Nine Horror Foods For Skincare Disasters

Nobody wants terrible skin – but many things could be causing your acne breakouts or greasy nightmares, without you even knowing it! For example, food is a common cause of bad skin, which many people may not have even considered. Not all food is bad since many foods with high fiber content can be beneficial to your skincare regime. However, there are many common household foodstuffs which can be incredibly damaging to your skin. Here are just nine of the worst offenders, which you should cautiously consider eating if you have any regard for your skin.

High glycemic index foods

If you're not sure what that means, don't worry. This is simply foods like popcorn, white bread and bagels, which gives you an intense sugar rush once digested. Glycemic index can be figured out at glycemicindex.com, where anything under 55 is a ‘low' index. Not only can high glycemic index foods cause inflammation, which could lead to skin breakouts, but they also often cause skin problems due to the severe levels of sugar introduced to your body.

Read: Fruit Sugar: Good Guy, Bad Guy or Both?

Sugar

Leading on from that point, if food has too much sugar, it will affect your skin. Chocolate and sweets have long been terrorized for contributing to teenage acne, but this old wives' tale is actually surprisingly accurate. High levels of sugar bring about dull and wrinkled skin, which no one wants, due to the breaking down of collagen and elastin, which usually maintain your skin. So, stay away from sugar (honey is a good natural substitute) if you want to keep your healthy, glowing skin!

Dairy

"Dairy is a tricky subject among skin experts, because whenever we are asked about it, all we can say is that we don't know for sure", Bianca Neumann, a health writer at Academized and Australian help, says, "because we don't have enough data and there are a lot of conflicting factors when it comes to studies on dairy". Many dairy products contain excess sugars, which can be a contributing factor of bad skin, or the cows which made the milk for the products may have been treated with hormones which are also known to cause bad skin. Avoiding it can be good for these reasons, but we can't know for sure if dairy itself is bad for your skin."

Read: 11 Non-Dairy Sources of Calcium

Bottled water

Another fairly unknown source of bad skin, but bottled water can have the same bad effects as hormones when it comes to your skin. The BPA in bottled water is a steroid analogue, which can wreak havoc on your skin since your body treats it like hormones. The same effect as dairy products which come from hormone-treated cows can have. In general, it's best to steer clear of bottled water unless it's absolutely necessary, and drink tap water or juices instead.

Too much alcohol

Nobody likes hangovers anyway, but if you knew about the damage which they were doing to your skin, you'd never drink again. Hangovers dry out the skin, causing damage in that way, and also make any lines or blemishes on the skin look ten times worse. Bags and puffy eyes will be much more visible, and have to be hidden by makeup like concealer and even tricks like putting compresses filled with milk under your eyes. if you don't want to have to go through all that trouble, and want to keep your skin naturally healthy, try to stay away or limit alcohol and save yourself – and your skin – that horrible morning after.

Salt

“It looks similar to sugar – and it’s similarly bad for your skin!” Morton Rife, a food blogger at State of writing and Paper fellows, declares. “Salt dehydrates your skin, meaning that the cells inside your body shrivel and can’t function. This is horrible for your skin and leads to lots of dehydrated, dried-up and dead cells, which make your skin flaky and peeling in places quite often. So many herbs can be used instead of the standard salt and pepper – just search up a few alternative recipes, and stop showering everything in that moisture-sucking white powder!”

Read Skin Care Products: Steer Clear of These 5 Ingredients

Spicy Food

Although you may love a curry on the weekend, or lathering your favourite pizza in hot sauce on a night in, it might not be great for your skin. Spicy foods can encourage inflammation and also flushing, not to mention their tendency to make pre-existing conditions much, much worse. Rosacea, for example, is highly-affected by spicy food, so any sufferers should make sure that they stay well-away from chilli and such, to make sure that they are not putting themselves in a needlessly-worse situation with their skin.

Coffee

Although it may be the only thing getting you out of bed every morning, however, you do need to consider the health implications of constantly getting your caffeine fix from coffee. Many studies have shown that coffee is actually diuretic, which means that it increases the amount of urine being discharged from the body. Not only will this send you to the toilet more often, but it also reduces the water levels in the body, putting you at risk of dehydration. This can be horrible for your skin cells and are liable to shrivel up once they recognise a lack of water. A simple fix would be to have a glass of water alongside your coffee, to make sure that you're not getting too dehydrated.

Milk Chocolate

Milk chocolate, as you may have suspected, is filled with sugar, so it isn't good for your skin at all. However, that doesn't mean you have to cut off chocolate entirely. In fact, dark chocolate (generally around 70% cocoa or more) is quite good for you, especially since it has a much-reduced amount of sugar in it, and you can even have it with some honey if you absolutely can't stand the sometimes bitter taste on its own. Dark chocolate is a refined and adult way to enjoy the often-childish treat of a chocolate bar, and, when eaten sensibly, can help you to avoid a skincare disaster.