Speaker 1
That's the nice thing about healthy foods. They just have good side effects. So global disease prevention strategies might benefit from emphasizing that a healthy diet is also linked to less facial wrinkling and maybe vanity will help us prevent a few heart attacks in the bark. In our next story, we discover how some foods appear protective against the development of skin wrinkles, while others may make them worse. The skin is the largest organ in the body, about 20 square feet, and the most vulnerable organ in the body, exposed to both the oxidizing effects of UV radiation from the sun and the oxidizing effects of oxygen in the air. And years of oxidant stress can take a toll over the year skin becomes thinner, more easily damaged, loses volume, elasticity, and can sag and wrinkle. How can we do about it? Skin wrinkling can food make a difference? They measured healthfulness of skin using a micro topographic method. It's cool. They make a mold of the back of your hand with a silicone rubber, peel it off, and then look at it under a microscope. But then as we age, our skin can get all coarse and flaccid. How can we stop it? Well, three things contribute to the aging of skin. Skinned stress induced by sun damage, inflammation, and ischemia, lack of adequate blood flow. Oxitive stress means we need antioxidants. Under these circumstances, many skin antioxidants undergo depletion. Must be replaced continuously in order to delay the otherwise inevitable deterioration, which would lead to skin aging. So plant foods would presumably help. And then inflammation and lack of blood flow. And so one might predict saturated fat, inflammation, and cholesterol ischemia might be associated with adverse effects on our skin. Let's see if our predictions hold up. In particular, a high intake of vegetables, bean-speased lentil soy, and olive oil appeared to be protective against skin wrinkling, whereas a high intake of meat, dairy, and butter appeared to have an adverse effect. Prunes apples and tea appeared especially protective. A recent study, for example, found that green tea, phytonutrients, were able to protect skin against harmful root UV radiation, help improve skin quality of women. After a few months on green tea, there was a 16% reduction in skin roughness and a 25% reduction in scaling, as well as improved skin elasticity and hydration. Finally, today we asked the question, instead of treating sensitive skin topically with lotions and creams, why not treat it from the inside out with diet? About half of the American population says they have sensitive skin, defined loosely as tingling, chafing, burning, itching sensations when exposed to various environmental factors. A similar high prevalence has been reported throughout Japan and Europe, especially in women. Often there are no obvious signs, and so it's often dismissed by the medical community as a princess in the P phenomenon, a mindset that has hindered the investigation of this problem.