Gorgeous Skin for Teens: Eat Your Way to Radiant Clear Skin

273 Pages·2008·5.95 MB·English

by  Erica Angyal

Erica Angyal is a nutritionist, health
consultant and author of Gorgeous Skin
in 30 Days. Since 2004 she has been the
official nutritionist to the Miss Universe
Japan finalists.
© Kenji Maeji
‘This is the perfect little guidebook for anyone who wants a better
understanding of how what we eat, drink and think can affect the
way we look, feel and act. Beauty really does come from the inside
out. I especially love Erica’s Gorgeous Skin action plan.’
—Miranda Kerr
‘Internationally respected nutrition authority Erica Angyal has done it
again! Her latest work, Gorgeous Skin for Teens, is essential reading
for all teens, educators, parents and dermatologists. Erica shatters
the myths surrounding diet and acne, while providing sound,
scientifically based nutritional advice. The book is a treasure trove of
valuable information for the promotion of clear, glowing skin, and will
set the table for a lifetime of healthy diet and lifestyle habits.’
—Dr Alan C. Logan, best-selling author of The Brain Diet
‘Erica truly shows you the secrets to great skin from within.’
—Riyo Mori, Miss Universe 2007
‘In this book Erica provides plenty of helpful advice on which foods
to eat to improve the health of your skin.’
—Ana Ivanovic, tennis player, ranked #2 in the world, 11 April 2008
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First published in 2008
Copyright © Erica Angyal 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a
maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for
its educational purposes provided that the educational institution
(or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to
Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
ARENA, an imprint of
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Angyal, Erica.
Gorgeous skin for teens / Erica Angyal.
9781741755275 (pbk.)
Includes index.
Skin—Care and hygiene. Teenage girls. Acne. Diet. Beauty, personal.
Teenage girls—Nutrition. Lifestyles—Health aspects.
646.726
Illustrations by Ian Faulkner
Set in 9.5/12 pt Helvetica Neue by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed in China by Everbest Printing Co., Ltd
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GORGEOUSSKIN
ff oo rr tt ee ee nn ss
ERICA ANGYAL
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PREFACE: THE TRUTH ABOUT TEENAGE SKIN 6
INTRODUCTION: ACNE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD 12
1 SKIN 101 17
2 NUTRITION 101 33
3 KISS THE SKIN ENEMIES GOODBYE 55
4 EAT YOURSELF GORGEOUS 75
5 THE SKIN PROTECTORS 109
6 THE HEALTH AND BEAUTY MYTHS 133
7 FEELING GREAT FROM THE INSIDE OUT 147
8 GETTING PREPARED 161
9 THE GORGEOUS SKIN PLAN 171
10 GORGEOUS SKIN RECIPES 213
NOTES 243
APPENDIX 250
INDEX 266
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 270
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A The truth about teenage skin
F Oh no, it’s wake up time! The alarm rings and it jolts you
out of a blissful dream. Tired and totally lacking energy, the
idea of starting a new day is enough to make you want to
E stay under cover—you can’t even contemplate getting out
of bed.
But the dreaded moment arrives: the wake-up-and-
R
check-your-face moment! As you stumble towards the
mirror for that daunting first-thing-in-the-morning
inspection, you can’t stop thinking, How many zits have
P sprouted on my face during the night? Will my face be an
oil slick? Do I have enough time to apply a ton of make-up
to camouflage my bumpy red skin?
By the time you get to the mirror, you are almost too
afraid to look. Shock sets in as your sleepy eyes begin to
focus and you get a clear look at your face. How could this
be? How could I possibly have another pimple on my chin?
Could this get any worse? How am I going to face my
friends and be able to go out tonight?
We all have experienced our own skin nightmares at
some point in our lives. It happened to me, at fifteen,
when I was a world away from my regular life in Australia,
as an exchange student on the Japanese island of Kyushu.
On my first day in class, I was in for a real shock.
‘What’s that?’ asked the girl sitting in front of me,
pointing right at my face.
‘What’s what?’ I responded, not knowing what she meant.
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PREFACE
‘Those red spots on your chin,’ she said, and kept
pointing at my face in front of everyone.
I didn’t know what to say, and my face turned bright
