately after eating.
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It has been scientifically proven that correcting carbohydrate intolerance can be one of the most important things that you can do to slow down the aging process.
How do you find out if you have carbohydrate intolerance?
There is a test called an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT), which will enable your Doctor to tell you if you have carbohydrate intolerance. The first step is to measure your fasting sugar level in the blood. Next, you are fed a meal that has a normal level of glucose in it. After eating the meal, your blood sugar levels are measured in half-hourly intervals for the next two to three hours. This allows the Doctor to determine how fast your glucose levels return to normal after you eat carbohydrates. Being overweight and being over 40 are the critical factors for carbohydrate intolerance.
How to improve carbohydrate intolerance
It is possible to improve the rate of carbohydrate metabolism, which will, in turn, slow the aging process as well as reduce the possibility of diabetes. Therefore, it is good for most people over the age of 30 to follow these steps to reduce the risk of developing diabetes or carbohydrate intolerance significantly.
Lowering the adverse effects of eating on blood sugar
When we eat, the enzymes present in the gastrointestinal tract are broken down into simple sugars, peptides, and amino acids. These byproducts are comprised of relatively small molecules. As a result, foods high in sugar like cake, pizza, or ice cream are converted into glucose when you eat them. Glucose is a type of starch. It is a branched polymer comprised of multiple parts of glucose and sucrose, a sugary substance made up of one glucose and one fructose molecule. When food is digested, the glucose is absorbed by the bloodstream, raising blood sugar levels. (This is referred to as the glycemic effect.) How significant a rise this depends on several factors:
- what the level of glucose is in the food itself;
- what kind of glucose is it? (Starch v. sugar);
- Are there other ingredients in the food that will assist with the rate of glucose absorption (an example would be fiber)?
Meals that don’t produce a significant rise in blood sugar levels are healthier for carbohydrate metabolism. Therefore, a good rule of thumb is that those with a lesser glycemic effect should be favored in foods of the approximately equivalent nutritional value. In other words, it is better to eat wholemeal bread than white bread.
Fiber and healthy eating
In the past, research showed fiber as a fairly useless, non-nutrient filler found in plant-derived foods; it is now understood to be an essential part of the food that we eat to promote longevity and good health. The chemical basis of fiber is based on the plant polymers and polysaccharide chains, while starch is also a kind of polysaccharide. Unlike starch, fiber cannot be easily digested by humans. Instead, fiber generally passes through the digestive system partially or even fully intact. High levels of fiber in the diet make stools large and soft.
Fiber became a popular topic of discussion in the scientific community when it was noted that in the developing nations of Africa, there is a significantly lower incidence of health issues like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, colon cancer, hemorrhoids, and diverticulitis, all of which are pretty common in the developed world. The average diet in Africa was much higher in fiber. This led scientists to hypothesize that one of the roles of fiber is to prevent obesity and disease. Many studies on the subject followed. The preventative or at least helpful effects of fiber in cases of carbohydrate intolerance and type II diabetes have now been proved by scientific studies. It has been demonstrated that fiber decreases the rate at which glucose from food is absorbed into the bloodstream, thereby giving the body more time to process carbohydrates. This results in better carbohydrate metabolism and lower blood sugar. The effects of fiber on colon cancer have yet to be proved.
People in developed countries on average consume only one-third of the daily recommended amounts of fiber. It is relatively simple to increase your fiber intake without the need for supplements. It is essential to understand that fiber supplements, particularly if misused, can lead to intestinal obstruction, a severe health issue. Intestinal obstruction cannot occur as a result of eating high-fiber foods.
Exercise and carbohydrate intolerance
Carbohydrate tolerance can be improved with a regular exercise regime. Regular exercise can also give you a variety of other health benefits as well, not to mention that it can be enjoyable. If you exercise outside you, need to make sure that you remember to use products that will protect you from excessive wind and sun.
Supplements and carbohydrate intolerance
Many nutrients and botanicals can have a positive effect on the rate of carbohydrate metabolism. For example, lipoic acid can be used to lower glucose levels in the blood. In addition, specific adaptogens have been shown to improve carbohydrate intolerance and even reverse the beginning stages of type II diabetes. Adaptogens can be used to allow the body to adapt to different kinds of stress and also to regulate certain physiological aberrations. The majority of adaptogens are made from natural plants and are very safe if used in recommended dosages.
Drugs and carbohydrate intolerance
Some drugs can be used to lower the levels of sugar in the body. However, the majority of them can have harmful side effects. For people who are confirmed as being diabetic, the trade-offs of the drugs are worth using. It is not good to use drugs to lower sugar levels in the blood if you only have mild carbohydrate intolerance. There are much safer ways to deal with the problem.
The good health of every organ in the body is dependent on vitamins and minerals; the skin is one of those organs. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies can be particularly harmful to the skin and can result in accelerated aging or skin disease.
Non-essential nutrients are the ones that the body can do without or else are synthesized by the body productively. Essential nutrients are the ones that body cannot make itself and cannot do without either. The third type of nutrient are the conditionally essential ones, these can be synthesized by the body if it is working at optimal efficiency.
One of the major causes of aging is free radical damage. As has been discussed earlier, free radicals are the indiscriminate and highly reactive chemicals that have the ability to damage the structure of all living cells.
One of the main fat soluble antioxidant vitamins found in the body is vitamin E. It have protective functions within the cellular membrane, the lipoproteins and other structures that are oily in nature. Skin is particularly high in unsaturated fatty acids so using vitamin E (both topically and orally) is very beneficial.
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The cost of a skincare treatment should not be indicative of its value for the skin. In other words, just because a remedy or supplement is expensive doesn’t mean that it is good. Cheaper remedies can be very effective. A good example of this is the fact that regular exercise, which can cost nothing or close to it, can have very positive effects on your cardiovascular system. In addition, eating fewer carbohydrates and cutting down on your caloric intake can have life-lengthening effects that are cheap and easy to achieve.