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Your diet plays a huge role in your appearance, especially when it comes to your skin. Dry skin, inflammation, breakouts, and even wrinkles can oftentimes be related to the foods you eat and the beverages you drink. With that in mind, avoiding certain ingredients (or at least keeping them in moderation) can be an important part of your skincare routine.
So what should be the first drink you take off your grocery list? Doctors say that alcohol is likely to be the culprit behind aging skin. Keep reading for more details.
Alcohol
Alcohol is one drink you might want to leave out of your weekly ritual as it could be the culprit behind some of your skincare concerns.
Carol Ann Goodman, a board-certified physician at Bella Vi Spa & Aesthetics in Indiana, tells Huff Post, "Alcohol also causes blood vessels at the skin’s surface to dilate. For intermittent drinkers, this causes temporary skin flushing. However, over time, the capillaries can dilate so much that they actually burst, creating visible red and purple veins, especially across the face and cheeks."
These visible veins are not the only signs of aging that alcohol might make more prominent.
Alcohol also dehydrates the skin, speeding up the aging process. According to WebMD,"Our skin gets thinner and drier as we age. It’s a natural process called intrinsic aging, and it’s something you can’t control. Extrinsic aging is when your skin ages faster than it should because of your environment and how you live. That’s where alcohol comes in – it dehydrates you and dries out your skin."
Cutting down on your alcohol intake can help slow this extrinsic aging process.
Plus, drinking in moderation – or cutting out alcohol entirely – could start to reverse some of these telltale signs of aging.
New York nutritionist Jairo Rodriguez tells Vogue, "If you do give it up, the good thing is that your skin, like any other organ, has the ability to regenerate. The body has a fabulous rate of rehydration. But that regeneration depends on how much damage has been done. If you’ve been drinking for 15 to 20 years and stop, I think it’s great, but can you regenerate your skin back to [that of] a normal 50-year-old? Once you destroy the collagen, it is hard to get back."
