Ravishing red peppers are better than botox!

In our last post we looked at amping up your vitamins A and C intake with a green smoothie designed for gorgeous skin. Another easy thing you can do for your skin is to think about red peppers slightly differently – almost like they are portable fruits.

Today’s high-tech tip is that you can eat certain kinds of red peppers just like you would an apple! Hear me out on this one if you are a vegetable-phobe. This is a dead easy habit that creates glowing skin and glossy locks. You just need to find the right type of red peppers (beyond the basic bell pepper). They need to be a bit sweeter and easier to eat on their own. The Romano/Ramiro variety that I’m holding in my hand in the picture above is really sweet and tasty!

The trick to eating them is to bite into them at the very bottom pointy bit first and eat your way up to the top, almost to where the seeds are. At that point, I simple use my fingers to break off the remaining red bits that are still clinging to the stem, and then throw out the seedy middle bit, just like I would an apple core.

I got this idea when listening to a friend (who happens to be of Chinese descent) telling me how cringe-worthy it was as a child when her parents did “weird” things like pull a red pepper out in public and start munching on it like an apple! I thought it was a funny story, but I also realised I had never thought about red peppers like that, and it was a brilliant idea!

Part of finding habits that you can incorporate into your everyday life involves weighing up the “ease vs. impact factor”. I jumped up and down about this one, because red peppers are rockstars in the nutrient world, and changing how I think about them means I can now repurpose a vegetable that I had written off as non-portable. That slight mental tweak means I tuck one into my bag as I’m going out the door!

Previously I ate red peppers only a couple times a week after chopping them up into salads. Now I eat one every day. This is an awesome and easy tool for health and beauty!

Red peppers have twice the vitamin C of an orange, and it’s this Vitamin C richness that Dr. Mehmet Oz has said  “allows them to act like a natural botox” to prevent wrinkles. Vitamin C is a prime skin-care ingredient in many beauty creams. It aids in the body’s production of collagen, a protein that forms the basic structure of your skin, and it also tightens the skin.

One medium Red Romano Pepper weighs in at around 120g. It contains 500% of the daily RDA for Vitamin A, and 200% of the daily RDA for Vitamin C. Just like cucumbers, that glossy outer coating on the red peppers signals that it contain silica which also amps up your beauty benefits including strong glossy hair and better skin and nails.

You can read more about the incredible benefits of Vitamin A, Vitamin C and silica and how a simple green smoothie will help you improve your skin tone, stay youthful, heal wounds, and help cells regenerate quickly.

Keep in mind that it is key to get your nutrients, particularly Vitamin A,  from whole foods like red peppers instead of pills as many studies have proven that supplements can be toxic.  

You can get organic Romano or Ramiro peppers easily from most major supermarkets. I get 4 packages of these ones every week.

Natural Beauty Tip No. 4: Eat one red pepper a day. (Eating it apple-style gets you extra points!)

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