red. Coming from Australia, I had thought pimples were
normal. But the whole class turned around and stared as
if my pimples were some infectious disease! I was
beyond embarrassed. I wanted to crawl under my desk.
Looking around my class, I noticed that hardly
anyone had any pimples. How come none of the
Japanese girls and guys my age had acne? Why did
they have such perfect skin? Did they have some sort
of secret?
I couldn’t figure it out. Here I was halfway across the
globe feeling like the ugly duckling among swans. And it
wasn’t just that girl that turned my first day in class into
a nightmare. I still remember my first morning sitting at
my Japanese host family’s breakfast table, starving.
Gross, I thought. How disgusting! I had no idea how I
was going to eat the food that was in front of me. I
wasn’t used to soup in the morning, and this was not
just any soup. This one had little fish floating in it, and
their black beady eyes were staring straight at me.
Right next to the soup was a small dish of this slimy
brown sludge stuff that smelt like a really bad off blue
cheese.
‘This is natto,’ my host sister explained. ‘Fermented
soybeans, very good for you.’
Thanks, but no thanks, I thought, believing it was
some kind of a joke. Well, it wasn’t.
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GORGEOUS SKIN FOR TEENS
There were three generations living under the same
roof. My host mum was busy working, so my host
grandma made sure lots of interesting foods were served
up first thing in the morning: raw egg, pickled vegetables,
dried seaweed . . . Yuck!
So for the first week I lived mostly on rice. Then I
started nibbling on the more familiar-looking stuff like egg
rolls and tofu dishes. After a while I discovered that some
of the food wasn’t that bad at all, and I started to eat what
the family ate. My host grandma even brought us yummy
things like melon, sushi and red bean sweets.
About a month later something amazing happened. My
pimples slowly disappeared and my skin looked better than
ever. My Japanese classmates didn’t have some special
gene or mysterious secret after all. It was all the stuff that
my host grandma was feeding me every day—a healthy
diet that happened to help my skin at the same time.
It wasn’t until I got back to Australia, to tuckshop food
and all those sweets and snacks, that the pimples and
less-than-great-looking skin staged a comeback.
Ironically today, twenty-three years later, I am giving
nutritional advice to Japanese beauty queens, and I am
helping some of them to get rid of acne! What happened to
the blemish-free Japanese complexions?
Well, in the past twenty years, the typical Japanese diet
has changed at lightning speed. Meanwhile, in that same
period, acne rates in Japan have more than doubled. Now
Japanese teenagers are getting just as much acne as
teens in Australia, England and the United States.
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PREFACE
My own experience in Kyushu shows that acne is not
so normal. And research confirms that you don’t have to
get acne just because you’re a teenager.
Way back in the mid 1900s, a doctor named Otto
Schaefer noted that acne was completely unknown among
the Inuit Eskimos in Northern Canada. Mirroring my own
experience in Kyushu, in the years before World War II
doctors working on the Japanese island of Okinawa
reported not a single case of acne in any of the kids,
teenagers or young adults who lived there.
In the 1990s doctors examined 1200 Kitavan people on
the remote islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and
big groups of Aché hunter-gatherers in an isolated jungle
area of Eastern Paraguay in South America. And you know
what? They didn’t find a single spot in the entire teenage
population.
Now think about your classmates and almost every
other teen you’ve seen. It would be impossible to round up
a random group of teens that is completely acne-free in
Australia—or any other Westernised country.
So how come all these teens living in far-flung places
don’t battle with their skin? They certainly don’t all eat
traditional Japanese food. Perhaps they’ve got some
special sort of anti-acne gene? Sounds interesting, but
nope, that’s not it.
All the studies and observations point to the same
thing. The societies with zero acne don’t drink Coke and
eat Krispy Kreme doughnuts; they don’t have Big Macs
and KFC; and they don’t munch on M&M’s in between.
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