Eat Your Veggies, and Eat Them First!

 Good nutrition is vital to your skin’s well being, but did you know that the order in which you eat foods is just as important as what you eat?

For healthy skin, you should eat vegetables at every meal, eat them before you any other types of food, and make sure that half of those vegetables are raw. Following these rules also helps your overall health and keeps your weight down because you feel fuller faster.

Have you heard of glycation? It’s a process that leads to skin aging. Sugar molecules attach themselves to protein molecules leading to a breakdown of collagen fibers--fibers that are needed for taut and supple skin. Once healthy collagen fibers lose their elasticity, they become brittle and prone to breakage. This is visible as wrinkled skin. Minimizing the effects of aging requires reducing glycation.

So how do you minimize glycation?

By reducing your intake of simple carbohydrates and sweets, and choosing foods with low glycemic indexes. Also, by avoiding foods cooked at temperatures above 250 degrees.

If your stomach is digesting vegetable fiber, the carbohydrates--which you eat after your veggies and proteins--get covered with this fiber. This slows down insulin spikes and the speed that sugar is transported into the blood.

Another benefit of eating vegetables first is that the fiber absorbs water in your stomach, making you feel full more quickly.  And raw vegetables have a digestive enzyme which aides in the digestion of proteins.

Protein is hard to digest, so they stay in the stomach too long, forcing other foods to remain in the stomach, and slowing down digestion.

If you want to maintain healthy, youthful skin, make vegetables the first part of your meal. If you don’t follow this eating order, you may be prone to more glycation and skin damage.

There are 2 types of enzymes: digestive and metabolic.

The digestive enzyme--which is contained, for example, in raw vegetables--is necessary to digest food. The metabolic enzyme works to metabolize, detox, and to anti-oxidize the body. Antioxidants are very important for anti-aging.

These 2 enzymes are produced in the body, and in raw and fermented food. There is a fixed amount of enzymes produced in the body, so if too much enzyme is used for digestion, the enzyme cannot be used for metabolism, including the antioxidant function to prevent aging.