14 DAY TRIAL // Health care specialists recommend we eat at least five fruit and vegetables every day, and a new scientific study shows that this actually makes us look more attractive too.
It seems that our appearance depends very much on what we eat, and getting our five a day makes us look better than if we had gone to a beauty salon.
The team of researchers from the University of Bristol proved that eating many fruits and vegetables is the best way to get to a healthy skin with a golden glow.
Dr Ian Stephen, lead researcher on the project and an ESRC post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol said that “most people in the West think that the best way to improve your skin color is to get a suntan, but our research shows that eating lots of fruit and vegetables is actually more effective.”
The researchers worked at the Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and the first part of their experiment consisted in evaluating the skin color of people compared to their diet.
They concluded that individuals who ate more portions of fruit and vegetables a day, had a more golden, yellow skin color.
For their next step, they used an instrument called spectrophotometer, and measured the way that light in different parts of the spectrum is absorbed by the skin.
This revealed that people with a healthy glow had a higher presence of carotenoids – yellow and red antioxidants believed to play a role in the immune system and fertility.
Finally, the team used a special computer software to change the skin color on the images of 51 faces, so that it could simulate more or less carotenoids and more or less suntan.
The study participants were then asked which faces looked more healthy, and the majority preferred the carotenoid skin color.
Carotenoids are normally found in fruit and vegetables like yellow and red peppers, spinach, apricots and melons.
This study is the first one to reveal such surprising similarities between humans and many other species, and the proof is in nature – the more colorful a male bird is, the more the females from the species will be attracted to mate with it, bright colors being a sign of good health.
And in the case of birds, the bright coloration is actually caused by the same antioxidant carotenoids that drive the effect in humans.
Dr Stephen said that “the bright yellow ornaments of birds demonstrate that the bearer has such a strong immune system and healthy reproductive system that he has plenty of these valuable antioxidant carotenoids left over to use in ornaments to advertise himself to females.
“Our work suggests that the carotenoid coloration of human skin may represent a similar advertisement of health and fertility.”
Prof Perrett, who heads the Perception Lab, said that the “study shows that not only do people use color cues to judge how healthy other individuals are, but they are accurate when they make those judgments.
“This is important because evolution would favor individuals who choose to form alliances or mate with healthier individuals over unhealthy individuals.”
This study has focused on Caucasian faces but the paper published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, also describes a study that concluded this phenomenon exists across cultures, and that similar preferences for skin yellowness were even found in an African population.
The work was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Unilever Research, and published with support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the British Academy.