Natural skin care is eating right and providing your skin with the nutrients, vitamins and minerals necessary for healthy skin and the use of natural-based  and paraben-free products that promote healthy skin cell development.

Natural Skin Care through Nutrition  

Fruits, grains, fish, vegetables, and good oils and fats really make an impact on anti-aging. Sugar, bad fats and oils, salt, and alcohol show negatively when used in excess. Vitamins and minerals containing the ingredients that may be left out of the average diet can also play a role in making the cell membranes healthier.   Nutrition creates a healthy environment for the organs to work properly and to stay clean.

The skin is the largest organ the body has. A balanced diet provides a glowing appearance and blemish-free complexion. Foods rich in Omega 3 fatty acids provide nutrients only found through foods.  Fish such as Mackerel and Salmon contain oils (fish oils) that have been shown to improve skin health as well as reduce cardiovascular disease.  

Balancing Your Diet For Good Skin  

A balanced diet is hard to keep up with in today’s world of fast-paced movement and fast food restaurants. To maintain a balance of healthy foods, try to consume at least two cups of vegetables each day and two and a half cups of vegetables. A salad with meals can give you mush of this requirement. Also needed are foods containing whole grains that are not milled before they are made.  

Bread, rice, pasta, couscous, and polenta help here. Milk, cheeses, and yogurt are positive foods. The good bacteria in the yogurt will help to reduce the amount of bacteria on the skin and reduce the risk of infections. It will also boost the immune system for faster healing.  

Foods To Avoid

Foods to stay away from are excess sugars, salt, alcohol, and fats. These foods show up on the skin in ways that are damaging. Alcoholics usually have a dry look to their skin caused by damage to the tissues. Diabetics who have excess sugars deal with dry skin and bacterial infections on the skin. This is true of those who are not diabetic but take in large amounts of sugar. Salt is positively bad for the skin and tissue because it drains the needed fluid out of the body.

The skin looses its elasticity and becomes brittle. The skin can crack and bacteria and infection can seep-in and cause problems. It is really true that you are what you eat so for healthy skin, a good diet is essential.

Natural skin care begins with a healthy diet and proper nutrition.  Though supplements may help provide additional benefits, a diet rich in vegetables, fruit, fish and low-fat, high-protein meats will add vitamins only found through consumption.  For healthy skin care, your diet may be as important as any natural skin products.

The products used by Cleopatra and all of the women around her provided those women with a way to carry-out the classic form of natural skin care. Those products had a preponderance of plant-based ingredients. Any minerals in those products came from substances found in nature.

Herbs, roots, oils and flowers all provided ancient women with an adequate supply of the substances that they needed when caring for their skin. Those women learned how to mix plant-derived substances with carrier agents that could be found in nature.

The mummies of Egypt serve as proof that the Egyptian women had access to natural, yet effective preservatives. Those women did not add synthetic chemicals to the products that they put on their skin. Those women could preserve those products without using any of the synthetic chemicals that are found on many of today’s product labels.

Those women never had to worry about the possible side effects from any substance that they put on their skin. At the same time, those women lacked today’s knowledge about natural skin care. They did not know, for example, that fatty fish contains omega-3 fatty acids, and the ingestion of generous amounts of omega-3 fatty acids can prevent premature aging.

Those women had no access to information about the complementary relationship between plants and humans. They could not count on scientists to produce more effective products, products that capitalized on that same complementary relationship.

At that time no one knew what proteins in the skin were necessary for maintenance of healthy skin. At the time of Cleopatra, women did not live to be as old as they do today. Yet today, women do not want to believe that only younger women can have healthy skin.

At the time of Cleopatra, no one realized that use of natural skin care products  could facilitate production of important proteins. Today, women can go online and read about proteins such as collagen and elastin.

Today, women can sit at a computer and discover that collagen is protein, a protein that displays a fiber-like characteristic. The collagen in skin gives it tensile strength; it causes it to become firmer.

A woman at a computer can also search for information about elastin. Her search should lead her to discovery of the fact that elastin allows the skin to be flexible. When it contains elastin, then stretched skin can return to its original form.

Our evolving understanding of skin care has given present-day women products that were not available to Cleopatra and her retinue of women. Today women can apply to their products that do more than simply facilitate the production of collagen and elastin. Today women can use products that actually stimulate the production of those proteins.

When women use those products, their skin makes collagen. It becomes firmer, and it ceases to sag. Because it can also make elastin, it returns to its original position. The women who use such natural skin care products can enjoy seeing a more youthful face in the mirror.

Dementia is not a disease, but rather a serious neurological disorder resulting from a disease or disorder. It affects someone’s intellectual and mental abilities, disabling the bodily functions. Alzheimer’s Disease is the most common cause of Dementia in people over the age of 65.

In the January, 2009 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, an article was published regarding, A Finnish Cardiovascular Risk Factors, Aging and Dementia (CAIDE) Study. The findings of this study were revealed, stating that coffee drinkers are at less risk of suffering from Dementia than those who drink little or no coffee at all. It further noted that the lowest risk was with moderate coffee drinkers who consumed from three to five cups a day.

This study is just one in a global research series that relates coffee drinkers to Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia. These findings are not yet conclusive because they need to be confirmed by many other studies.

Associate Professor, Mila Kivipelto of the University of Kuopio in Finland and Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden commented, “It opens the possibility that dietary interventions could modify the risk of Dementia.”

Another study by a team of researchers for the Journal of Neuroinflamation verified that when they gave rabbits a caffeine supplement, the vital barrier between the brain and the main blood supply was protected from the dementia-causing damage that cholesterol can inflict. This barrier is a filter that protects the central nervous system from potentially harmful chemicals that are in the rest of the bloodstream. A recent experiment showed that as little as one cup of coffee a day was enough to generate these benefits.

Their previous studies have suggested that caffeine does lower the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, and their recent studies are opening up the explanations as to why.

Coffee has been a very controversial subject regarding health for some time. Many years ago, it was linked to a range of health problems that included diabetes complications and miscarriages.

Recent studies, however, are revealing that coffee is actually more beneficial to our health than was assumed. Besides the new findings that coffee can help prevent age-related Dementia, it is also being accredited with the prevention of certain cancers such as ovarian and liver cancer.

An article in the November, 2006 issue of USA Today stated that the results of experiments with caffeine intake revealed that coffee may not only help to prevent Alzheimer’s Disease, but also Parkinson’s Disease. It was suggested that five cups of coffee a day could be enough to ward off the degenerative diseases. It further stated that at the time of publication, approximately six million people in the United States are affected by some form of Dementia.

For more up-to-date information on the effects that caffeine has on Dementia and other health issues, a great site to visit is MedlinePlus, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health.

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