The Sneaky Culprit Breaking Down Collagen and Elastin in Your Skin

Let’s be honest. When you’re constantly on-the-go, or stuck at work, or winding down from a stressful day, it feels so much easier to reach for processed junk food than fruits or veggies. We’re all guilty of it sometimes!

And even though a single Pop-Tart won’t kill you, regularly eating high-sugar foods makes you vulnerable to awful health and wellness consequences. From fatigue and weight gain to dull, acne-prone skin, sugar wreaks havoc on your body. 

That’s exactly why I cut sugar from my diet altogether. It seemed impossible at first, but now that I’ve ditched “the s-word”, I don’t even crave it! I knew that eliminating sugar from my diet would boost my physical health by cutting calories and balancing my blood sugar, but I wasn’t expecting the incredible additional skincare benefits I experienced. 

Saying Bye, Felicia! to sugar actually helped my skin look and feel more vibrant. Yes, that’s right… without the constant interference of sugar, my skin finally had the opportunity to rebuild, rebalance, and restructure. 

Let’s take a deeper look at sugar, the sneaky culprit that’s aging your skin by breaking down collagen and elastin. 

Sugar 101

Sugar is the man behind the mask responsible for breaking down the collagen and elastin in your skin, but how much do you really understand about sugar’s role in your body? How does sugar cause inflammation?

Simply put, sugars are sweet carbohydrates that provide energy for the body. Unrefined sugars are the “safer” natural sugars found in fruits, vegetables, and legumes. They can break down to fuel your body properly. 

Refined and processed sugars, on the other hand, can’t provide stable energy. They’re added to desserts, sodas, and white breads for taste, ultimately spiking your blood sugar and giving you the temporary rush of a “sugar high”.

The average American eats about 57 pounds of added sugar annually, which is flat out crazy. Especially considering Americans ate just four pounds of sugar annually in the 18th century. It’s no wonder that we are suffering from the effects of sugar overload! 

Sugar itself is not poisonous, but it acts like a poison in the body when eaten in such large quantities. These are just a few of the dangerous effects of excessive sugar intake:

• Weight gain
• Increased risk of diabetes
• Increased risk of heart disease
• Nutrient deficiency
• The mood and energy “crash” after initial sugar rush
• Prematurely aging skin

These health issues are actually our body’s way of shouting that you need to change your habits. If you can cut the amount of sugar you eat and drink on a regular basis, you can stop inflammatory damage to your body before it has a chance to begin. 

How Does Sugar Cause Inflammation?

Your body quickly breaks down carbohydrates from sources like bread, potatoes, and fruit into glucose. This simple sugar is absorbed into the intestines and then transported to the bloodstream. As soon as glucose hits your bloodstream, messengers send insulin to carry that glucose into cells throughout your body. 

In small amounts, this is an important and life-sustaining process. Insulin helps glucose provide essential energy to your muscles, fat, liver, and other critical cells. So how does sugar cause inflammation?

It's all about sugar in excess. Most of us eat processed and high-sugar foods with every meal, often without realizing it! Even flavored yogurt, barbecue sauce, and salad dressing are culprits. All of those sugars convert into glucose and force our insulin levels spike beyond what is natural or healthy. 

These spikes of insulin act like bullets of inflammation traveling through your body. Just imagine a sugar bullet ricocheting randomly around your tissues and organs. The damage becomes increasingly worse with every “sugar bullet” until your immune system turns on itself and starts damaging healthy cells. 

If you’re about to drink a soda with 48 grams of sugar, think of that beverage as 48 grams of inflammation instead. That’s 48 grams of self-destruction that leads to side effects like depression, fatigue, constipation, weight gain, and diabetes. How much do you want that soda now?

The Long-Term Effects of Sugar on the Skin

Your skin isn’t excluded from the damage that sugar causes your body. Most notably, the inflammation induced by sugar quickly destroys the elastin and collagen in your skin. Considering that elastin and collagen are (literally!) the foundation of youthful, attractive skin, you shouldn’t take this lightly. 

You can think of collagen as a mattress in the middle layer of your skin. The surface of your skin is the bedsheet. As long as collagen production remains consistent, the “mattress” is always full and strong to support a taut “bedsheet”.  You can imagine the consequences of decreased collagen production — droopy, wrinkled skin that adds five or ten years to your appearance. 

Elastin, meanwhile, helps give structure to your skin so that it maintains a youthful elastic response. When your skin lacks the elastin it needs, it can’t bounce back from the effects of gravity, time, toxins, and expressions. Instead, it just sags and wrinkles in defeat. 

