Healthy Foods For Skin

No matter what you put on your skin, if you are not eating healthy foods for skin, it will never truly glow. A good diet gives your skin the nutrients it needs to function properly and stay healthy and youthful, in a way no cream, however expensive, ever fully can.

It's worth saying plainly: if you're spending hundreds of pounds a year chasing anti-ageing promises in a jar, some of that money, and a fair amount of your future skin health, might be better invested in what's on your plate. We'd genuinely rather you spent less on us and more on real food. That's not a bad trade for either of us.

Water for Skin Health

Drinking enough water is vital for skin health, skin is hydrated from the inside out, not by the watery moisturisers so often advertised for the job. There's no single magic number that suits everyone, it depends on your body, activity level, climate, and diet, but a useful rule of thumb: if you're waiting until you feel thirsty, you're probably already a little behind. Most of us could stand to drink a bit more than we do. Water also helps flush out toxins.

Antioxidants

There's little debate about vitamins and antioxidants, even where the rest of nutrition science argues constantly. A diet rich in fresh vegetables, lightly cooked or raw, reduces free radical damage, premature ageing, and disease risk. When it comes to healthy foods for skin, antioxidants are one of the top considerations.

Juicing is great, mainly because most of us don't chew nearly enough to release these nutrients ourselves, and nothing is lost to cooking. Fruit smoothies are often higher in sugar than people realise, so lean on vegetables instead, beetroot, carrots, spinach, chard, wheatgrass. I've even heard brussels sprouts work well in a smoothie, though I confess I haven't tried it myself.

Grow Your Own

Growing your own, even just a few herbs and some living salad on a windowsill, is a genuinely good boost. Much commercially farmed veg comes from soil that's been intensively farmed for years, and minerals like magnesium, copper, selenium, zinc, and iron can end up depleted even in perfectly healthy-looking plants. What you grow yourself, you can pick fresh as you need it.

Good Colour

It's hard to know exactly which vitamins are in which plants, but a good rule of thumb: the more colourful your plate, the more likely you are eating foods for healthy skin. Beetroot, carrots, dark leafy greens, peppers, tomatoes, blueberries, are all healthy foods for skin, bursting with vitamins and antioxidants. If you want colour in your cheeks, start with colour on your plate.

Vitamin A

  • Liver
  • Carrots
  • Red Pepper
  • Sweet Potatoes
  • Herbs, especially parsley, basil & oregano
  • Dark Greens
  • Dried Apricot
  • Butternut Squash
  • Beetroot

Vitamin C

  • Oranges and orange juice
  • Red and green peppers
  • Strawberries
  • Blueberries
  • Blackcurrants
  • Broccoli
  • Brussels sprouts
  • Kiwi
  • Beetroot

Vitamin E

  • Avocados
  • Sunflower seeds
  • Dark green veg
  • Nuts
  • Tropical fruits
  • Olive oil

Vitamin D

Vitamin D is a genuine exception to "just eat well." Your body makes most of its Vitamin D from sunlight on skin, not from food, and at UK latitudes, from around October to March there simply isn't enough usable sunlight for that to happen at all, no matter how good your diet is. This is one of the few areas where the NHS itself recommends everyone consider a daily supplement through the autumn and winter months. It's exactly why we added a Vitamin D3 supplement to our range, some gaps genuinely need supplementing, this is one of them.

Other Foods Rich in Antioxidants

Olive oil, cocoa, nuts, red wine (in moderation!), broccoli, and green tea. Tofu is also rich in isoflavones, believed to help protect against collagen breakdown.

Beautiful Bone Broth

Vegetarians should skip this part! These days, cooking from scratch often involves a stock cube rather than the real thing, and very few of us still make stock from the bones left over from a roast. That's a shame. Once an animal's been bought or killed, it seems only right to use as much of it as possible, and if you eat meat and don't make stock, you're missing one of the best and most economical anti-ageing tricks going.

Bone broth is loaded with glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), glucosamine, chondroitin, hyaluronic acid among them. We believe GAGs from real bone stock, absorbed in something close to their natural form, have something a supplement genuinely struggles to replicate. GAGs support joint health, strengthen tendons, ligaments, and arteries, and promote collagen production, hyaluronic acid in particular helps skin retain moisture. Is chicken soup really the age-old cure grandmothers everywhere swear by? We think there's real substance behind the folklore.

