The Anti-Wrinkle Secret in Your Kitchen

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

My wife, Laurie, and I spent early September rampaging around eastern Oregon — rafting the Deschutes River, hiking up dry desert washes, and generally soaking up the atmosphere.

But… it’s high, cloudless, and dry up there. The sun is strong.

Did we worry that the sun’s harsh rays would make us prematurely wrinkled?

Not a bit.

I’ve made the case before that prudent sun exposure is healthful. It stimulates the body to convert cholesterol into vitamin D3.

That vitamin, in turn, is vital for health, even lowering cancer risk.

Yet ultraviolet radiation from the sun is indeed a stressor.

So here’s the important point.

Not all skin is the same. Some resists solar stress better than others.

I’ve stated in these pages that the type of the food you eat has a large effect on your vulnerability to disease.

Turns out that this applies to premature skin wrinkling as well.

If you eat a great deal of polyunsaturated fat — the kind that stays liquid at room temperature, such as soy, sunflower, canola, or corn oil — solar radiation will do a number on your skin.

It will rapidly promote wrinkle formation.

If, however, you habitually eat highly saturated oil — the kind that stays solid at room temperature, such as coconut oil or butter — the result will be quite different.

This has been established in several studies. In one of the best, a 2010 Japanese survey¹ including more than 700 women, those who consumed the most saturated fat developed significantly fewer wrinkles. Their skin was more elastic as well.

Why?

Consider a common culinary technique — oven-baking vegetables such as Brussels sprouts in oil on a cookie sheet.

If you try this with polyunsaturated soybean oil on your veggies, cleanup is a nightmare. The oil, oxidized by the oven’s heat, forms a sticky, gummy residue on the cookie sheet, similar to varnish and about as difficult to scrape off.

Well, within the body, it does more or less the same thing — this highly unstable oil oxidizes and cross-links like varnish, reducing elasticity and giving rise to wrinkles.

But cook those vegetables in precisely the same way with highly saturated coconut oil and the oil on the sheet rinses away with a quick spray of water.

Within the body, it also resists oxidation and cross-linking, promoting smoother skin.

Bottom line? Overexposure to the sun’s ultraviolet light is definitely tough on skin (which is why I recommend measured, prudent exposure of roughly 30 minutes daily between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on the face and arms).

But our vulnerability to the skin damage that we typically blame on the sun is actually largely due to what we eat.

So avoid liquid oils derived from seeds because, like the toxins that they are, they drive inflammatory damage to organs and blood vessel linings.

Instead, eat healthy, saturated fats, including coconut oil, grass-fed butter, lard, and grass-fed beef tallow.

You’ll be healthier in many ways — and younger-looking as well.

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions

Citations

1. Chisato Nagata, Kozue Nakamura, Keiko Wada, Shino Oba, Makoto Hayashi, Noriyuki Takeda and Keigo Yasuda. Association of dietary fat, vegetables and antioxidant micronutrients with skin ageing in Japanese women. British Journal of Nutrition, 2010