Foods that Protect Against Skin Cancer

While everyone knows sunscreen helps protect the skin from the sun’s  damaging rays, who knew there was a way to protect your skin from the inside as well? A study published in Nutrition Reviews from Professor Niva Shapira at Tel Aviv University suggests that certain foods may protect the skin from skin cancer just as well as sunscreen.

The key to protecting your skin through food is to eat a diet rich in polyphnol’s such as a Mediterranean-style diet.  Dr. Shapira thinks this could be one of the reasons that despite lots of sunshine in a country like Greece, there is a relatively low level of melanoma.

So what do you eat if you want to do more to protect your skin this summer?? Eat like an Israeli, Greek, Italian or Turk: lots of olives and extra-virgin olive oil, lemons (and citrus fruit in general), grapes, tomatoes, tea, rosemary, sage, brightly colored vegetables, and fish.

So next time you are lotioning up to go lay on the beach, why not have some hummus with olive oil and Israeli salad first?

Thanks to Truth in Aging for this story.

Photo courtesy of Davide Schiano on flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

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