Tag Archives: antioxidants
What you should eat for glowing skin and healthy hair
Ever wondered what you should be eating if you want glowing skin & healthy hair? Dr Michelle Braude, The Food Effect Doctor, explains. When you think of good hair and skin, the likes of Cheryl Cole – throwing her glossy mane across your TV chanting “because I’m worth it” – probably springs to mind. But in actual fact, getting healthy skin and hair goes a lot deeper than what we put on it. That’s because our hair and skin are our biological mirrors of our inner well being. In simple terms, what we put into our body affects our skin…
Free radicals: They age your skin but you can slow them down
Free Radicals: they might sound like an anarchistic political movement but as Zara Kassam explains, they’re tiny molecules that do a whole lot of damage. But, there is help at hand. Free radicals, antioxidants and oxidative stress have become trendy topics as far as health and longevity are concerned. Many people have heard that foods and skincare products with antioxidants protect us from free radical damage, which is responsible for many of the effects of aging on both the body and mind. But what exactly are free radicals, why are they bad and where do they come from? Like everything in nature,…
Antioxidants: how they can help your skin
Antioxidants in our food have long been touted as an anti-ageing miracle so it’s hardly surprising that they’re in creams and serums. But do they really have the same benefits when they’re in a tube? Heather Stephen reports. Antioxidants are in nearly every anti-ageing product because of their value in slowing the damage caused by what are known as free radicals. The antioxidants are vital for protecting cells and boosting collagen production. Here’s how they do it. Molecules in skin cells are damaged by exposure to sun damage, pollution, smoking, alcohol and other lifestyle factors. That causes the atoms in the cells…
Pollution: how to combat its aging effects
Pollution can play havoc with your skin – irritating and prematurely aging it. But there are things you can do to combat it. Heather Stephen explains. The World Health Organisation claims air pollution is linked to one in eight deaths worldwide, and pollution through cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, wood burners and industry has been linked to a whole raft of diseases from dementia to heart disease to cancer. And it’s pretty disastrous for our looks too. Our skin is our largest organ and it bears the brunt of the daily assault our environment throws at us – prematurely aging and…
Flavonoids: What are they and can they help your skin?
Flavonoids are a big thing in cosmetics – but what are they and what do they do? Dr Haran Sivapalan explains. Green tea, soybeans, red wine and thyme. What do these ingredients have in common (apart from perhaps all being components of a dish prepared by Heston Blumenthal)? The answer is that they all contain flavonoids, a class of over 4000 plant-derived chemicals (or ‘phytochemicals’) which share a similar molecular structure. Structurally, flavonoids are a type of “polyphenol” – a group of molecules that, in plants, play various roles including: aiding reproduction, fighting against infection and protecting against damage from…
