Can Food Prevent Premature Wrinkles?

In Los Angeles, botox for wrinkles is sold by the unit in free weekly newspapers and in private homes. In New York, botox is a bit more elegantly disbursed, in Park Avenue suites.

Food has some fierce competition in those suites, and lucrative too. Botox courses are easy to find for physicians—some last less than an average doctor’s day. Botox certification is offered by nurse practitioner-led botox training workshops. They are promoted to dentists, oral surgeons, nurses, physicians and physician assistants.

But botox dosages that are inappropriate, botox injections that are unsanitary, and botox techniques that are unconventional are widespread…all for wrinkling that might be improved using food as medicine.

Older skin is thinner, drier, and less elastic. A study of food and wrinkling showed that the Mediterranean diet–rich in vegetables, beans, olive oil, nuts, legumes and multigrain breads—was recently shown to make a difference, especially compared with a diet heavy in red meat, butter, and sugary foods.

Why? Because heart attack, stroke, impotence and premature wrinkling are all the same inflammatory, hardened-artery process. Smoking worsens this.

And the main risk is the sun, and indoor tanning. Fair-skinned teenagers and young adults, those at highest risk of UV phototoxicity—read, sunburn—will be unhappy with their premature wrinkles if they do not use SPF 45.

But sun helps you create active vitamin D, now touted for your bones and cancer prevention. Foods with vitamin D include milk, salmon/sardines/mackerel, fortified cereals, breads and orange juice.

How much vitamin D do you need, and how should you get it, when botox treatments, botox therapy and botox procedures can be had for the asking?

You almost certainly need vitamin D if you are a frail, elderly person, or an inner-city ethnic minority: your levels are almost certainly low, and the risk for skeletal problems and DNA errors high.

You should get D from food or a dietary supplement; it should be vitamin D3, the active form; you need, on average at least 800 IU daily if you live above a line drawn between Norfolk, Virginia, and San Jose, California; and ask your doctor to have your vitamin D level measured.

So, no botox for you …at least, maybe not yet. Try food first.