What Your Skin Says About Nutrient Deficiencies

Dr. Andrea Suarez, dermatologist, shows us:

Watch out for…

Fun fact: skin, hair, and nail cells divide rapidly, making them among the first tissues to reflect inadequate nutrition.

These deficiencies mimic other common skin conditions: nutrient shortages can disrupt your skin barrier, immune function, cell turnover, and inflammation control, causing rashes that resemble dandruff, eczema, acne, or seborrheic dermatitis.

So, what’s to blame?

Deficiencies and their signs/symptoms include:

• Vitamin B2 deficiency: can cause severely chapped lips, cracks at the corners of your mouth, angular cheilitis, a smooth red tongue, and a facial rash that resembles seborrheic dermatitis.
• Vitamin B3 deficiency: can cause a severe sunburn-like rash, skin darkening and thickening, a dark band around the neck called Casal’s necklace, mouth pain, a smooth tongue, diarrhea, dementia, and can eventually be fatal if untreated (technically all vitamin deficiencies are fatal if not corrected, or else they wouldn’t be called vitamins, but this one speedruns it)
• Vitamin B6 deficiency: can produce a seborrheic dermatitis-like facial rash, dandruff, and eczema-like skin changes, especially in people with alcohol misuse, inflammatory bowel disease, malabsorption disorders, kidney failure, or certain medication use.
• Vitamin B9 deficiency: can contribute to pale skin, brittle nails, mouth sores, fatigue, and symptoms that overlap with B12 deficiency.
• Vitamin B12 deficiency: can cause skin darkening, especially in skin folds and on your palms, dark streaks in your nails, a sore smooth tongue, loss of taste, angular cheilitis, and sometimes premature graying of your hair.
• Iron deficiency: can lead to hair thinning, excessive shedding, brittle nails, spoon-shaped nails, pale or dry skin, and unexplained itching.

For more on all of this plus visual illustrations, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

As for why you might want to favor getting these from food if you can, then while the title says “vitamins”, the following book discusses an assortment of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients; the “other nutrients” category including amino acids (branched chain and essential), prebiotics and probiotics, and triglycerides of various kinds:

Eat Your Vitamins – by Mascha Davis, RDN ← see our review, here

Take care!