Most plastic surgeons focus only on their craft – performing plastic surgeries to the best of their ability. There was a time when Dr Youn, a well-known American plastic surgeon, did just that too.
This changed after one of his patients unexpectedly died following a simple surgery, despite not having any underlying health conditions. The shock from this event made Dr Youn reassess his focus.
From that time on, he decided to focus on a holistic approach to beauty and aging. He delved into researching what people can do to look younger naturally, before considering any invasive procedures.
His goal shifted to keeping people out of the operating room for as long as possible. Ideally, forever.
His new motto became “Autojuvenate Before You Operate”.
In his book “Younger for Life”, Dr Youn lists five key mechanisms behind accelerated skin aging.
They are:
- nutritional depletion,
- chronic inflammation,
- collagen deterioration,
- free-radical damage, and
- the buildup of cellular waste.
Each one of these five factors can be addressed with lifestyle changes. You can read the book if you want to learn about all of them.
Here we will explain one nutritional habit that Dr, Youn calls “Skin enemy #1” because it can age your skin through two different mechanisms – chronic inflammation and collagen deterioration.
The picture above was posted on Dr. Youn’s Facebook page. He accompanied it with the comment:
“It’s not a secret anymore. Sugar = wrinkles!”
The problem is when you eat sugar or refined carbs (such as white bread, white rice, and pasta), your blood sugar spikes. This causes your insulin to spike as well. Chronic insulin spikes can result in chronic inflammation.
Chronic inflammation damages your skin and impedes your body’s natural processes, making you look and feel older. It degrades the quality of your skin, impairs its natural healing ability, and breaks down collagen.
Eating too much sugar and refined carbs also leads to the process of glycation. Sugar molecules can bond to the collagen fibers as well as elastin fibers in our skin and disturb their structure. The result of these reaction is the accumulation of “advanced glycation end products”, also, coincidentally, known as AGEs.
AGEs are damaging for our skin because our once tight collagen and elastin fibers become permanently kinked, leading to thinning skin, wrinkles, and sagging.
If you want to maintain a youthful appearance, consider cutting back on sugary and refined carbohydrate rich foods.