Eating More Fruits and Vegetables Adds More Red and Yellow Tones to Skin Within 6 Weeks, Study Suggests
One more reason to eat well! Eating more fruits and vegetables gives a rosy hue to skin making you more attractive. It’s Mother Nature’s way of giving skin a healthy glow.
Yellow-red pigments which give natural produce like carrots, tomatoes and mangoes their colour can also alter the hue of our skin when they are absorbed by fat deposits in our skin, a study showed.
According to the Scottish researchers the changes in the redness and yellowness of skin in white people may be linked to the number of servings of fruit and vegetables they eat on a daily basis. These antioxidant-rich foods, which are loaded with plant-based pigments, seem to affect skin tone.
Study
For the study scientists analysed data from 35 college students with average age about 21, at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Participants completed food frequency questionnaires describing how often they ate certain foods during all three sessions of the study over a six-week period. On average, the students ate 3.5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day.
Scientists also measured each person’s skin tone at seven body locations, including the cheeks, forehead, shoulder, and upper arm, at the beginning of the study as well as at three weeks and six weeks.
Findings
Findings suggest that eating fruits and vegetables give Healthier, Better-Looking Skin. After six weeks, the researchers observed noticeable increases in skin redness and yellowness in people who increased the fruit and vegetables at their meals. Healthier and rosier-looking skin was linked with an increase of one portion of fruit and vegetables a day.
“Diet-linked skin color changes occurred over a relatively short time period and were attainable through relatively modest dietary changes,” the study researchers write.
They suggest it’s the carotenoids — the red, yellow, and orange pigments in fruits and vegetables — that play an important role in skin tone. Foods such as carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, and apricots are rich in beta-carotene, as are some dark green vegetables, including spinach and kale. Another carotenoid is lycopene, which is found in tomatoes and pink grapefruits.
Researcher’s View
Ross Whitehead, who led the research, said: “Most of us know we should eat plenty of fruit and veg, yet we are not sufficiently motivated to actually go ahead and eat a healthy diet.”
“We hope that by highlighting the rapidly achievable benefits of a healthy diet on our attractiveness will be a stronger incentive for people to eat more healthily. Knowing you are going to look more attractive in a few weeks may be more persuasive than the promise of health benefits later in life.”
Researchers said still more study is needed to know if similar findings would be seen in people with other skin pigmentations, or if older adults would have the same changes in skin tone as younger adults.
[Source: the study appears in the online journal PLoS ONE]
