Believe it or not, your skin is an excellent barometer for your overall health. Suzy Cohen explains how skin can reveal health concerns such as diabetes, cancer, and even heart disease.

There are three factors that reveal important information about your health. These are:

  • Tone
  • Texture
  • Color

Although everyone’s skin is different when it comes to tone, texture, and color, skin is still an attribute that you can observe and make connections to regarding potential health problems. For example:

  • Skin that sags:  means that you use alcohol or nicotine and are losing elastin and collagen, which helps keep your skin firm.
  • Spots/uneven skin tone:  associated with either getting too much sun exposure or from smoking.  This spotting also occurs inside your body in your blood vessels and organs too.
  • Yellowish skin tone:  Can be due to liver problems from drinking too much or a complication from a drug they are using.
  • Skin bruising:  Caused by taking steroids to treat asthma. Can also happen if taking fish oil, ginkgo, aspirin, or a prescribed anticoagulant medication.
  • Grey/blue lips:  Caused by not having enough blood that is getting enough oxygen, which in turn is a cancer symptom.

So what can you do to protect your skin? Cohen recommends doing your best to limit being exposed to the free radicals that cause these problems. Proper nutrition helps, along with reducing the number of prescription/synthetic-based medications that you use. She also recommends supplements such as:

  • Biotin
  • Collagen
  • Hyaluronic acid
  • Lipoic acid
  • Silica
  • Natural-based vitamins A, C, E.
  • Astaxanthin
  • Tart cherries
  • Acai
  • Plants with lots of chlorophyll but are not goitrogenic.
  • Grape seed extract.
  • Resveratrol
  • Pomegranate

Choen notes that you should check with your doctor to determine if these natural remedies could help with your skin problems. Also, she warns that it could take a few months for you to see any potential changes.

Want to learn more about why you need to pay attention to your skin? You can read the full post by Suzy Cohen here:  What Your Skin Says About Your Health.