Beauty may be skin deep but to achieve it you need to do more than just layer creams on top of your skin. The fact is whatever you apply topically, to keep your skin young and healthy looking, will never work if you don’t provide your body with nutrients needed to build and sustain healthy beautiful skin. And that’s when nutraceuticals come into picture. The term nutraceutical was coined by Dr. Stephen DeFelice from 2 words “nutrition” and “pharmaceutical”. It is used in reference to foods, extracts of foods or food ingredients that “provide medical or health benefits”.
Photo by KoAnLaScrivana at flickr.com
There is a big segment of the nutraceutical market focused specifically on beauty. It offers consumers ingestible products designed to meet skin, nails and hair care needs. Nutraceuticals targeting beauty come in various formats: capsules, tablets or powders. Recently you can come across such forms as drinks (water or juice), yoghurts, health foods etc. Nutraceuticals can contain Vitamins, Minerals, anti-oxidants, herbal extracts and oils etc.
So what can they actually do for our beauty? Except from a general promise of improving the appearance of skin or hair, you can hope to achieve some concrete goals such as treating cellulite, relieving dry skin, improving skin’s elasticity, protecting your skin from free radical damage, improving growth, thickness and appearance of hair etc. However don’t hold your breath waiting to see the results. Changes will be very gradual and will take a long time but they will also last longer than the results achieved with the help of topical products.
Photo by zebrapaperclip at flickr.comSounds wonderful, right? However, there are ongoing debates whether nutraceurticals always work. On the one hand, experts insist that a good diet can supply us with all the vitamins and minerals we need for healthy skin and beautiful hair. So if you have a balanced diet, your body will not utilize additional nutrients in a pill. In the end it will just excrete the excess and you will end up with investing into expensive urine. On the other hand, how many of us have perfect diets and lifestyles? If even a slight deficiency exists in certain vitamins and minerals, a supplement can make a big difference.
Currenlty nutraceuticals enjoy highest popularity in Japan and Europe. Consumers in the US have not yet embraced the trend of beauty from within. Some manufacturers were even forced to withdraw their nutraceutical products from the US market due to unsatisfactory sales.
Photo by RubyBlossom at flickr.comI personally love the idea of cultivating beauty from within. Which reminds me of a funny story that happened several years ago. Impressed by an article on benefits of beta carotene for the skin, I started to religously consume big volumes of carrot juice. As a result I turned bright yellow! That was a funny (and scary) sight :-) It was a lesson for me not to go to extremes and better rely on professional products and follow correct dosage! In the light of the information above and my personal curiousity, I thought it would be interesting to make an overview of some nutraceutical products available on the market at the moment. A little peek at what’s coming up in the next post: we’ll look at a supplement that promises to increase the skin’s elasticity, powders that promise to free you from cellulite, and drinks that stimulate collagen production!
The saying ”beauty comes from within” has a direct meaning when we speak about nutraceuticals
No comments:
Post a Comment