The news goes wild with food fads. Eating to feed your beauty interests is so much easier than following some strange juice diet and hoping for clear skin from it. When you’re experimenting with foods that help with your complexion, a salad is the perfect vehicle for it. There are dozens of superfoods for your skin and hair that you can put right on top of your favorite salad to sneak them into your diet.
Soy
How To Get It In Your Salad: Soy comes in so much of our food now, but sometimes it’s best to just keep it simple. Cut up some small cubes of tofu and toss it in along with your veggies.
What It Does: Soy helps to bring more elasticity to your skin. This reduces wrinkles. (Good-bye crow’s feet!) It also can help if you have problems with elasticity in your midsection after having children.
Why It Works: Soy is rich in isoflavones, a chemical similar to estrogen that helps replenish the elasticity in your skin. Adding in a half-cup of tofu throughout your day adds on about 100 calories, but gives you those isoflavones as well as more protein than a half-cup of beef. Protein is wonderful for those of us hoping for strong hair and muscles too.
Cheese
How To Get It In Your Salad: I bet you probably already have it in there! Cheese is a salad staple in both its shredded and cubed form.
What It Does: Cheese doesn’t just give you stronger teeth and bones, but it makes your teeth whiter too!
Why It Works: Exposure to acids in our diet along with dark colored foods and drinks can leave teeth very vulnerable to staining. The high PH level in cheese has shown to help neutralize the acids and protect your pearly whites. Most cheese used in salads pack about 200mg of calcium per ounce and plenty of protein. Limit yourself to an ounce or two on your salad if you’re watching calories. Whatever you do, make sure the package says “cheese” and not something like “processed dairy product”.
Red Fruits and Veggies
How To Get It In Your Salad: Add slices of tomatoes and red bell peppers to your salad.
What It Does: Adding either of these two things to your salad can help reverse age spots and red splotches, as well as help prevent sunburns.
Why It Works: It’s not time to drop the sunscreen, but it’s certainly time to reverse some of the damage done already. The lycopene in red fruits and vegetables like tomatoes and red peppers can reverse sun damage and help protect the skin from further damage. Toss them with olive oil first to increase your body’s absorption, and follow up with polyphenol-rich green tea to maximize the effect.
Meat
How To Get It In Your Salad: Chop and add strips of beef, bison, chicken, or pork.
What It Does: Getting a good dose of these daily can give you stronger, thicker hair.
Why It Works: When there’s not enough protein, iron, and zinc in your diet, your body prioritizes where it should go. While your hair is important to you, to your body it’s more of a take-it-or-leave-it thing. Keep your portions of meat no bigger than the palm of your hand and make sure they’re cooked properly before being added in. If you’re a vegetarian, some zinc and iron can be found in lentils as a substitute.
Eggs
How To Get It In Your Salad: Hard-boiled, sliced eggs are a common addition to lunch salads.
What It Does: Adding in eggs to your salad can give you stronger nails.
Why It Works: Eggs really are a superfood. Aside from containing much of the nutrients mentioned above for other concerns, eggs are a source of biotin. Biotin helps to repair brittle, thin nails. Our body does not hold a supply of it like it does with some other nutrients, so biotin is something that must be replenished frequently for it to work. For vegans, add on a handful of sliced almonds or some shredded carrot to get a does of biotin.
What’s normally in your salads? Are you already including one of these beauty superfoods?
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