Does eating fruits and veggies make you more attractive?

Researchers claim it’s better than getting a tan.

Fri, Jan 14 2011 at 9:08 AM

Related Topics:

Healthy Eating, Vegetarianism & Veganism, Science

This is interesting. Dr. Ian Stephen at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. led research to determine if people look better after eating fruits and vegetables or after getting a tan.

BBC reports that he had students “eat five extra portions of fruits and vegetables every day for two months.” Then students looked at photos of themselves with varying skin tones, including a photo taken after they’d completed their two months of fruits and vegetables. More students liked the way they looked after having eaten the fruits and vegetables than they did when they had a tan.

Stephen believes that is because the fruits and vegetables upped the subjects' carotenoid levels and added more golden tones to their skin.

Stephen explained: “In humans, the more red and yellow tones found in the skin, the more attractive the people were found to be.”

The redder tones are caused when people are flush with blood, particularly if the blood has lots of oxygen in it.

I don’t know whether eating more fruits and vegetables makes people more attractive or not, but I do believe it can change your skin tone. When my oldest was a baby, his face turned a little orange and his nose turned bright orange. It freaked us out.

When we asked the doctor about it, he asked how often we fed him carrots. Our son was in a phase where he only wanted to eat carrots and sweet potatoes. His skin tone eventually evened out as he learned to eat different vegetables and fruits.

Perhaps now we have one more reason to add more fruits and vegetables into our diets — so we can look more attractive. As long as our noses don’t turn bright orange, it certainly can’t hurt.

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