By If you suffer from skin allergies, this is something you need to read
Like most people, I commute to and from work on the train.
I won’t ever forget this one teenage girl who I’ve seen for years while travelling on the train to work. It’s hard to notice her skin condition.
Although she tried to hide the evidence, since I’m a health nut, I know she has some allergic response to food from a mile away — her skin and scalp flake, inflamed and red in patches.
Perhaps her parents are oblivious of how to rectify it -but since I have a teenager myself, I know how hard it is to get through to them sometimes!
As a teen, I also suffered from this condition — and I overcame it by altering my nutrition and continual immune therapy.
These days I believe altering my diet would have been enough to cure my allergies.
Our gut controls all our functioning — including our brain. So it’s one of the most important organs (I believe) in enhancing our health and skin quality.
A Monash University explored how closely the gut axis and skin are closely related and how our gut can protect us from allergic skin diseases.
As I mentioned above, it could be the one thing that changes someone’s life.
Researchers fed mice a diet high in fermentable fibre or gave them purified SCFAs (which are short-chain fatty acids). This treatment was proven to be very protective against skin allergies or inflammation.
Researcher’s also tracked the mice’s bodies’ responses, and it only took a few minutes to reach the skin, priming it to produce the key structural components essential for that healthy skin barrier.
Our immune system is secondary to the skin barrier function.
When you actively improve the skin barrier, it can have positive effects against environmental exposures that cause allergies and perhaps skin disease, which may be underpinned by damage or a weaker skin barrier.
SCFAs can be administered orally or topically on the skin by bypassing the gut.
The realisation that short chain fatty acids can be tolerated topically opens up a huge array of possibilities to develop preventative strategies for disease-modifying interventions.
It can help children at higher risk of developing skin allergies that might develop into food allergies and asthma.
It’s not uncommon to have allergies in one area and to progress to more.
Perhaps this intervention could have helped that teenager on the train get the quality of her skin back too. But who knows how many more allergies she has. I am certain there may be something yet to be uncovered.
Diet has a huge impact on the quality of our skin — there is no doubt about that; it’s just unfortunate that there isn’t a lot of science backing up this theory.
In my own experience, I had to make the changes myself to discover the difference.
Sometimes, eliminating the key foods and allowing time to pass will help uncover the root cause and could be the key to better skin quality.
Key take away
You might be wondering where you, too, can get SCFA? It’s easy and most likely in the food you are eating today. As for a topical cream, that’s a bit out of my league!
As Healthline specifies, these are the best fibres for the production of short-chain fatty acids in the colon:
Resistant starches: Grains, barley, rice, beans, green bananas, legumes & potatoes cooked and cooled.
FOS: Fruits, veggies, onions, garlic and asparagus
Inulin: garlic, leeks, onion, wheat, artichokes
Pectin: apples, oranges, carrots, apricots
Guar Gum: Beans, butyrate (found in cheese, butter and cows milk)
Arabinoxylan: Grains, wheat bran, oats.
Eat as many of these as possible and monitor your skin. Is it making a difference?
Do you have a skin allergy, and did you use diet interventions to change that? How successful were you?
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