You might hear all the time that for beautiful looking skin, you should avoid fried foods and junk. But no one has ever really explained to you WHY there is a link between the two, so you keep heading to the drive-through for your fix.

Today, I’m going to explain to you why fried foods are the enemy when it comes to healthy skin. It’s all thanks to something called AGEs.

What are AGEs?

AGEs stands for advanced glycation end products. This sounds complicated, so let me break it down into English. AGEs are when a protein or fat molecule bond with a sugar molecule. This bonding process is called glycation.

AGEs can be found both in foods and produced in the human body. The problem is, no matter what the source, AGEs aren’t really very healthy for our bodies.

How do AGEs affect our bodies?

AGEs have some pretty nasty side effects when they’re in our bodies. These include:

• Inflammation
• Oxidative stress
• Interfering with blood pressure lowering mechanisms
• Stiffening collagen by cross-linking the collagen together
• Oxidating the ‘bad’ cholesterol LDL, making it more toxic to the body
• Binding to cells and forcing them to create further inflammatory processes

Overall, AGEs act sort of like gate-crashers at a party. One or two doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, but when there’s a heap of them they trash the house and leave you to deal with the aftermath.

How does this impact our skin?

There’s a few key side effects of AGEs that we want to consider when it comes to skin health – specifically inflammation, oxidative stress, and cross-linking collagen.

We’ve already chatted about the role of inflammation and oxidative stress in skin health, but here’s a quick recap.

Oxidative stress leads to greater strain on the liver, which means it can’t detoxify hormones and toxins, and that backlog can lead to break-outs and skin inflammation. Inflammation feeds into this by creating more oxidative stress and leading the body to produce more skin-inflaming Substance P.

Cross-linking collagen has serious long-term impacts on the skin though, as sometimes the cross-linking is irreversible. So what’s bad about cross-linking? When collagen is cross-linked, it becomes stiffer.

As we know, when skin is stiff, it’s less able to perform its job of protecting us, increasing the likelihood of skin tears, infection, break-outs and wrinkles. That’s right – AGEs are thought to be one of the number one causes of premature ageing.

What’s the link between AGEs and fried foods?

This is probably the easiest question to explain. AGEs are produced rapidly when high heats are involved, which means that fried foods are the number one source of dietary AGEs for us.

In particular, meat products tend to be most vulnerable to high heat cooking and can produce a lot of AGEs, which is why it might be best to skip the hot dogs and burgers.

How can we avoid the damage of AGEs?

The easiest way to avoid all of this chaos is to avoid fried foods. Yes, that includes deep fried foods from restaurants, take-outs and your own home. If you do fry a lot of your foods currently, try new cooking methods with lower temperatures or that include water, such as steaming or poaching.

However, it’s not always possible for everyone to avoid fried foods 100% of the time, so if you are going to indulge, there’s a few ways that you can reduce the potential damage.

Research shows that herbs such as rosemary and turmeric, as well as resveratrol and vitamin C, can all help to counteract the effects of AGEs. Marinating meats for at least 1 hour can also halve the number of AGEs produced.

So if you are going to cook yourself up a steak, make a marinade with red wine vinegar and rosemary, and serve with a side salad that contains orange slices or red peppers.