How Sugar May Be Sabotaging Your Skin

A warm welcome to 'Balanced Bites'! I hope you enjoy my notes on holistic nutrition. This week we will be uncovering the bitter sweet truth of sugar and how it can impact the health of our skin.

How Sugar Impacts Your Skin: The Not So Sweet Truth

We all enjoy a sweet treat now and again- whether it’s a morning pastry, slice of birthday cake, scoop of ice cream or a bar of choccy - and most of us know they aren’t the best choice for our teeth or our blood sugar levels. What’s less known is the impact sugar has on the health of our skin. From breakouts to early signs of ageing and inflammation, sugar can be secretly sabotaging our skin from the inside out.

But before you toss out every sweet treat in your cupboard, it’s important to take a balanced viewpoint. While a diet heavy in sugar and refined carbohydrates can certainly affect your skin, a balanced diet is not about cutting these foods out entirely. Rather, it is about understanding how they interact with your body and from there making mindful and informed choices that help you to feel and look your best.

1. Sugar Ages Your Skin

When we digest sugar, it rapidly enters our bloodstream as glucose and can bind to proteins to create harmful molecules known as advanced glycation end products (AGEs). Collagen and elastin—two key proteins that keep the skin plump and supple —are especially vulnerable to this process and the formation of AGEs causes them to stiffen and lose their elasticity. This dulls the skin’s natural radiance and encourages it to sag and develop fine lines and wrinkles, quite literally AGEing you. Although this process is very natural and with time happens to us all, a high sugar consumption accelerates it, as the more sugar you eat, the more AGEs your body produces and the faster your skin ages.

While it is healthy to enjoy a sweet treat now and again, being mindful of the amount of sugar we are consuming day-to-day can help our skin to look bright, fresh and radiant for longer.

2. Sugar Encourages Breakouts

If you’re prone to acne, sugar is worth watching as a diet high in refined sugars and carbohydrates will cause blood sugar levels to spike. When blood sugar levels rise insulin is released to bring it back down causing an all too familiar energy crash… Not only does this make us feel groggy but high insulin levels trigger more oil production in our skin, which can clog pores and lead to breakouts.

Plus, sugar is also inflammatory, and inflammation is a key driver behind acne and general skin texture and congestion. So if you’re already prone to breakouts, a sugary diet can make things even worse. Swapping out foods like sweets, chocolate, pastries, fizzy juice, white bread, and even natural sugars found in fruit juices can help to soothe acne-prone skin.

3. Gut Dysbiosis: The Skin-Gut Connection

Sugar can also lead to skin concerns through its disruptive impact on our gut microbiome. A healthy gut is a diverse gut, rich in multiple species and strains of bacteria like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium. Unlike those that cause infection, the microbes in our gut provide a multitude of benefits, such as supporting the immune system, modulating inflammation, creating enzymes, metabolising nutrients and maintaining a healthy gut and skin barrier. Though we all have some “bad” bacteria, if our gut is mostly populated by the good, we will have a healthy and happy microbiome. Yet many of the lifestyle factors synonymous with modern living including high intakes of sugar can compromise our good microbes and disrupt this delicate balance.

High-sugar low-fibre diets feed the bad bacteria in our gut while starving the good. Over time this leads to an overgrowth of bad bacteria known as gut dysbiosis which has been linked to the development of several inflammatory skin disorders including acne, eczema, and psoriasis. Plus, a disrupted gut can struggle to absorb all the skin-loving nutrients your body needs, like vitamins and antioxidants, leaving your skin looking dull and tired.

Similar to the bacteria found in your gut, your skin also has a diverse ecosystem of microbes, known as the skin microbiome that works to protect you and your complexion against pathogens. Recent findings indicate crosstalk between the gut microbiome and the skin microbiome, known as the gut-skin axis and so gut dysbiosis often translates to a disrupted skin microbiome. When your skin ecosystem becomes unbalanced, harmful bacteria and pathogens are more likely to slip past your skin’s barrier, causing infections and exacerbating inflammatory skin conditions.

