Four Beauty Foods to the Rescue!

If you’re familiar with celebrity nutritionist Kimberly Snyder, you may have seen her recent segment with Dr. Oz on the four foods that combat signs of aging, the same ones I have and Kimberly obviously does not.  Crow’s feet are one example.  I was happy mine could be Photo-shopped off the picture we used for Beanalicious Living, but that still leaves the real life wrinkles to deal with.  For this problem and others, here are four beauty foods to the rescue, starting with watercress.

I like the idea of replacing pricey eye cream with nourishing beauty food.  Kimberly recommends using this zesty green as an alternative to lettuce in things like spring rolls, salads and wherever else you can fit it in.

She then goes on to introduce the beauty food known as dulse, a sea vegetable to be used as a salt alternative which helps to combat under eye circles, and works as a remedy for dry hair. Her last two recommendations (at least in this segment) were eating beets for brighter eyes and red cabbage to increase circulation thereby decreasing the dark patches that form on the skin as we age.

Since these are all foods I enjoy and, with the exception of watercress and dulse, eat at least weekly anyway, I thought I’d put the theory to the test.  Kimberly suggests enjoying these foods raw, or in the case of dulse, dried, and eating them three to five times a week.  Follow this simple prescription and results will start to become visible in just three days.

Duly motivated for exciting results, I stocked up on beets, watercress and red cabbage, which were easy to find fresh at my local market.  Fortunately I had some dulse strips on hand which I purchased a while ago when I was on a sea vegetable kick and had found a great source online.  After tasting it I remembered why I still have it:  it’s definitely more palatable ground into a powder for sprinkling!

But as always, planning ahead makes healthy eating do-able, so plan I did!  And it was easier than I thought.  Crunchy Cashew Fennel Slaw is a delicious Beanalicious Living dish, so I took a few minutes to mix up a hearty batch to carry me through the next few days.  The beets were easy to add to a smoothie, check that one off.  The watercress I just sprinkled into salads, no problem.  The dulse was not my favorite, but I have identified an aromatic pre-flaked option from Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company which works very nicely.

Personally, I love the idea of eating for beauty – it’s efficient and inexpensive, especially compared with buying topical beauty products.  The nice part is, all of these foods are pretty readily available, except for the dulse flakes, which BTW, if you’re ordering anyway, add in a shaker of Mendocino Seaweed Miracle Mix, it’s a great addition to vegetable and legume salads especially, but finds its way into lots of other dishes it’s so good.

The only tricky part for me was self-assessing whether the treatment was truly effective.  I definitely noticed the whites of my eyes showing more vibrancy after a few days (and lots of beets).  The other benefits may take longer, and to be honest I’m lucky not to have the brown patches that the watercress was supposed to cure, so that was a wash anyway.  And as far as wrinkles go, I’m realistic enough to know that as a 48 year old whose seen my fair share of sun (before I knew better), while good nutrition helps, I wasn’t expecting miracles.  Perhaps if I had started when I was Kimberly’s age!

But better late than never I always say.  I’ll keep beets and red cabbage at the top of my produce list, and my Mendocino Miracle Mix shaker had long since been empty, so this was a good reminder to refill it.  And if my hair begins to become more lustrous with the switch from salt to seaweed, rest assured you’ll be the first to know!