The Microbiome: Health and Beauty Begin Within

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Hippocrates

Does what you eat show on your face? This may sound like a strange question to some because not everyone connects healthy food with healthy skin but the skin is the largest organ of the body and is directly affected by what we eat. In fact, what we eat affects all systems of the body and its ability to fight disease. Enter the new, but not so new, buzz word — “microbiome.” The term microbiome refers to the trillions of microbes that live on and in the human body.

So what does the microbiome do? A healthy, balanced microbiome helps digest food, stimulates the renewal of stomach cells, fights carcinogens, helps absorb drugs, generates nutrients and reinforces the immune system. An unhealthy, unbalanced microbiome can become pathogenic and therefore promote disease within the body.

Just like the gut, the skin has its own microbiome. It protects us from harmful organisms by enforcing the skin’s barrier, helps maintain a balanced PH and supplies the skin with vital nutrients.

There are several simple lifestyle choices we can make that will help maintain a healthy microbiome:

One of the most important things we can do is follow a clean healthy diet. Focus on eating more whole-foods and less processed food. Whole foods are plant based, unprocessed and unrefined. Think vegetables, fruits, whole-grains and legumes.
A diet high in fiber will help aid in digestion and can contribute to weight loss as high fiber foods take longer to digest and make us feel full.
Consider adding a probiotic supplement to your diet. Probiotics are made of good bacteria and are important to maintaining a balanced microbiome particularly in the gut which happens to be where most disease starts.

Following a healthy diet will boost your skin’s ability to fight bad bacteria and retain moisture among a host of other things. Healthy skin really does start on the inside so essentially what you eat does show on your face!

I would like to add that coffee, and wine are both high in polyphenols which have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, anti-diabetes and antihypertensive properties. Cheers to that AND a healthy microbiome!

All of the studies on the microbiome point to one fact: that health and beauty truly begins on the inside.