Do You Have The Guts To Be Beautiful

(Excerpts from Do You Have the Guts to Be Beautiful)

“People who are in the business of skin care generally talk about lotions and potions. Yet, the most important aspect of beautiful skin is diet. When the diet is filled with foods that blemish and wrinkle the skin, it can add several years to your appearance, hours to your daily skin care routine, and hundreds of dollars to your beauty budget. With a skin-friendly diet, you can cut your skin care regimen to just a few minutes a day and look better, too.

Diet is the mainstay of beautiful skin, and it is when people have an unhealthy diet that they feel the need to spend thousands of dollars to visit the plastic surgeon and the skin care section at the cosmetics counter.

Whole food, plant-based beauty diet

It is important to eat a whole food, plant-based, beauty (WFPB) diet. Because animals are higher on the food chain than plants, toxic chemicals such as herbicides and pesticides get super-concentrated in the fatty tissue of animals. Plants have less fat and far fewer toxins. In their whole food form, they have a tremendous amount of fiber, which acts as a sponge once it enters the body and sequesters toxins, keeping them from getting into your skin. Animal flesh has no fiber and super-concentrated toxins. The immune system, when challenged with animal products, simply does its job of protecting your vital organs by depositing these toxins in your skin. These toxins can show up as age spots and steal your good looks from you. You also want to eat whole foods because processed foods drain your body of water and enzymes—so even a vegan pizza, because it is processed, will take a whole lot of water to process, and your body will have to produce many enzymes to digest it. Digestion is a tremendous amount of work for the body, and it goes through the effort simply to gain some vital nutrients. Giving the body any kind of processed food reduces the efficiency of the whole system, and this extra work for little benefit has serious consequences for the skin. The water, energy, and the body’s resources (such as amino acids) needed to make those enzymes could be directed toward keeping your skin wrinkle-free and blemish-free, rather than processing the pizza you just ate. So whenever you eat processed food, you are sacrificing your beauty.

Appropriate Supplementation

Along with eating a variety of plants and making sure to get those dark leafy greens in your diet, you can additionally boost your plant nutrient variety with whole food based supplementation, flax seeds, and additional minerals. One brand of whole food based supplementation has been clinically shown to increase key nutrients in the blood is Juice Plus+^®. Use of micronutrients in supplement form has been shown to reverse the process of the skin aging. While the diet is the preferable source of nutrients, this is not always possible; and a broad based supplement is useful.

Such an increase in plant nutrients, including minerals, will reduce what is known as “oxidative stress,” as well as help the body to detoxify regularly. Let’s discuss “oxidative stress” and how it damages the skin. Underneath the epidermis is the dermis, where important components of the skin—such as blood capillaries, hair follicles, sweat glands, nerve endings, and oil glands—are embedded in a matrix of collagen, elastic tissue, and reticular fibers.

Sagging skin and deep wrinkles can occur when there is a breakdown in the structural components of the dermal layer from free radical damage. The integrity of the dermal layer is important for structural as well as functional reasons.

Free radicals are the normal byproduct when our cells are burning glucose to create the energy currency of the body, adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Free radicals can cause damage because they are missing an electron and they try to steal electrons randomly from stable molecules in the body. In addition to normal metabolism, we experience a wide variety of other sources of free radicals in our environment such as UV rays, pollution, pharmaceuticals, etc.

Free radicals are implicated in causing premature aging and disease in the body. A wide variety of antioxidants from plant sources can neutralize these free radicals before they can attack our cellular components; and, in so doing, can help to prevent aging at the molecular level. In the dermis, free radical damage causes wrinkles by activating enzymes that break down collagen. You will notice wrinkle lines, especially around the lips of a smoker. Also, sun worshippers often have wrinkled skin from too much sun. A diet rich in processed food and animal products can cause similar damage. Smokers and sun worshippers, as well as the rest of us, can improve the health of the skin through whole food based supplementation.”

I recommend Juice Plus+^® because there are dozens of studies that have been published now in peer-reviewed journals showing its ability to reduce free radical damage and support many systems in the body, such as the immune system, the cardiovascular system while also reducing inflammatory markers. It is also exciting that clinical studies using Juice Plus+^® show that it will help our skin far beyond any topical product we might impulsively purchase. Here is a summary table of the statistically significant changes after 12 weeks, during the winter, from Düsseldorf, Germany:

De Spirt et al, Skin Pharmacology and Physiology, 2012: 25: 2-8

While I am guilty of occasionally purchasing beauty products that I know will fall short of my expectations, I have been faithfully taking my Juice Plus+^® for almost two decades knowing all along that it helps give me a healthy glow. Now with this research, I feel even more confident about sharing with others that Juice Plus+^® should be a part of everyone’s regimen for beauty from within. For more tips on health and beauty, please visit my website www.drmitraray.com.