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by VibeFit.com

Beauty may be only skin deep, but skin is deeper than you think: it is marvelously sensitive to goings-on inside the body and is quick to break out in a rash of protest when it disapproves.

Pimples and Skin Blemishes

Few beauty blemishes are harder to bear than unsightly skin. Yet pimples, eruptions, rashes, scaliness, dryness and changes in color do not often originate in the skin itself.

Usually they reflect some disorder of nourishment (in other than specific disease processes) that affects the general health.

Causes of Skin Problems

Except for certain food allergies, such as the propensity of strawberries to cause hives, skin troubles are caused not so much by the foods you eat as by the foods you don’t eat.

Essentials of Skin Health

The essentials of skin health, and consequently of general health, are deficient in the diet, or the nourishing bloodstream is carrying substances that the skin resents.

Changes of Skin May Indicate Malnutrition

One of the first signs of vitamin shortage is unhealthy changes in the skin. Often both the causes and symptoms are vague and obscure. Persons who go on regulated diets for other reasons than beauty are frequently surprised to observe that blemished skins become soft and clear on balanced food intake.

Vitamins that Help Your Skin

Indispensable to healthy skin is Vitamin A. It is the great regulator of epithelial tissue, the stuff your skin and the linings of your body cavities are made of. When A intake is diminished, an early sign is roughness and extreme dryness of the skin. It is a special kind of dryness, not relieved by ointments.

Especially on thighs and arms, the skin becomes rough with goose-pimples. The hair follicles are plugged with cornified epithelium. “Cornified” comes from a word meaning “horn” and it means that your skin is on the way to becoming the same stuff that makes a bull fighter watch his step. In more advanced cases the skin may break out with eruptions similar to those of acne except that they are not pustular.

Not only the skin but the external layers of organs such as the eye become hard and dry in absence of Vitamin A. In fact, the eye can dry up so completely that blindness results. If you remain dry-eyed at a grand weepy movie, it may not be a sign of emotional inertia but simply an indication that the tear ducts are becoming dammed up from lack of Vitamin A. Absence of perspiration may mean that the sweat glands are becoming plugged.

Hair and nails are modified forms of skin. Just as the skin becomes dry from lack of Vitamin A, so does hair become brittle and lose its luster. Brittle nails are often improved by high-vitamin diets. Brittleness in nails is also chargeable to the over enthusiastic use of some types of lacquer and polish that abstract natural oils.

Vitamin C deficiency can also cause papular eruptions of the skin, as well as patchy areas of vaguely darkened color.

More characteristic of C shortage is the tendency of the skin to bruise easily, developing ugly black and blue spots from causes hardly more severe than being spoken to sharply. In fact, the skin can become black and blue entirely on its own initiative. Small red pinprick spots can occur spontaneously. These phenomena arise from the fragility of the blood vessels, characteristic of Vitamin C shortage.

Among the B vitamins, riboflavin and nicotinic acid are most commonly associated with skin disorders. The disease of pellagra, involving the skin, is caused by a dietary lack of nicotinic acid. In early cases the skin looks as if it were severely sun burned; it is burning, tender, and dark in color. Later the skin becomes thick and scaly and pigmentation deepens. Riboflavin (Vitamin G) deficiencies show up in painful fissures of the skin at the corners of the mouth.

Taking Care of Acne

The tragic skin curse of adolescence is acne, which peppers the face with unsightly pimples at the very age when personal appearance becomes supremely important to boys and girls. The irresistible impulse to dig and gouge at the eruptions may leave permanent beauty blemishes in the form of scarred skin.

In part, at least, acne is a skin response to the adjustment of the glandular system to maturity. Yet dietary management has a place in treatment. The mere restriction of fat, greasy, and sugar-heavy foods is often helpful.

Vitamin D Sometimes Helps Clear Acne and Other Skin Disorders

Recently it has been demonstrated that Vitamin D is sometimes beneficial. Regular daily doses of 5,000 or more units of Vitamin D have reduced the number of acne eruptions in many cases. Although not a specific cure, enough work has been done to prove that Vitamin D is a highly valuable agent in acne treatment.

Psoriasis, a skin ailment manifested by a curious silver scaliness, has also proved moderately amenable to Vitamin D. It is a mysterious disease, however, with spontaneous remissions, and dermatologists are very cautious in making any promises about it.

