How To Prevent Wrinkles Naturally: Study

Forget Botox.  If you’re worried about wrinkles, a recent study shows how to prevent wrinkles naturally… you know, without injecting toxins straight into your face like a crazy person on a dare.

The quickie version is this.  A big, big study found that women over the age of 40 with wrinkly dry skin tended to be deficient in certain nutrients;  the big ones were Vitamin C and linoleic acid.  Now let’s go over it in more detail.

The Study On How To Prevent Wrinkles Naturally

First off, this is a big study.  The sample size was over 4,000 women aged 40-74, which is a great start.  The larger the sample size, the less likely you are to come to one conclusion or another just off of random variation.  The other thing I really liked about this study is that they used about a hundred different dermatologists to rate the womens’ skin for various factors (wrinkles, dryness, atrophy) based on a standardized measure.

With a lot of different raters and a lot of different subjects, you reduce the complication of having a rater who just thinks everybody in the world is dry and wrinkly, or just the opposite, and therefore throws off your results due to their bias.  With a large number of doctors doing the testing, some are going to lean one way, some are going to lean the other way, and odds are, it all works out in the end.

So far, so good.  The researchers assessed the subjects’ diets by 24 hour recall; in other words “Hey, write down everything you ate yesterday”.  Those of you who have read many of my articles know my mantra about self-report; specifically, you cannot trust self-report, because people lie, embellish, forget, miscalculate, or get embarassed.  To some extent, some of those factors were dealt with in the testing, as the person administering the questions helped people estimate portion size with phony food models (this is important, people tend to seriously underestimate their portion sizes), and to remember the little things people tend to forget to mention (did you put sugar in your coffee, did you eat a Tic-Tac after all those onions, that sort of thing).

Still, it’s self-report, so it’s not as accurate of a nutritional assessment as would be ideal.  Not to mention the fact that it’s just a 24 hour recall; we’re basically comparing how someone’s skin is compared to what they ate yesterday, in the hopes that what they ate yesterday is a good example of what they’ve eaten over the last few decades.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is, when it comes to nutritional research, self-report is usually the only practical alternative.   It’s too hard to follow a large number of people around and document everything they stuff in their face.  Try it some time. Wait, don’t.  You’ll draw stares.   Just stay aware of the limitations of this kind of study and draw your own conclusions.

The Results Of The Wrinkle Study

Okay, so enough about experimental design; what did the researchers find out about how to prevent wrinkles naturally?  After all, I just wrote an article trashing Botox and its weird side effect that was just discovered… it’s only fair I give you a better alternative.

The womens’ skin was assessed on three different dimensions: wrinkles, dryness, and atrophy (thinness and weakness).  There were a number of non-nutritional factors associated with these factors; sun exposure, being post-menopausal, and having low physical activity were all associated with “worse” wrinkle scores.  Smoking is another well-known problem factor in this area.

Now for the nutrients that prevent wrinkles.

Each of the different measures of aging had different nutrient deficiencies associated with them, but there were some common threads.  Skin dryness was associated with low linoleic acid and Vitamin C (potassium and A were pretty close to significant, too), while skin atrophy was associated with low linoleic acid.  Wrinkles were associated with a number of nutrient deficiencies, including A, C, phosphorous, potassium, protein, and total cholesterol.

A higher overall fat and carbohydrate intake was associated with greater amount of wrinkles and skin aging.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the researchers did control for other variables like race (white people are more wrinkly), physical activity, BMI, sunlight exposure, and other stuff that might have confounded the results.  They even through in some fancy-schmancy statistical shenanigans called a logistic regression analysis designed to try to predict how much of a dose of this or that nutrient results in one measued “unit” of skin aging.  That’s neato and all, but really, I don’t put too much stock into those numbers because of the limitations of the experimental design (one day of recall).

How To Prevent Wrinkles Naturally

So what do we take away from this?  The major stuff you can do to slow or prevent wrinkles naturally is as follows:

• Avoid too much sunlight.  You’ve probably heard this before.
• Stop the smoking.  C’mon, you knew this already.
• Get some exercise.
• Don’t be old or white. (Just checking to see if you were paying attention)
• Eat a whole foods diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables to get as much of those nutrients in you as possible.  A good broad-spectrum multivitamin can act as an insurance plan against accidental gaps in coverage.  Additional Vitamin C isn’t a bad idea, either.
• Don’t neglect the protein!  Nuts, eggs, lean meats from grass-fed sources, all are important.   The lack of protein measure was by far the strongest association found with wrinkles.
• Lower your overall intake of fats and carbs/sugars.  Really, the main thing to avoid is the processed, artificial fats like trans fats, and processed carbs.  Unprocessed vegetables and fruits are fine.
• Increase your intake of linoleic acid.  This is an essential fatty acid (fat) that the body makes from EPA and DHA, the main “good” fats in fish oil.  So, read this article on fish oil dosage.

The good news is, the way to prevent wrinkles naturally, really is just the same stuff I’m always telling you to do for good health; whole foods diet, fish oils, exercise, ditch the cigarettes, etc., etc.  So, if my pleas for a healthier lifestyle have fallen on deaf ears so far, perhaps the fear of wrinkly old-looking skin will motivate you.

Stay healthy!

Article citation:

Cosgrove MC, Franco OH, Granger SP, Murray PG, Mayes AE. Dietary nutrient intakes and skin-aging appearance among middle-aged American women.  Am J Clin Nutr. 2007 Oct;86(4):1225-31.