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Dr. Weil explains if your diet affects your skin health.
Dr. Weil:
I think skin health and beauty really reflect general health and the root of good skin health and appearance first is proper nutrition.
So I think that particularly getting the proper amounts and kinds of fats in the diet is very key. There are what we call essential fats.
Now these are the good fats that we absolutely have to have every day and they are the fats that you can get from nuts, seeds, avocados and also from oily fish, the omega-3 fatty acids.
So that’s the first thing is to make sure that you are getting plenty of these in the diet.
I recommend that everybody take 2 to 3 grams of supplemental fish oil a day. I think this is for general health, for healthy aging but certainly very good for skin health.
There is a particular fat called GLA which is hard to get in the diet, that you can get in natural products like evening primrose oil and black current oil and these can be taken as supplements, easy to find in natural food stores.
And for women especially this can greatly improve the texture and appearance of hair, nails and skin.
On top of that I think it’s very important to have a good intake of antioxidants and all the protective fidonutrients that you get in fruits and vegetables.
So eating fruits and vegetables, especially across the color spectrum, everyday is important, and I recommend taking a good multi-vitamin, multi-mineral supplement everyday as insurance against gaps in the diet.
About Dr. Weil, M.D.:
Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D., was born in Philadelphia in 1942, received an A.B. degree in biology (botany) from Harvard in 1964 and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1968. After completing a medical internship at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, he worked a year with the National Institute of Mental Health before writing his first book, The Natural Mind. From 1971-75, as a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, Dr. Weil traveled widely in North and South America and Africa collecting information on drug use in other cultures, medicinal plants, and alternative methods of treating disease. From 1971-84 he was on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and conducted investigations of medicinal and psychoactive plants.