Transcript
Here's some signs I wish I knew before I was in my 30s. You can change your skin color by eating the right fruits and veggies, and multiple studies have shown that this change is consistently rated as more attractive than an equivalent suntan, if you don't overdeal it. So there are some tricks for getting it right. Welcome back to 30 studies to change your life. Nutrition Week continued. Turns out that humans are wired to find the glow from a nutritious diet attractive, sort of like how peacocks flaunt their colors. Enter carotenoids. The colorful superheroes of the fruits and veggie world, also found in some animal products like egg yolks and salmon. But they're not just potential cancer and heart disease fighters, they also work wonders on your skin tone. From the orangey, alpha, and beta-carotene that you find in carrots to the lycopene that you find in tomatoes. When you eat fruits and veggies, these carotenoids make their way out through your sweat glands and then back into the outer layer of your skin, making it look a bit more yellowish or reddish. Sort of like a natural bronzer and blush. These studies had people rate the attractiveness of the color change from either carotenoids or suntanin. In both Caucasian and black faces. rated the carotenoid coloring as being more attractive, which was a surprise to me. Then they showed that supplementing for just eight weeks was enough to make a meaningful change. But I prefer foods to supplements, and which ones you choose and how you prepare them can make more than a 10x difference in the available carotenoids that you can consume. So next time we'll cover the best foods and preparation methods and a fun experiment that I'll be starting. So many sunburns that idiot younger me should have avoided.
Additional notes
Once they get into your skin they actually PROTECT vs UV damage from the sun! We all grew up hearing “don’t eat too many carrots or you’ll turn orange.” Turns out it’s sort of true, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing! When done to the right degree, and with the orange properly balanced with red. There’s also another pathway for them to reach the skin, via slower diffusion from the adipose tissue, blood and lymph, but it takes longer. These THREE Studies all show the same result, with people preferring the yellowish look of carotenoids vs the color change from melanin. They isolate color by using a computer program where people can adjust sliders to make the face more or less yellow or brown, in keeping with the exact shades from both of those compounds. This let them isolate the effect of color on attractiveness and perceived health without the other health benefits of fruits and vegetables influencing it. I do think that there’s a version of the “tanned” look that wasn’t properly captured in the sliders that they used, and the way they handled the black faces wasn’t perfect in that regard either, but the main result of the specific type of yellowing from the carotenoids being viewed as attractive definitely holds! 📚 STUDIES doi: 10.1080/17470218.2014.94419 doi: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.09.003 doi: 10.1111/ajpy.12163 #health #science #nutrition #skinhealth