Who knew? Giving up sugar can take 20 years off your looks!

From The Daily Mail.  Better than any skin cream they say that giving up sugar can be one of the best things you can do - even makes you look younger!

The biggest compliment anyone can pay Wendy Powell is to call her a liar. The mother of two absolutely adores it when people refuse to believe she is all of her 40 years.‘Better still is when I bump into people who I haven’t seen for a long time,’ she says. ‘It’s not unusual for them to say “wow you look better than you did 20 years ago”, which is wonderful.’And the reason for this sudden turning back of the years? It’s not weight loss, expensive cosmetic surgery or the glow of a new and exciting love affair. Wendy, a personal trainer and mother-of-two from Truro, in Cornwall, puts it all down to cutting sugar from her diet. She swears it has helped rejuvenate her skin more effectively than any so-called miracle cream ever could.

Now it seems Wendy’s findings have the backing of science. For the first time, a direct link has been established between the amount of sugar circulating in the blood and how old a person looks. Scientists from the Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, and Unilever in the UK, measured the blood sugar levels of 600 men and women aged between 50 and 70.They then showed photographs of these people to a board of 60 independent assessors and found that those with higher blood sugar looked older than those with lower blood sugar. In fact for every 1mm/litre increase in blood sugar, the perceived age of that person rose by five months.
‘We took into account other factors such as whether or not that person smoked and yet still the effects were clear — the higher the blood glucose, the older the person looked,’ says Dr David Gunn, a senior scientist at Unilever who helped conduct the trial.‘Those who looked the oldest of all were the diabetics in the group. Because of their condition, they will have had the high levels of glucose for a long period of time.’ The skin experts agree. A diet high in sugar is a disaster for the face.‘There is no point in spending lots of money on expensive skin creams if you are eating a diet high in sugar,’ says Dr Aamer Khan, a cosmetic dermatologist who is also medical director of the Harley Street Skin Clinic. 'Yes, you can protect and moisturise your skin from the outside with creams, but you need to feed and stimulate the growth of good strong skin cells from inside too and sugar will sabotage that.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2125217/How-giving-sugar-20-years-looks.html#ixzz1r7c0M87L