STRONG SKIN, Hair, and Nails Require This Mineral

For example, biotin is great for hair growth — but if our bodies produce or intake enough of it already, an excess can cause congestion in the pores and lead to breakouts. Adaptogens are amazing for stress, which when mitigated can have an amazing windfall of positive outcomes like balanced skin and healthy hair — but that doesn’t mean we need to be on a constant stream of adaptogenic herbs every day for the rest of our lives.

Cue: minerals. Many of us are well-versed in the deeply relaxing effects of magnesium, for example. But our body needs many minerals to function optimally, and not all of these minerals are as readily available from food due to specific diets and modern farming methods. The star mineral of our show today? Silica. Let’s hear a round of applause.

Silica is a well-known beauty booster, and for excellent reason: It’s a basic component of elastin — aka the collagen we want to see in our skin to restore a lasting, youthful glow that also works wonders for our connective tissue and actual elements of the dermis. Strengthened elastic helps skin to repair itself quicker, meaning it’s more resilient to breakouts, scarring, and sun damage.

For those radically deficient in silica for an extended period of time, this may look like loss of bone mass, or osteoporosis. In some cases, it might be dry, brittle hair with a plateaued growth pattern, dry, itchy skin or dermatitis, breakouts, and more. And, not to scare anyone — but the likelihood that we are deficient is rather high.

While silica is the third most abundant mineral in the human body, getting it from our diet doesn’t always suffice as we age. First and foremost, we need to be consuming the ideal amount of silica-rich foods, such as green beans, brown rice, lentils, brazil nuts, oats, bananas, alfalfa, and even nopal cactus. Unfortunately, modern grain milling strips away much of the silica-rich husks from rice and legumes, and many fruits and veggies are grown in water-based farming techniques, missing the silica-rich soil from whence they once grew. Are you getting enough nopal cactus in your diet? Us, either.

But it’s so much more than our nopal cactus intake. Both intrinsic and extrinsic aging are key players in the atrophy of our collagen and elastic stores. Smoking, pollution, and UV rays are also factors that play into rapid aging and a reduction in fibroblasts. Make sure to up your intake of the aforementioned foods to give it your best go — or opt for the fool-proof route of investing in a silica supplement to ensure the proper amount of this beauty mineral is down the hatch, day in and day out.