Real Skin

Skin retouching is all about reducing imperfection – nobody really looks like that, or I’d be out of a job. Although many models and celebrities do actually have fantastic skin, photographs are often taken from inches away and every detail is massively magnified.

While I work at reducing amazing looking people's perceived skin imperfections, like many people I struggle to control my own skin's erratic behaviour.

This is how anyone can improve their own skin easily.

The first thing to say is that these are only my personal food guidelines that have had a profoundly positive effect on my own skin, I’m not a dietitian, I'm a retoucher! Nobody recommends cutting too many things out of your diet unless you have a proven food allergy - it’s more about including certain foods and being aware of how you are eating. I've read that stylists, make up artists, musicians and models follow this way of eating too.

By altering your diet can control inflammation within your own body and this is particularly effective for the conditions of dry, irritated skin and eczema. If you are troubled by your skin in any way these food guidelines could help you too.

1. You need to be aware that inflammation in the body is triggered by the fast release of our body’s blood sugar when we eat food with a high glycaemic index. By adapting the way you eat, you can slow down this sugar rush and consequently control the inflammation of your skin.  
2. You need to add foods to your diet which can raise the levels of Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs, Omega 3 and 6) that are lower in people with eczema and dry skin. The best sources of these EFAs - particularly the Omega 3s which are generally lower in comparison to the Omega 6s already in our everyday diets - are wild oily fish and to a lesser extent some plant based foods.  

It’s easy.

1. High sugar foods and quickly absorbed carbohydrates such as bread and potatoes should be eaten in moderation and preferably as part of a balanced meal - which will slow down the rush of sugar to your bloodstream. Snacks such as sweets, crisps and chips are really best avoided but they won’t hurt you if eaten occasionally. Don’t eat too much high fat red meat - chicken and turkey are better meat options. Soft drinks, coffee and alcohol are inflammatory too so drink water, green tea or Redbush tea instead.
   
     
2. Eat fish. Eat fish. Eat fish. Starting to eat fish at least twice every week, preferably in the form of Wild Alaskan Salmon, will make a remarkable difference to the condition of your skin. You will feel for the first time as though your skin is moisturizing itself from the inside. Salmon contains more palatable Omega 3 DHA than any other food source (DHA makes up 40% of the polyunsaturated fatty acids in the brain and 60% in the eyes).
   Eat more salads, greens, apples, nuts, seeds, beans, pulses, vegetables, porridge and seeded bread. Make your own salad dressings using a variety of oils such as olive oil, rapeseed oil, walnut oil or rice bran oil and some vinegar. Avoid corn oil, vegetable oil and sunflower seed oil due to their high Omega 6 content.   

My personal belief is that because people with dry skin and eczema have been medically proven to be lacking in EFAs or their receptors, in order to feel any positive effects from an increased dietary intake we need to build up a far higher base level than people with normal skin. A bit like taking Evening Primrose Oil as a supplement – you need to take a lot of it for an extended time before it has an effect and then you can lessen the dose. A little known, reported fact is that 15-30% of the brain’s dry weight is compromised of essential fatty acids, obtained exclusively through diet. 

Once I realised how lightweight my brain might be because of my own eczema, I decided to follow a well known ‘skin anti-ageing’ diet for a month, hoping that it would work as well for dry skin and maybe prove my theory. I ate Wild Alaskan Salmon twice a day with fresh salad and avoided any sugar rush inducing foods. If you want to know all the science behind this diet then read any book by Nicholas Perricone MD, that’s how I first learned of this way of eating. The difference in my skin was obvious within the first week and I have now cut down to eating this delicious fish every other day and still feel the same skin benefits a year later. This is the first time in my life that my skin has felt anything near to normal instead of dry, tight, itchy and uncomfortable. I wish I had known sooner.  

Why Wild Alaskan Salmon?  

Wild Alaskan Salmon are sustainably sourced from one of the best managed fisheries in the world in Alaska, a US state which by law does not permit fish farming within its waters. This means that all Alaskan salmon live a natural life cycle, eating completely natural food out in the pure clean waters of the wild Pacific Ocean, returning to land only when it is their time to spawn. 

When I discovered what a wonderful food this is I did a lot of research into the Wild Alaskan Salmon and realised that the extraordinary red/orange flesh colour is entirely natural, resulting from the food that fish eat at sea. (I didn’t quite believe it until I saw a video on youtube where some fishermen cut vibrant red fillets from the salmon they had just caught in Alaska.)  

Wild Alaskan Salmon have been shown to have higher levels of Omega 3s than almost any other commercially available fish and so you don’t need to eat so much of it to get great skin benefits.  

Although they are termed as a wild fish - and the vast majority are wild - the reason that this particular fish is sustainable is that many millions of salmon are “ranched” in Alaska, bred from returning wild salmon by non-profit organisations and released into the wild each year to live out their lives in their natural, healthy environment, alongside their wild born counterparts. Experts have found that there is no discernable difference between them.

They are ready to eat in 3 -5 years. 

Why Not Farmed Salmon? 

