Beautiful Skin & Vitamins!

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.

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.

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. 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.
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.

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 bullfighter 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 o£ 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 overenthusiastic 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.

Make it a great day!


Chris