Stock also supports the liver, whose capacity to detoxify depends partly on the amino acid glycine, found in homemade stock. And gelatin appears to help repair a compromised gut lining, relevant to far more than digestion alone, see our Gut-Skin Axis page for the fuller picture on how that connects to skin.

Broth is rich enough in minerals and amino acids that it can replace some of the meat in your diet, cooking beans or rice in it, or using it as a soup base, is an easy way to eat a more balanced diet for less.

Offal

Vegetarians should definitely skip this bit too, sorry! If boiling up bones wasn't for you, liver probably isn't either. But liver and other offal are some of the leanest, most nutrient-dense meats available, and another good source of hyaluronic acid. Liver also contains the most concentrated source of Vitamin A you can eat, all of the B vitamins (especially B12), iron, trace minerals, and CoQ10, also available as a standalone supplement if liver really isn't for you.

The catch is that organic liver is genuinely hard to find, the liver is the body's filter for toxins, so anything used in intensive farming tends to accumulate there. You won't often see it organic in a supermarket, but farmers' markets and small, trusted producers are worth seeking out.

Essential Fatty Acids

A nutrient is "essential" when the body can't make it itself and has to get it from diet. Omega-3 and Omega-6 are the two essential fatty acids that matter most here, and they need to stay roughly in balance, since they compete for the same metabolic pathways. Opinions differ on the ideal ratio, but there's wide agreement that most of us in the West eat far too much Omega-6 relative to Omega-3.

Omega-6 drives inflammation the body sometimes genuinely needs, to isolate pathogens or cushion damaged tissue. Omega-3 helps bring that inflammation back down again. Too little Omega-3 relative to Omega-6, and that natural inflammatory response can run unchecked, which is linked to increased risk of heart disease, arthritis, and skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis.

Omega-3 may also support the skin's own defences against sun damage and free radical damage more broadly (see our Free Radicals page), and some research suggests it can help calm overactive immune responses in autoimmune conditions such as lupus, Sjögren's syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis, though the evidence here is still developing rather than settled.

Sources of Omega-3

  • Oily fish
  • Wild salmon (not farmed)
  • Sardines
  • Grass-fed meat (most commercially reared beef is grain-fed)
  • Tofu
  • Walnuts
  • Almonds
  • Pumpkin seeds
  • Walnut oil
  • Flax oil
  • Hemp oil

If fish and offal aren't for you, that's most of this list gone, which is exactly why we carry an Omega-3 vegan supplement too.

Sources of Omega-6

  • Grain-fed meat
  • Poultry
  • Eggs
  • Cereals
  • Wheat
  • Avocado
  • Most vegetable oils (sunflower especially, which turns up in a huge amount of processed food)
  • Nuts
  • Sunflower seeds
  • Sesame seeds

Most of us eat far more from the Omega-6 list than the Omega-3 one, not helped by the fact that Omega-3s are particularly fragile and easily destroyed by cooking. Worth considering how to balance that, through diet, or supplementing where diet alone won't quite get you there.

For the science of why these fats need to be eaten fresh and largely uncooked, and why we formulate our own products with the same principle in mind, see our Free Radicals page.

Pulses

Lentils and other pulses are rich in collagen-supporting nutrients, protein, complex carbohydrates, and fibre. Use them to bulk out casseroles and stretch your meat further, buying a little good-quality meat, extending it with homemade stock, and building it into a protein-rich stew is often better value and better nutrition than buying more meat outright.

Inflammatory Foods

Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects: refined sugar, refined carbs, gluten, red meat, processed foods, deep-fried foods, coffee, and alcohol. Too much of any of these can aggravate chronic skin conditions like eczema, psoriasis, and acne, as well as inflammatory conditions like heart disease and arthritis. Keep them to a minimum, and cut them right back if you're dealing with a flare-up you can't otherwise resolve.

Cinnamon is also worth knowing about specifically, it's a recognised trigger for perioral dermatitis in some people.

A Word on Supplements

You'll notice we mention a few of our own supplements throughout this page, Vitamin D3, Omega-3, CoQ10. We want to be honest about why: a supplement should genuinely supplement a good diet, not stand in for one. It's easy these days to eat badly all day and assume a pill, whether a supplement or a medicine, can undo the damage. It generally can't. Where we mention one here, it's because there's a real, specific gap, like UK winter sunlight, or a food source most people simply don't eat, not because we think supplements are a shortcut around eating foods for healthy skin and general wellbeing.