Soaps and Cosmetics and Their Purported Vitamin Content

Some soaps and cosmetics contain slight amounts of Vitamins A and D, and ballyhoo this virtue out of all reason. It is true that these vitamins can be absorbed to some extent through the skin. The advisability of taking them in this fashion is another matter. If the cosmetics are sold at the same prices as standard creams and ointments your druggist can show you, there is no need to avoid them; but if they are decked out in fancy prices, you can suspect that some canny manufacturer is aiming to cash in on public gullibility.

Indeed, it is amusing to consider that some soaps, bill-boarding their Vitamin D content, may actually restrict your intake of that vitamin by washing off the skin oils from which you manufacture Vitamin D with the cooperation of sunlight or ultra-violet irradiation.

Foods to Avoid In Order to Help Your Skin

In general, the avoidance of heavy, rich foods and greater dependence upon milk, eggs, liver, lean meats, fruit and fresh vegetables is a sound principle in building good health and consequent skin beauty. The elimination of foods to which you suspect you are hyper-sensitive is best left to the offices of a dermatologist, who can usually determine the offender swiftly with simple tests and thus save you from possibly eliminating from your diet the very foods that protect against deficiencies.

Image via Wikipedia

Eczema is much less frequent in adolescence than in the first years of childhood. In teenagers it usually causes a thickening, dryness, and redness of the skin. Itching, and at times pain, may accompany the rash. At this age, eczema is most frequently found in the folds of the elbows and knees and on the wrists. Another common location is the back of the neck and ears.

Eczema may bring scaling of the skin. At times there is marked splitting of the skin and sometimes blisters appear, filled with clear fluid or pus.

The cause of eczema is usually an allergy. Though in infancy, the allergens (allergy causers) are nearly always foods, in later years the eczema is just as likely to be a reaction to wool, nylon, or other materials. Reactions to various plants can also cause the rash. The reactions may be from touching the plants or from inhaling their pollens.
Edna has severe eczema. She has had to give her dog away and must avoid visiting homes where cats or birds are kept as pets, as she is allergic to these animals.
She cannot eat fish, nuts, or chocolate. If she does eat a little of these forbidden foods, she may break out with a worse rash. Then she takes antihistamines which counteract the body’s response to allergens.

Fairly frequently she has to take penicillin to fight the infection that attacks her sensitive skin.

When her rash gets worse, and she knows it is not allergy or infection that has caused the flare-up, she has learned to look for an emotional problem that she may be trying to ignore. One time she realized that the strain of school exams was making her scratch more. On another occasion it was a quarrel with her father which had made her feel guilty.

The emotions can play an important role in eczema. If a person is anxious or tense, he is more likely to scratch and pick at the lesions. This can lead to trouble from secondary bacterial infections, or just from the mechanical irritation and injury to the skin. When the eczema has a nervous or emotional root, the medical term for it is neurodermatitis.

Allergic reactions of the skin can be so brief that they last only a few minutes. They can be so prolonged that they last for months or years.

The briefer type usually are hives, also known as wheals or welts. Hives may be small white or yellow-centered blisters with some redness surrounding them. Flea bites and mosquito bites are examples of this kind of hives. Giant hives, or urticaria, can be so large that one may cover most of the body.

Besides insect stings, other causes of hives are the allergy-producing materials-foods, plants, and clothing. Strawberries and other fresh fruits, particularly citruses (oranges, lemons, and grapefruits) are known to bring on hives. Chocolate, wheat, milk, eggs, nuts, and fish are other fairly frequent food allergens. In some cases any food may cause trouble.
Hives may appear and then vanish so rapidly that treatment is not necessary. Sometimes they keep recurring until the allergen is discovered and removed. Physicians have found that treatment with antihistamines may be helpful. At times an injection of adrenalin gives relief. In severe instances cortisone or a similar adrenal-hormone like drug may be used.

Some of the severest cases of skin reactions, occasionally combined with joint pain and swelling or with asthmatic attacks, are caused by allergic reactions to certain medications. Penicillin, which has been of inestimable benefit to mankind since its first medical use in World War II, has occasionally caused much anguish because of an allergic reaction in certain persons.

Allergic skin reactions may show up as marked swellings of small parts of the body. Localized swellings are most usually seen on a lip (”fat lip”) or an eyelid. They can also be seen on other places on the face and on the hands, feet, arms, or legs.

Treatment is the same as for hives. There is one caution with these cases of swelling, called angioneurotic edema. In rare instances the swelling affects the back of the tongue or the inner throat. When this happens, it may be a real medical emergency because the swelling may shut off the breathing space. The patient should be rushed to an emergency hospital or doctor’s office, where injections may be lifesaving. A tracheotomy (putting a hole into the windpipe through an incision in the front of the neck) may be needed if breathing is fully blocked.