Skin care and anti-aging products play a huge role in helping you in fighting fine lines and wrinkles. However, you can make these products much more effective if you take precautions and measures to boost your anti-aging efforts naturally as well. What this essentially means is reducing items that lead to aging and increasing your intake of food items that help your body to fight free radicals that cause aging.

According to recent reports, the negative effects of sugar are not just restricted to fats. It also leads to other issues such as accelerating the skin aging process. In fact, the harmful effects of sugar have been compared to the kind of damage that is caused by smoking cigarettes. Just imagine that perfect cake to look like a cigarette box. Yuck.

Research conducted in the studies pertaining to diabetes have made a note of the processes that take place when sugar enters the human body – and the results are hardly comforting. When the body consumes sugar, the sugar molecules directly enter the blood stream and attach themselves onto fats and proteins. This process is known as glycation.

After the glycation process, the molecules begin to form a compound known as the Advanced Glycation End Products. These products are quite slippery and can easily move through the blood stream of the human body. However, this larger product is considered to be slow moving and it also has trouble in moving through the smaller body vessels.

As a result, those suffering from blood sugar can suffer from a number of diseases such as chronic inflammation and connective tissue damage. Moreover, when blood sugar goes untreated, it can lead to the tightening of cataracts and blood vessels and a number of pancreas and liver related diseases. Sugar is also responsible for attaching itself to the elastin and collagen proteins in your body, thereby making them lumpy and slow moving. What this means is that the sugar proteins are what ultimately lead to sagging of your skin, loss of its shine, wrinkles and discoloring.

If this wasn’t enough, the AGE compound formed by sugar also leads to weakening of the skin so that other components such as sun damage, cigarette smoke and environmental toxins can damage your skin even further.

According to Cheryl Karcher, an MD in New York, the glucose in your bloodstream ends up making your cells abnormal and it also creates free radicals. Both results are considered to be extremely detrimental for the body when it comes to aging.

Fredric Brandt, a dermatologist in Miami, further confirms that when one is younger, the human body has more resources to fight the damage caused by sugar, simply because it produces more collagen. However, after one reaches a certain age, the collagen production begins to reduce and the byproducts of sugar begin to build up in the body.

Luckily, not everything is beyond your control when it comes to glycation. One of the best ways to reduce the stickiness and glycation is to ensure that your blood sugar remains within acceptable levels. The best way to do this is to follow a low carb diet religiously. You should also look at avoiding white sugar, processed flours and high fructose corn syrup. Green Tea is also known to help out with negating the damaging effects of glycation.