Are Food Additives Robbing Us Of Healthy Glowing Skin?

Do you experience adverse skin reactions and you can’t work out why? Perhaps you’ve tried changing your skin care products and your beauty regime. You may have tried wearing less make up, being more diligent about cleansing and exfoliating, or even drinking more water. Surely these are all good things for our skin! Yes they are, and the issue may have something to do with the additives in the food we consume. A skin reaction may not be limited to the face, impacting other parts of your body too.

Did you know that many food additives can lead to adverse skin reactions? While we’ve all heard you are what you eat, I’m guessing that most people probably don’t realise the detrimental impact that food additives can have on us achieving natural, healthy, glowing skin – which we’d all love! You may have even had your skin reaction diagnosed as eczema, dermatitis or psoriasis. Having it labeled, doesn’t necessarily solve the problem and as I’ve experienced first hand, sometimes your skin problem isn’t diagnosed.

Perhaps this is a 21^st century issue, given the amount of processed food we eat today? The food we consume today from supermarket shelves has a wide variety of new additives/chemicals/artificial ingredients which didn’t exist 50+ years ago. Most processed foods contain additives that didn’t exist 50 years ago, even the ones we think are actually normal and considered by the average person as healthy!

Are we simply unaware walking zombies who consume whatever the supermarket shelves stock, and what jumps out at us due to great packaging and constant TV advertising, regardless of the impact on our health today? We naively think that food producers have our health and our best interests at heart.

A few examples of food that many of us think are healthy enough, and are even included in diets designed by dieticians, but actually contain flavor enhancers which are known to cause skin reactions include:

• Chicken salted chips
• Flavored crackers
• Sauces
• Traditional Chinese

These foods contain flavor enhancers such as 620-635, 621 – Monosodium glutamate, otherwise known as MSG.

Food additive 635 also found in party pies and canned soups is prohibited in food for infants and is banned in some countries.

Food additive 621 can also be found in gelatin, yeast extract, soy sauce and over 10,000 foods containing malt extract, is also prohibited in food for infants and may be genetically modified. See For more detail see The Chemical Maze

There are many factors at play, and “healthy food” is a debatable topic with differences of opinion between experts such as dieticians and naturopaths, due to the context and focus of the training. Naturopaths and dieticians certainly have their place and role to play. I have however had dieticians recommend all the above foods quite happily, whereas I haven’t had a naturopath recommend any of these options for a healthy diet and optimum health outcomes.

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