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How What You Eat Changes Your Face

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How What You Eat Changes Your Face

Here's How What You Eat Changes The Way Your Face Looks

Long Story Short

In her new book, a skincare specialist makes the bold claim that the things you eat and drink can have a unique, direct and sometimes immediate visual impact on your face. She believes wine, sugar, gluten and dairy all change the face in different ways.

Long Story

People have believed for centuries that what you eat will show up not just around your waist, but in your face as well. As teenagers, most of us were told that acne is a direct result of eating too much pizza and chocolate (this is not actually true). As adults, it’s undeniable that too many nights of hard partying (or simply not enough sleep) will make us look noticeably older. Now, a naturopathic doctor and skincare specialist named Nigma Talib claims that not only can our diets affect our faces, but that different substances produce their own unique effects.

“Any issues with the digestion of certain foods – perhaps you have an unknown intolerance or you eat more of a food than you can comfortably digest – can cause a cascade of chemical and hormonal changes that speed the ageing process internally and externally, with the results swiftly showing on your face,” she told the Daily Mail. “Certain food groups appear to be particularly damaging: gluten, dairy, sugar and alcohol. Each taxes the body in specific ways, contributing to a cluster of ageing symptoms such as spots, puffiness, changes in skin tone, premature fine lines and wrinkles or sagging.”

Wine, she claims, produces redness between the eyes, droopy eyelids and deepened nasolabial folds. Eating too much sugar results in nastiness like taut, pallid skin and acne pustules. Dairy leads to bags and swollen eyelids, while gluten (everyone’s favourite food boogeyman) can lead to puffy cheeks and a blotchy complexion.

This is all, to put it gently, extremely dubious. Talib is a “naturopathic doctor,” which means “not actually a doctor at all of any kind.” What’s more, these facial descriptions sound less like scientific deductions and more like someone simply describing what happens when someone does too much of anything. Drink a couple of bottles of wine, and you will indeed wake up with a red, wrinkly face –flushing/blushing and dehydration are by-products of alcohol, after all. Sugar face sounds like someone with a nutritionally-vacant diet, and gluten face sounds like what happens when someone eats too many carbs of any kind – gluten be damned. Of course, dairy face sounds an awful lot like someone with a degree of lactose intolerance, which is both common in adults and well understood by actual doctors.

That said, while there may not be any hocus pocus behind the way certain foods affect your face, it’s worth remembering that how you live and eat can definitely determine how your face ages. It should also be noted that while it’s easy to age yourself prematurely, there’s really no such thing as an “anti-ageing” product – there are things that will improve your skin's appearance, but only temporarily. If you want your skin to stay young, you’ll have to do it the hard, old-fashioned, un-fun way – clean living.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Are there any foods that really are bad for the skin on their own?

Disrupt Your Feed: I definitely saw “wine face” staring at me in the mirror after the weekend’s festivities.

Drop This Fact: About 65% of the world’s adult population has trouble handling lactose, so it’s no surprise that dairy can have a strong effect on some people’s appearance.

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