So how do sugar and inflammation influence collagen and elastin? Eating sugar triggers inflammation, which in turn initiates a damaging process called glycation. The byproducts of glycation attack collagen and elastin, aggressively paving the way for unwanted signs of prematurely aging skin.  

How Glycation Harms the Skin

Glycation occurs when the sugar in your bloodstream bonds to proteins or fats to create advanced glycation end products (AGEs). Your body is equipped with natural mechanisms to eliminate toxic AGEs, but if you eat and drink too much sugar, your body can’t eliminate AGEs quickly enough. Instead, the AGEs accumulate and trigger oxidative stress and inflammation. 

Research has linked high levels of AGEs with many conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, and Alzheimer’s. Now we know that glycation and AGEs also cause skin damage. 

Collagen and elastin are proteins, so they’ve vulnerable to the effects of glycation. As soon as you digest sugar, the sugar molecules attach to the collagen and protein in your skin. Through glycation, AGEs emerge and stimulate inflammation within your skin.

The more inflammation that exists, the less blood flow and detoxification of the tissues. Toxic buildup creates more inflammation, and the cycle of damage continues until it becomes visible through changes like acne, wrinkles, laxity, dull skin tone, and other imperfections. 

To make matters worse, we naturally produce less collagen and elastin as we age anyway! When you combine the natural consequences of aging with the accelerated collagen and elastin damage caused by AGEs, you end up with seriously damaged skin. 

Unfortunately, your current skin care routine probably takes this terrible situation and makes it even worse. The majority of skin care products use water as the primary ingredient, but water-based products pull moisture from your skin and cause internal dehydration. This further compounds the existing issues of inflammation, low blood flow, and toxic build up.  

Yuck! It’s no wonder that your skin looks years older than it should. So how can you stop the cycle of damage, shield your skin from the wrath of sugar, and revitalize your complexion? I’m here to help you, and the solution is surprisingly easy!

Renewing Your Skin Naturally

As your Health and Beauty Nurse, I can help you restore your beauty and radiance by rebuilding the internal structures of your skin including collagen and elastin. If you can commit to the tips below, firm, youthful skin can be yours once again. 

Reduce Sugar Content In Your Diet

Your journey to better skin really needs to start here, with the way you nourish your body. All the skincare products in the world can’t overcome a high-sugar diet. 

Even if you aren’t ready to cut sugar entirely, even a modest reduction of your sugar intake will reduce internal inflammation, minimize the production of destructive enzymes, and protect existing collagen and elastin. 

I know that steering clear of sugar isn’t easy. There’s a reason that experts say sugar is just as addictive as recreational drugs! Try these tips to alleviate your sugar cravings:

• Eat nourishing and satisfying whole foods like almonds or a hard-boiled egg
• Sip on tea
• Stay hydrated
• Create new habits; replace your after-dinner dessert with a walk
• Consume more probiotic-rich options like kombucha and tempeh to cut cravings
• Chew on high-quality pork rinds or another salty snack 
• Team up with a buddy to hold yourself accountable

You might be surprised to realize how awesome you feel without so much sugar around to antagonize your internal systems. You’ll have more energy, lose weight, and feel rejuvenated!

Cut the Water in Your Skincare

What happens to your soups, dressings, sauces when you add 75% more water than the recipe calls for? It tastes awful and you reduce the nutritional content of the food. Well, that’s exactly what happens when you use watered-down skincare.  

But it gets worse. When you apply a face serum or moisturizer that lists water as its first or second ingredient, the water pulls moisture out of your skin and dehydrates it- like a plum shrinking into a prune. 

Water-based skin care products also disrupt the natural sebum oils on your skin. They are meant to secrete sebum, moisturize and protect your skin, and nurture healthy bacteria that keep your skin healthy. Unfortunately, skin care products formulated with water strip the sebum from your face and destroy that delicate microbiome. 

That’s right… the water in your skincare is sabotaging your beauty.  

Rebuild Your Skin With Waterless Beauty Products

The simple solution is to ditch the sugar in your diet and ditch the water in your beauty products. When you swap water-based products with fat-soluble ingredients filled with vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, and antioxidants, you’ll experience a true skin transformation. 

Not only will your skin look more “plump”, but the increase in hydration will improve blood flow, nutrient delivery and waste removal. This powerful combination will super-power your skin and give you your confident glow back!

My skincare products are founded on that exact principle: waterless beauty products that rebuild the infrastructure of your skin.

Earth Face Wash

If you’re trying to compare the ingredients in your traditional benzoyl peroxide face wash to Earth Face Wash, you might as well compare apples to zebras. The two aren’t even in the same solar system!

