If you have sun-sensitive skin - like me - but you love being outdoors, then Mother Nature holds a secret for you that will save your skin and change your life (as it did mine)!

Just imagine, what if there was a simple and natural way to prevent your skin from getting easily sunburned? What's if, as a side effect, it also helps preventing you from pre-mature aging and even skin cancer? How would you feel to be able playing carefree outside in the sun - despite your sun-sensitivity - and actually reaping the benefits of UV light? And all of it without sunscreen and chemicals.

Mother Nature's secret was discovered by a breakthrough in scientific research. It showed that the oral ingestation of certain vegetables turn sun-sensitive skin into less-sun-sensitive.
Read this article ...

Your skin is the largest organ of your body, and obviously the most visible. At some time in their lives most people look for ways to improve their skin, whether it’s calming acne, preventing fine lines and wrinkles, removing age spots, or just generally making the skin look healthier and more attractive. Certain antioxidants may help prevent some skin problems, including skin cancer. These antioxidants may also help improve the health and appearance of your hair and nails.

Antioxidants, you may know, neutralize free radicals, which are molecules that damage cells. By damaging skin cells free radicals contribute to wrinkles, other signs of aging, and possibly skin cancer. A major source of these unwelcome free radicals is sunlight, especially UVA, which penetrates deeper than UVB. By neutralizing the free radicals from sunlight and other sources, antioxidants help keep your skin cells healthy and your skin looking and feeling youthful.

Vitamins A, C, and E, as well as lycopene, flavonoids, and beta-carotene are antioxidants that play important roles in preventing premature aging of the skin. Think of it this way: While lotions and sunscreens protect your skin from the outside, antioxidants protect your skin from the inside.

Food for Your Skin
To help keep your skin looking its best, include generous servings of the following foods in your diet:

Tomatoes. Juicy and healthful, tomatoes are rich in vitamin C as well as the antioxidant glutathione, which helps boost your body’s immune system, an essential factor in skin health. Tomatoes and other red fruits also contain lycopene, an antioxidant that appears to reduce the risk of skin cancer.

Leafy greens—Leafy greens such as kale, collard greens and spinach contain large amounts of vitamins C and E, making them very effective in preventing skin damage. Because vitamin E helps the body produce vitamin C, the combination of these two antioxidants is especially powerful. Collard greens, spinach, and kale are also rich in beta-carotene, an antioxidant the helps skin cells develop.

Green Tea – Rich in flavonoids, green tea is both a skin-healthy beverage and an ingredient in skin lotions and creams. Some flavonoids have anti-carcinogenic and anti-inflammatory properties in addition to being potent antioxidants.

Antioxidants show great promise as agents of health. Studies continue to look at the effects of antioxidants on the skin and other organs of the body. The good news is that most people can get all the antioxidants they need from a balanced, healthy diet. Eating the antioxidant-rich foods listed above may improve your health and keep your skin, hair, and nails looking great.

You have probably always been told to eat your fruit and veggies right? Well there is a benefit to eating a diet high in these foods.  They provide antioxidants which may play a role in preventing diseases that are related to oxidation[8].

Oxidation is a process that occurs within your body all the time to produce energy from the oxygen we breathe in. It’s a totally natural and necessary process, but unfortunately it also produces unstable molecules called free radicals. Free radicals are atoms that are missing an electron in their outer ring. This makes them extremely volatile and they aggressively seek to fill that last gap with an electron from another compound in the body. The real trouble begins when free radicals damage cell membranes or DNA structures.

Besides the normal metabolic pathways of oxidation, free radical damage may also be caused by environmental toxins such as smoking, pollution, sunlight/UV damage, frying and BBQing foods, as well as household chemicals, unhealthy oils, preservatives and chemicals found in refined foods and emotional stress.

As well as this, once a free radical has attacked a compound, it loses an electron and will search for another electron from neighbouring compounds. In this way a chain reaction could potentially damage large sections of a cell membrane or DNA. Damage can accumulate over many years and if there is an excess of free radicals that our body cannot control, then oxidative stress can occur.

If a free radical is able to react with a nearby molecule, it will continue onto the one beside it in a potentially never ending chain unless stopped. Herein lays the risk; if a free radical attacks a cell wall or part of a DNA strand and it isn’t controlled, it will do significant and irreversible damage to the structures around it, which in some cases can lead to heart disease. In the case of a cell wall, the cell could die or be unable to function properly. In the case of DNA, it can mutate the genetic code in such a way that it becomes cancerous and can lead to a cancerous growth.
Oxidative stress weakens the body and makes it harder for it to fight degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s[1,2], Parkinson’s[3], Heart disease[4] , Diabetes[5,6],  Cataracts, Cancer, Rheumatoid Arthritis[7] , Hypertension and aging.  However, our bodies are well equipped to deal with free radical damage and this is where antioxidants come in (the name says it all – an ‘anti oxidant’).

