They’re all the rage.
So many beauty brands, including green beauty brands, are jumping on the ingestibiles bandwagon. Wha dat? Simply put, ingestibles are something you… well… you ingest. Yeah. This includes vitamins and herbal supplements as well as probiotics. These ingestibles claim to improve your skin from the inside out. And they probably can. But there’s a cheaper, easier, and I believe better way to improve your skin. More on that later.
So what’s the big deal? Why do we sound a bit skeptical? Well, it’s because none of these “new” ingestibles are actually new. They’re all supplements and probiotics that can currently be found in the market, but are simply combined and repackaged in a pretty container and marketed to the beauty crowd as a way to improve skin health.
But let’s be realz. Skin health (and yes, beauty) comes from within. Gut health is absolutely essential to skin health. But we’re not convinced that we should supplement the heck out of our lives. Supplements can play a role when we need an essential nutrient that we can’t get through our diet or lifestyle, like Vitamin B12 for vegans or Vitamin D for night owls (or vampires). Or probiotics – our antiseptic world zaps too many of these good bugs. Or if you have a specific problem, like dry skin, borage seed oil is a wonderful supplement that is chock full of GLA fatty acids which are great for skin health but difficult to find in nature. But for general wellness, a whole food, plant based diet that incorporates fermented food can give you the complete jigsaw puzzle and not cost hundreds of dollars a month for stuff you don’t need anyway if you’re eating healthy. No amount of supplements can fix a bad diet.
And another thing, and it’s kind of a big deal. All the natural elements found in plants work in symbiosis with each other. When we break them down into separate parts, we remove all the relationships that millions and millions of pieces of the whole have with each other. Isolation of elements is a very scientific approach that is the basis for modern medicine. But why take it out at all? Maybe a better term for supplements is “isolates.” Why not go straight to the source? Those plants, they know what the heck they’re doing.
So let’s keep the jigsaw puzzle together and eat more plants!
Oh, and if you want to learn more about eating for skin health, here are some super awesome books that can help:
Eating for Beauty by David Wolfe
Skin Cleanse by Adina Grigore
Eat Pretty: Nutrition for Beauty, Inside and Out by Jolene Hart
