“Oh my! But why am I so yellow this morning? But also: so wrinkled, so swollen … so old, in short?”. Anyone who has never looked in dismay at the mirror in the early morning, getting out of bed and running their hands full of water over their face, can stop reading. Unless she looked at her thighs without enthusiasm lying on the sand this summer, exhausted from the useless war on cellulite waged during the winter with massages, creams, expensive electrical devilry. Or she has not touched the skin of the arms and abdomen in search of the lost tone who knows how many years ago; explored the signs of acne, rosacea, dark spots without knowing what to do. Or, again, combed what remains of a hair not badly reduced to a saucer of angel spaghetti.
If none of these little daily anxieties have ever touched you, and you are sure they will never touch you, well, then yes: our proposal this month is not for you. You can laugh calmly and deluded that your skin will never let you down. Maybe snorting in front of the new road map of feeling good according to science: this “Beauty Food. Recipes for eternal youth”, a joking title for a very serious book written by the nutritionist and hydrologist Nicola Sorrentino and the dermatologist Pucci Romanowhich you can find on newsstands with Salute.
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If, on the other hand, you want to keep up with your skin, your hair, your nails, whatever the DNA that has given them shape and will determine their course, start reading, go to the market to buy new foods and prepare them with many recipes that form the second part of the book.
How to stay young at the table
So? How do you stay young at the table? At first glance it seems the same old story: lots of water, vegetables, fruit, fish, little meat, little sugar, no industrial foods, little alcohol … The Mediterranean diet, the modern elixir of life. The wise and winning choice to live long, in health and even in beauty. A little exaggerated? Well, we have said it and we repeat it: how soon our skin ages is written in the DNA. What was your mother’s complexion like? Your father’s fabrics? Seen those, seen it all. But we at Salute do not like this sort of inevitability that pushes us towards the sofa and the spritz fatally inspired by our genetic destiny. We are convinced that there is a precise individual responsibility to which to attribute a lot of our destiny, even that in front of the mirror. It is a belief “according to science”, and Sorrentino and Romano, studies in hand, show how the play of vitamins, mineral salts, fatty acids, but also sugars, proteins and fibers is the real arbiter of our appearance. Explaining how each of the nutrients we ingest with our diet plays a role in aging and skin blemishes.
“Beauty Food” first of all details how our skin is made and why it ages, it fills with sebum and capillaries, accumulates imperfections due to its pathologies (from cellulite to acne) to get to explain why polyphenols fight wrinkles, selenium it keeps us a bit of the color of the thirty years, the carotenoids allow us to stay in the sun without too much damage.
Do we mean that they preserve us? Let’s not exaggerate: wrinkles come sooner or later. But if we want it to be “then”, then we can equip ourselves with a nice basket of vegetables and a nice bottle of water.
After having explained the cellular and metabolic dynamics that make us grow old and sick, Sorrentino and Romano offer us many ad hoc recipes for each of the conditions we want to prevent or mitigate. Who would have thought that against capillary fragility you can try a cold cod salad (which is also good)? Or that – surprise – to get to grips with cellulite, spaghetti alla pescatora help us (made as the book suggests, of course).
The authors warn against toxic lifestyles, a sedentary lifestyle and smoking. And they invite us to observe our skin carefully because it can give us valuable clues about our state of health: there are not only wrinkles, there are more serious matters that our skin warns us about. A chapter explains it well, and tells us what to watch out for.
But without forgetting some good news: chocolate does not cause pimples! Hurray.