Antioxidants stop chain reactions and minimize the damage to cells, hopefully before they cause irreparable damage like groups of cancerous cells or damaged DNA. Often the antioxidant is self-sacrificing and gets oxidized to stop the reaction. The antioxidant will have a stable end product which means the chain reaction stops. It does mean however that we need a constant intake of antioxidants to replace the ones that have succumbed to oxidation each day.

As you can imagine research on the way that antioxidants work in the human body has been moving at great speed over the past few years.  Many antioxidant compounds have been isolated in vitro (in a test tube) but haven’t shown benefits in vivo (in living, breathing humans). A possible reason for the difference in results may be that in a test-tube unknown processes that occur in the body cannot interfere with processes that require antioxidants. The main antioxidants that have been proven to help fight oxidation damage in our bodies are Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin E, Selenium and Flavonoids.

• Vitamin E is one of the most powerful antioxidants and has been shown to have positive effects on lowering the risk of heart disease. It does so by giving up an electron to the free radical in an irreversible reaction.

• Vitamin C is arguably the most well known vitamin and it also provides antioxidant support by helping to regenerate Vitamin E after its been sacrificed to a free radical. Vitamin C has the ability to donate an electron and in this way it helps to stabilise Vitamin E. Vitamin C is what’s called a ‘free radical scavenger’ because it picks up reactive free radicals and turns them into less reactive free radicals which quickly breakdown into harmless products.

• Selenium is another antioxidant important for maintaining health. The main sources are from plant foods which reflect the status of selenium in the soil. In many countries levels are generally low so people may not get enough from the fruits and vegetables alone. Selenium’s antioxidant properties come from the fact that it is involved with enzymes that have antioxidant functions.

The top foods are as follows:

Kale has extremely high vitamin A antioxidant levels. One portion of Kale can provide 192% of your daily needs! As well as high levels of vitamins A, C and E, kale also contains phenols, all of which are thought to decrease your risk of heart disease and cancer. Spinach is extremely high in lutein, a carotenoid and antioxidant that helps to preserve eyesight. Lutein is the main compound in the region of the eye where you have maximum visual sensitivity and it was found that it could help protect your vision. Lutein seems to work especially well as a shield to protect the retina from sun damage and fight the free radicals that can harm your eyes.

Broccoli/ Brussel sprouts

Broccoli has long been known as a ‘superfood’, but other cruciferous vegetables like cabbage, cauliflower and brussel sprouts can also help to decrease the risk of cancer and heart disease. They contain an antioxidant compound which may reduce the risk of breast cancer and other estrogen-sensitive cancer like cancers of the ovaries and cervix.

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  Research has shown that individuals who consume more fruit and vegetables have a lower risk of heart disease and maybe some other diseases[8].  This may be partly due to the antioxidant content of these foods. The antioxidants in food work better than those found in supplements so it is important to consistently consume a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables. Alternatively you can take a UV protection supplement called Ready Ray and receive the similar benefits.

References:

• 1. Christen Y (1 February 2000). "Oxidative stress and Alzheimer disease". Am J Clin Nutr 71 (2): 621S–629S.
• 2. Nunomura A, Castellani R, Zhu X, Moreira P, Perry G, Smith M (2006). "Involvement of oxidative stress in Alzheimer disease". J Neuropathol Exp Neurol 65(7): 631–41.
• 3. Wood-Kaczmar A, Gandhi S, Wood N (2006). "Understanding the molecular causes of Parkinson's disease".Trends Mol Med 12 (11): 521–8.
• 4. Tribble DL and others. Antioxidant consumption and risk of coronary heart disease: Emphasis on vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta-carotene. American Heart Association Science Advisory. Circulation 99:591-595, 1999.
• 5. Davì G, Falco A, Patrono C (2005). "Lipid peroxidation in diabetes mellitus". Antioxid Redox Signal7(1–2): 256–68.
• 6. Giugliano D, Ceriello A, Paolisso G (1996). "Oxidative stress and diabetic vascular complications". Diabetes Care19(3): 257–67.
• 7. Hitchon C, El-Gabalawy H (2004).Arthritis Res Ther 6 (6): 265–78.
• 8. Stanner SA, Hughes J, Kelly CN, Buttriss J (2004). "A review of the epidemiological evidence for the 'antioxidant hypothesis'". Public Health Nutr 7 (3): 407–22.
9. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/antioxidants.html