Thankfully reducing sugar and enjoying a more nutritious and varied diet high in fibre, polyphenols and fermented foods can help to restore the beneficial bacteria in our gut and dampen skin inflammation.

4. Dehydration: Sugar Steals Your Skin’s Moisture

If your skin is feeling tight and dry, sugar could be to blame. Here’s how: When you consume a lot of sugar, your body pulls water from your cells to help process it, leaving your skin dehydrated. Dehydrated skin tends to look dull and is more prone to fine lines and wrinkles because it doesn’t have enough moisture to stay plump and smooth.

Drinking water is great, but cutting back on sugar is also key to keeping your skin hydrated and glowing.

How to Protect Your Skin from Sugar

So how can we make meaningful differences in our sugar intake, and help care for our skin from the inside out?

1. Be mindful of sugary goods: Try to reduce your intake of sugary snacks, sodas, and refined carbohydrates (like white bread and pastries). Opt for healthier, whole foods like whole grains, lean proteins and healthy fats. To sweeten, for example, your tea opt for natural sweeteners like honey or stevia, in moderation.

2. Focus on low-glycemic foods: Low-glycemic foods like whole grains, vegetables and legumes don’t cause crazy blood sugar spikes, meaning less inflammation and fewer breakouts.

3. Cook from Scratch: Swap your packaged sauces out for home-cooked recipes. For example, a jarred tomato pasta sauce or a curry sauce will often contain high amounts of added sugar, but if made from scratch it will have little to none at all. See below for one of my current favourite homemade pasta recipes!

4. Eat for your skin (and your gut!): Incorporate foods that are good for your skin and your gut, like leafy greens, berries, nuts, and fermented foods (think yoghurt, kimchi, and sauerkraut). These help keep inflammation down and your gut bacteria happy, which in turn helps your skin glow.

5. Hydrate: Drinking plenty of water is essential to help flush out waste products, and toxins, and to rehydrate any water loss from sugar.

At the end of the day, a little sugar won’t hurt—but too much can leave your skin looking tired and inflamed. Your skin can often be a reflection of your internal health, so making mindful choices about your diet is one of the most empowering ways to care for it. The next time you’re tempted by that sugary snack, think about the long-term effects on your skin and consider reaching for something more nourishing instead, your future self will thank you!

Low Sugar Sardine Spaghetti

Ingredients

• 1 can of tinned sardines

• 3-4 oil-packed anchovies (from a tin or jar)

• 1 onion (diced)

• 1 garlic clove (crushed)

• 1 lemon (juiced)

• parmesan (to taste)

• 2 tbsp olive oil

• 1 chilli (finely chopped)

• 1 small handful of sultanas (soaked in hot water)

• 400g of spaghetti (wholewheat)

Method

1. Cook the spaghetti aldente just 1 or 2 minutes under package instructions. Towards the end of cooking time set a small cup of pasta water aside.

2. In a large dry pan, lightly brown the pine nuts, remove from the pan and set aside.

3. Then to the large pan add the olive oil and the diced onion and fry over medium heat until translucent (5-10 minutes). Add the crushed garlic and stir for another few minutes.

4. Add in the chopped chilli and anchovy fillets to the onions and fry until the anchovies have dissolved. Then toss in the sardines, breaking up the fish into bite-sized chunks.

5. Add the lemon juice and a pinch of salt, stirring gently and if it looks too dry add a splash of pasta water.

6. Add the cooked spaghetti to the sauce and grate over a generous amount of parmesan. Drain and then toss in the soaked sultanas, the toasted pine nuts and stir gently to combine everything together.

7. Taste and season with salt and pepper, extra parmesan or a drizzle of olive oil.

8. Serve up immediately and enjoy!

This recipe was inspired by a recent trip to one of my favourite Italian cafes in Edinburgh, Gaia on Leith Walk ! You must go if you haven’t already xx