Hi team,

Our skin is incredible. It’s our biggest organ and it protects us from the outside baddies trying to wreak havoc on our little internal systems. Check out how the integumentary system works here. How do we take care of it? Well, sometimes an overlooked aspect is the nutritional component. I am not sure how many posts there are about skin care (actually, Google gives us a whooping 9,910,000,000 results when “skin care” is type into the search bar), but how many of those are topical (needless to say, it’d take more than one lifetime to skim through all that information).

We do have information on nutrition in relation to skin care. The wonderful Dr. Sharma offers solutions via podcast here. Dr. Greger provides an overview of the evidence here. And, because the website is vegan friendly and so wonderfully named, visit the website ethical elephant here for topical application recommendations. If you don’t want to sift through all the information, the study Dr. Greger refers to in his video suggests that a high intake of vegetables, legumes, and olive oil* are protective and a high intake of meat, dairy, and butter seem to not be protective. He also especially notes the protectiveness of prunes, apples, and tea.

Cheers!

-Wheeler

*olive oil is obviously not a whole-food and is calorically dense and not necessarily a recommendation best suited for optimizing health, but I am open to evidence