Is Your Diet Affecting Your Skin?

You wash your face day and night. You exfoliate, use serums, and mask once a week. Your diet is on point. Or is it?

The classical Chinese medicine description of the stomach is a "bubbling cauldron". I think of it like a slow cooker. It should be warm and wet, which means eating more cooked food than raw, as well as reducing the amount of dried or grilled meats, as these foods require too much of our fluids to digest. Opting for soups and stews instead allows the liquids from the meat and vegetables to stay in the dish.

The Chinese medical system has a channel system that spans the body and connects to the organ itself, similar to a highway system connecting one state to another. The stomach channel begins on the face, which is why when the stomach is out of balance, that can manifest as acne or other skin issues on the face.

I’m sure you've heard that hydration affects the quality of your skin, but what you may not have heard is that hydration is more than simply the amount of water we're drinking. Hydration also includes oils, fats, and collagen. science tells us that bone broth and collagen reduce gut inflammation and improves digestion, and Chinese medicine and other ancient medicines have known this for thousands of years.

Raw, vegan, or diets that include lots of green juice can be hard on our skin, because they not only dehydrate us as I mentioned before, but also eating a lot of cold food stagnates our energy and creates heat. If you put honey in the refrigerator, it’s much more difficult to get out of the container. Our energy is like that, too, and in the process, our stagnated, “refrigerated” energy creates heat in our stomach, which among other things, can manifest as skin issues.

If you're interested in more on this topic, check out this post by Andrew Sterman. Andrew is the husband to Ann Cecil-Sterman, who is the author of Advanced Acupuncture and The Art of Pulse Diagnosis, and a long time student of Jeffrey Yuen, who is widely regarded as the world's foremost expert in classical Chinese medicine teachings. His first book on food therapy is due out Spring 2019. 

Bone broth based soups like ramen or Vietnamese pho are really good choices for building stomach yin and fluids, which benefits our entire system.