How Eating Grapes Protects Your Skin From UV Damage

Oftentimes, when we write about the benefits of grapes, it’s about the water volume. Much like in our recent article about watermelon, the water volume is actually useful, in two main ways, so let’s quickly recap:

• One way is because enjoying food that contains water is generally more hydrating than just drinking water: Things Many People Forget When It Comes To Hydration
• Another way is that its volume (which is only possible because of its water content) increases satiety too: Some Surprising Truths About Hunger And Satiety

Of course, grapes are also well-known for their polyphenol content, or more specifically, for their resveratrol content, which has most popularly been talked about in the matter of the proposed health benefits of red wine.

We’ve written about that here: Can We Drink To Good Health? ← while there are polyphenols such as resveratrol that makes it through the process of turning into red wine that per se would boost heart health, there’s so little per glass that you may need 100–1000 glasses per day to get the dosage that provides benefits in mouse studies*.

^{*If you’re not a mouse, you might even need more than that!}

To this end, many people prefer resveratrol supplementation ← link is to an example product on Amazon, but there are plenty more so feel free to shop around 😎

Now, it’s not the only reason for popular misunderstandings about alcohol and health, but for how that myth got started, see French biochemist Jessie Inchauspé’s explanation: Are You Making This Alcohol Mistake?

But what’s this about protecting one’s skin?

Save your skin

Researchers (Dr. John Pezzuto et al.) found that enjoying the equivalent of 3 portions of grapes per day for 2 weeks resulted in improved resistance to UV radiation in 30–50% of people.

How it works: it has to do with gene expression, and while the results were varied in terms of how each participant’s gene expression changed, gene expression was altered in all participants. Specifically these changes increased keratinization and cornification, which might sound bad, but in fact they are both processes that, in healthy moderation, help form the skin’s protective outer barrier (the “horny layer“, as it is also known, to the mirth of first-year students throughout the English-speaking world) against environmental damage.

As Dr. Pezzuto himself put it:

❝We are now certain that grapes act as a superfood and mediate a nutrigenomic response in humans.

We observed this with the largest organ of the body, the skin. The changes in gene expression indicated improvements in skin health. But beyond skin, it is nearly certain that grape consumption affects gene expression in other somatic tissues of the body, such as liver, muscle, kidney and even brain.

This helps us to understand how consumption of a whole food, in this case grapes, affects our overall health. It’s very exciting to be working in the post-genomics era where we can finally start to employ functional genomics and actually visualize complex matrices indicative of nutrigenomic responses.❞

You can read this paper in full, here: Inter- and Intraindividual Variation of Gene Expression in Human Skin Following Grape Consumption and/or Exposure to Ultraviolet Irradiation

And how this builds on from Dr. Pezzuto’s earlier work, here: Short-Term Grape Consumption Diminishes UV-Induced Skin Erythema

This is very similar to part of the mechanism by which almonds have similar skin benefits, including improving the skin’s resistance to UV radiation: Eat This Daily For No Wrinkles (& How It Works)

Want to learn more?

For more about protecting your skin from UV radiation, check out:

Beyond Sunscreen: The Ultimate Guide To Photoprotection For Your Skin

Take care!