My gentle, natural, oil-based face wash is formulated to cleanse the daily grime from your skin without removing your natural oils! This helps your skin look and feel hydrated, youthful, and healthy. Ingredients like White Kaolin clay, French Green clay, organic grapefruit peel, organic honey, and organic lavender are powerful and safe. 

By including these “skin food” ingredients, Earth Face Wash enriches your skin with everything it needs to not just stay clean, but combat dehydration and increase collagen production and skin tone. 

Coffee Bean Elixir and Blu Berry Elixir

After you’re done cleaning your face, your skin deserves some deep and revitalizing serum TLC. Start your day with the Coffee Bean Elixir and end each evening with the Blu Berry Elixir. Both of these serums go above and beyond to nourish and enhance your skin. 

Each morning, the Coffee Bean Elixir gives your skin the ultimate “pick me up” when you need it most. Ingredients like essential fatty acids, sterols, and vitamin E work together to generate powerful antioxidant action that improves the look and feel of your skin. 

Better yet, this Coffee Bean Elixir adds collagen protein and argan oil into the Coffee Arabica seeds for impressive results including:

• Deep skin hydration without a greasy residue
• Enhanced moisture retention 
• Firm and uplifted skin 
• Softened, rejuvenated appearance
• Protection from free radicals and environmental stress

Blu Berry Face Elixir, meanwhile is loaded with natural vitamin C to deliver pure antioxidant power. Green Tea Seed Oil, Blue Tansy Oil, Rose Hips Seed Oil, and dozens of other plant-based ingredients help this product deliver ongoing anti-aging results. 

This elixir’s healthy fatty acids and antioxidants restore the balance and moisture your skin needs to recover from environmental stressors, inflammation, and unsightly damage. Sounds like the perfect antidote to sugar-induced aging, doesn’t it?

Sweet Revenge Exfoliator

I’ve made my feelings on sugar clear: stay away! But there’s one exception. A sugar scrub used on top of your skin— not inside of your body!— offers a number of benefits.

The Sweet Revenge Exfoliator gently scrubs away dead skin cells while protecting moisture and helping serums reach deep into your skin.  

Ingredients like cane sugar, sweet almond oil, French Green clay, caffeine crystals, and oil extracts naturally remove dead skin cells, dirt, and oil that clog and stretch your pores. 

Better yet, the French Green clay draws fresh blood flow to damaged skin cells and essential oils stimulate collagen production. This is exactly what you need to counteract signs of premature aging. 

You only need to use this exfoliator once or twice a week to reap the following rewards:

• Stopping breakouts
• Reducing inflammation and redness
• Moisturize skin
• Replacing dead skin cells with fresh, youthful skin
• Boosting smooth and radiant appearance

You can’t possibly say no to that, can you?

Face Sculptor to Re-Sculpt your cheeks: 

All the products I just described deliver real, undeniable results. But the Face Sculptor is here to amplify those results beyond your wildest expectations. Used just 2-3 treatments per week for 5-6 minutes, this beauty tool will subtract years from your skin. Seriously. 

How, you ask? Great question. The Face Sculptor EMS micro-current awakens skin, clearing pores, lifting facial contours, and helps to reduce lines

As the Face Sculptors ultra high-frequency vibrations reach deep down into your skin, major anti-aging benefits take place.

First, the Face Sculptors sonic vibrations stimulate your facial muscles, which triggers collagen production. Next, the exfoliating setting sweeps away dead skin cells to create a mini-exfoliation session. Finally, the Facial Sculptor opens your pores to help your skin hungrily absorb every bit of serum you apply. 

You’ll literally feel your skin tingling after you use the Quiver — that’s youthful skin in the making!

Swap Sugar For Supple Skin

The bottom line? Sugar is poison to your body and water is poison to your skin. The sugar in your diet and the water in your beauty products both make you sick and destroy the infrastructure of your healthy, youthful skin. 

Luckily, it’s possible to eliminate the sugar from your diet and the water from your skin care products. Doing just one or the other can certainly enhance your appearance, but doing both simultaneously will help you transform your skin and instantly look years younger!

Better yet, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to find the best water-free skin care products. I created a Natural Facelift Kit to make your skin rejuvenation process as simple as possible. Give it a try to reclaim beautiful, glowing skin that you’re proud to wear naked!

Resource Links: 

https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-growing-concern-of-overconsumption.html#.XcrSoehKjIU
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986486/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23949208
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/10978-skin
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/advanced-glycation-end-products
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6147582/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40257-017-0301-1