How Breakfast Can Make Your Skin (More) Beautiful

A bowl of oatmeal or bran flakes may actually do for your skin what you've been trying to do with all those cleansers, astringents, and toners you’ve been buying: stop a breakout.

Pimple-producing hormones can be linked to reduced insulin sensitivity -- that's when various parts of your body block insulin and prevent it from delivering energy, in the form of glucose, to your cells. That extra glucose floats around in your blood, damaging things, including your looks. So when a group of volunteers set out to improve their insulin sensitivity by eating a diet with a lower glycemic load (meaning they ate foods that were less likely to make their blood sugar spike), their skin was clearer after just 12 weeks. AND they lost weight too.

You can lower the glycemic load of your own diet by cutting out the foods famous for spiking blood sugar: refined carbs (cookies, chips, white bread -- you know, highly processed junk). Replace them with more lean meats and fish, more low-fat dairy, and -- maybe most important -- more of the fiber-rich, 100% whole grains found in healthy breakfast cereals (and in whole-wheat bread and pasta, brown and wild rice, and barley). Fiber is particularly good at lowering your glycemic load: It helps prevent blood sugar spikes by slowing absorption in the digestive tract.

Bonus: There's evidence that eating the low-glycemic way and filling up on vegetables, beans, olive oil, nuts, and multigrain breads may not only clear up your skin but may also make it less likely to wrinkle. While it’s not totally clear why, initial credit is being given to the many damage-fighting antioxidants in these foods, which may protect against solar aging.