Food Treatments for Hair and Skin

Travis: Today’s show is all about quick fixes for your most common complaints. That was a great tip from our own Dr. Lisa that you just might want to try it at home. We’re here now in our prevention home remedy lab with Liz Vaccariello from Prevention Magazine to try some other beauty remedies that might work for you. Now before the break we pick two lucky guinea pigs to help us out. They have no idea what they signed up for, so we’re here with Debbie who -- are you sure?

Debbie: I don’t know.

Female: She’s ready to go I think.

Debbie: I don’t know. I'm trusting you.

Travis: You’re trusting me?

Debbie: I'm trusting you.

Liz: Okay, the idea here is that there are things that are not necessarily good for you to eat, good for you at the inside but they're good for the outside. So we’re going to take some foods that you normally throw away and we’ll use them for a quick beauty treatment. We’re going to start with some bananas, brown bananas how many have we thrown away over the years right? But it can be a wonderful hair conditioner, Travis. Why have you -- so anytime in the salon in your life do you know how they're applying conditioner.

Travis: Every week.

Liz: And brown bananas are a wonderful hair conditioner. And you just apply it as you would in normal after you shampoo apply it to the hair and what’s happening here is that there’s tryptophan, how does that feel, it’s nice and cool right?

Female: Well I mean yeah, it smells good.

Liz: Yeah, and it smells great, it smells like you know the botanicals that you would find in any normal shampoo or conditioner.

Travis: Well tryptophan is important because your hair gets a lot of UV damage and tryptophan is an essential amino acid and I can see how it helped your hair look more shiny.

Liz: Yeah, it makes it soft and shinny and there’s natural, there’s also some vitamin A and B and E and bananas as well.

Travis: Am I putting it on correctly?

Liz: Yeah, you're putting it on correctly so you just keep it there for about 15 minutes and then you rinse it off. Voila! And you're going to have a soft shinny hair.

Travis: That wasn’t so bad right? So we’re going to leave that on for a while.

Liz: Yeah.

Travis: And move on to our next victim, more participants.

Diana: Great. Hello.

Travis: Hi, Diana.

Diana: Hi.

Liz: The idea here is we’re going to have some soft, shiny, youthful skin and I think you need it, you have lovely skin.

Diana: Thank you.

Liz: But rather than go to a salon which can cost almost $100.00 for an exfoliation, we’re going to use some Aloe Vera gel.

Diana: Okay.

Liz: And some salt or sugar. And in this case it’s going to be sugar mixed with oil and we’re going to put that on your lovely face, look at your beautiful skin, you don’t need this at all.

Diana: Thank you.

Liz: And we’re going to apply it in a circular motion. What’s happening here is that the sugar also has a glycolic acid in it which is a natural alpha hydroxy acid which is going to exfoliate the top layer of your skin and the Aloe Vera gel of course is very soothing.