Food and Wrinkles

Are Wrinkles and Diet Related?

To perform any effective clinical study, a large, uniform group of individuals are first randomly divided into two groups. A single variable must be controlled, such as the use of a placebo drug with one group, and an effective drug with the other, and none of those involved in the study, those administering the test nor those participating, may know which group is receiving which substance. Once the treatment has been administered, the results may be studied in order to draw conclusions regarding the effectiveness of the substance being tested, taking into account random statistical variations. This study must be conducted several times on different groups of individuals to draw any verifiable conclusions about the substance.

Conducting such a study on the optimal diet for wrinkle prevention, however, is next to impossible. A number of prohibitively restrictive obstacles exist, such as the presence of an unmanageable amount of variables, and the fact that such a long-term study would be extremely costly to perform, requiring huge amounts of difficult-to-obtain public funding.

Still, there is some proof that the consumption of certain nutrients may have direct and/or indirect effects on the appearance and overall health of our skin.

Monash University in Melbourne Australia has to-date produced the most complete and inclusive study on the correlation between diet and wrinkles. The 2001 study, published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, observed the diets of 453 individuals over the age of seventy from Greece, Sweden and Australia to determine the relationship, if one exists, between food consumption and wrinkling.

The administrators of this study concluded that a diet low in glycemic with a high variety of vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, and fish, lead to less wrinkling of the skin with age. Those with lower levels of skin wrinkling consumed relatively large quantities of the following food products:

• Total fat
• Mono-unsaturated fat
• Olive oil and olives
• Fish (especially fatty fish, such as sardines)
• Reduced fat milk and milk products, such as yogurt
• Eggs
• Nuts and legumes (especially lima and broad beans)
• Vegetables (especially leafy greens, spinach, eggplant, asparagus, celery, onions, leeks and garlic)
• Wholegrain cereals
• Fruit and fruit products (especially prunes, cherries, apples and jams)
• Tea
• Water
• Zinc (foods which contain zinc include seafood, lean meat, milk and nuts)

Foods that seem to exacerbate wrinkling in the aged included:

• Saturated fat
• Meat (especially fatty processed meats)
• Full fat dairy products (especially unfermented products and ice cream)
• Soft drinks and cordials
• Cakes, pastries and desserts
• Potatoes
• Butter
• Margarine

While the Monash study is correlational, seeking to find a connection between existing events rather than determining a causative relationship between them, related studies have come to similar conclusions. The results of this study are thus the best information we have to-date to advise you on what to eat and not to eat to maintain healthy skin long into your later years.