By the time you hit adulthood, you may be well aware of how your lifestyle can affect your skin, so you run offense to protect it: smearing on sunscreen before you leave for work in the morning, keeping a water bottle on hand to make sure you stay hydrated, shooting for eight hours of sleep per night (even if an evening out with friends or a too-long doomscrolling sesh occasionally foils your plans). Maybe you’ve even considered (or gotten!) Botox. But you may be disregarding one factor that can play a major role: your sugar intake.
There’s a long list of health issues a high sugar intake can cause—obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, tooth decay, even cancer—but it can also have another side effect that you might not know about: premature aging. Yep, that sweet-treat habit could be showing up where you least expect it: your complexion. Consistently eating a lot of sugar can actively harm your skin and make you look older than you actually are, sabotaging all that hard work you put into your nighttime skincare regimen.
“Sugar doesn’t just affect your body, it transforms your skin from the inside out,” Elizabeth Bahar Houshmand, MD, FAAD, a dermatologist based in Dallas, Texas, tells SELF—and, in case it wasn’t clear already, not for the better. Below, we’ll dig into why this happens, what skin changes you can expect to see, and how you can tweak your diet to reverse some of the effects, because, thankfully, they’re not set in stone.
How does sugar contribute to skin aging?
While the biology is a little complex, the root cause is a process known as glycation. When you eat a diet high in sugar, the excess sugar molecules bind to proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids in your body, forming compounds known as “advanced glycation end products”—AGEs for short. Over time, these AGEs accumulate, directly contributing “to the visible and structural signs of skin aging,” Dr. Houshmand says.
Take two skin-specific proteins as an example: collagen and elastin, or the main “dermal building blocks,” Anthony Rossi, MD, FAAD, a dermatologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, tells SELF. Both are important for “maintaining firmness, elasticity, and resilience,” Dr. Houshmand says, but the formation of AGEs disrupts that mission by making them “stiff, brittle, and less able to repair or regenerate.” “Basically, they’re not as pliable,” Dr. Rossi says.
