3 best foods for sun protection
You already know that too much sun is disastrous for the health of your skin. Premature ageing, wrinkles, dehydration, broken capillaries and some cancers are all caused by too much sun exposure.
But the flipside is of course that sun is also essential for your health, and without it you can’t make Vitamin D which plays a role in hormone production, brain function and immunity.
So what can you do? As is often the case, the answer is found in what you eat. There are several foods which help protect you from the inside against UV damage from the sun, and here are the three very best.
1) Fish oil
Fish oil supplements reduce sun sensitivity in fair skinned people who burn easily, and prevent sunburn.
After just one month of regularly taking fish oil, trial volunteers noticed that they burned less easily.
Not only will fish oil help protect your skin against sunburn, it helps to reduce the visible effects of damage that’s already occurred, such as wrinkles and pigmentation, and possibly has a role in preventing skin cancer.
Tomatoes are naturally high in the antioxidant lycopene which gives them their red colour. Research found that when healthy women ate 55gms of tomato paste, containing 16mg of lycopene, for 12 weeks, they had significant protection against both short term and potentially long term skin damage.
In fact, it took them 30% longer to develop sunburn than before they started.
And if a tan is what you’re after, lycopene interacts with melanin, the pigment produced in the skin which makes you brown, allowing a faster, longer lasting tan to develop.
3) Green tea
The ability of the active compounds found in green tea to protect against cancers of all kinds has been extensively studied. What we now know is that when skin cells are exposed to the sun, the genes which protect you against cancer are switched off, creating the right environment for tumours to grow.
The active compounds in green tea switch these tumour supressing genes back on after the skin is exposed to the sun, which could help protect you against skin cancers in the long term.
Other research found that green tea extract protected against developing wrinkles and damage to the collagen fibres in the skin.
Needless to say that too much sun will cause damage no matter what you eat, but increasing these foods for several months will help boost your skin’s natural protection.