Farmed salmon, on the other hand, bear only one resemblance to the Wild Alaskan Salmon in that they are born as fish. Their lives from then on are completely governed by the intensive farming methods necessary to successfully raise tonnes of fish penned at sea. The farmed salmon have no control over their captive environment, their pelleted dyed food, their swimming patterns, their parasites, their diseases or their medication for their entire lives. Wild salmon populations have been arguably decimated around the world by incidents related to fish farming, including huge, unavoidable concentrations of deadly sea lice from fish farms in the path of natural salmon runs, infectious salmon diseases and escaped farm fish breeding with wild fish and devastating their genetics. 

They are ready to eat in 1 year. 

You Choose.

The difference in price is the main reason why people choose farmed salmon over wild, but there are ways to buy Wild Alaskan Salmon without breaking the bank. Unless I go to Alaska, I doubt I will ever try fresh Wild Alaskan Salmon but I live in hope. By far the cheapest option is to buy frozen Wild Alaskan Salmon from the supermarket. The best value and quality I have found so far in the UK are Asda Extra Special 2 Wild Alaskan Sockeye Red Salmon Fillets, currently at £3 for 240g – similar in price to 2 supermarket sandwiches, £1.50 for a portion of high protein, skin nutrient packed goodness doesn’t seem like a lot to me, personally. The farmed Salmon on the right in the photos above is more expensive than that at £3.23 from Tesco. If you want the really beautiful Wild Alaskan Salmon shown on the left above it's £5.99 for 2 from Waitrose, (March 2010), it's often reduced in price by 1/3. You can buy tinned Wild Alaskan Salmon almost anywhere for a reasonable price too, although it’s not nearly as appetizing in my opinion. Both tinned and frozen salmon have equally beneficial effects on troubled skin as the fresh fish.  

But I Don’t Eat Fish. 

If you don’t eat fish you’re not alone, 70% of people in the UK don’t eat any fish at all and on average we each consume only 1/3 of a portion of oily fish per week. There was a time in the UK, until the 1800’s, when there were so many salmon in our rivers that everybody ate them. Salmon were cheaper than meat and were actually looked down upon as being the poor man’s food, restricted in being eaten by the servants - I suppose in case anybody saw them and disgraced the master of the house. Nowadays you instead might worry that people would think you were extravagant in eating wild salmon. It’s your skin though and if your skin troubles you then this particular food is your number one skin salvation. 

If you don’t eat fish just give Wild Alaskan Salmon a try, go on, you’ll be surprised. It really doesn’t taste ‘fishy’ in the slightest and has firm, big, meaty flakes of deliciousness with no bones and no fishy burps later on. This is truly a fish that you will not get sick of eating either. Simple and fast to cook, for me it has taken the effort out of thinking about what to eat every day. I simply douse my frozen fillets in oil, sprinkle on a few herbs and cook them foil wrapped in the oven. If I splash out and buy previously frozen fish I just slam it in my Baby George Grill and it’s done in minutes. 

If you can’t eat fish then eating ground up linseed as well as adding many natural oils and leafy greens like spinach to your diet are your best options for improving your Essential Fatty Acid levels. I still haven’t found any delicious ways of eating ground linseed but adding it to cooked porridge is pretty easy. 

It’s not really too huge an effort once you swap things around a bit in your diet and remember, you’ll be doing your whole body and future health a great big favour - all those Essential Fatty Acids are great for your brain, your heart, your lungs, your eyes and your joints as well as your skin. 

What about fish oil supplements? 

Why waste any money on just getting a small proportion of heavily processed ‘goodness’ that is squeezed from the remnants of the fish that we should all be eating more of? Eating fish is one of the healthiest ways of getting protein in your diet, along with all the natural vitamins and minerals found in whole fish.  

I took fish oil supplements for a long time, they are expensive and I really didn’t feel any noticeable difference in the condition of my skin. When I started eating fish regularly, just one meal of Wild Alaskan Salmon could make my skin feel easier within hours. I know that this way of eating has also improved my skin condition dramatically. 

When will we ever learn?

By the way, I’m not Alaskan, I’m Scottish. We lost most of our wild salmon a long time ago and sadly never seemed to learn the lessons of wild stock salmon ranching as a sustainable means of producing affordable, healthy, natural fish for us to eat in the UK.

More than 10,000 tonnes of salmon, around one fifth of Shetland’s fish farming annual production, worth £30 million, did not go into the sea pens in 2009 as a result of infectious salmon anaemia - a notifiable disease which was discovered by officials investigating the scale of the local sea lice problem.  

At the same time, one of the world's most incredible natural resources for wild salmon in Alaska, Bristol Bay, is under extreme threat of potential destruction by the proposal of one of the the world's largest mineral mines, Pebble Mine.

Copyright Nicola Marshall 2010

The content of this web page is based on the personal experience and research of the author and is provided for general informational purposes only - it is not intended as, nor should it be considered a substitute for, professional medical advice. Do not use the information on this web page for diagnosing or treating any medical or health condition.