Why Cutting Sugar Might Be the Most Powerful Anti-Ageing Move

Everything now is anti-ageing – the lasers, facials, peptides, NAD drops – the list goes on.

But the question is: if we are still indulging in sugar daily, how much can the rest actually help?

As much as we might not want to hear it, the truth is no serum, however incredible, can outpace what’s happening inside our bloodstream. I visited the highly regarded Dr Ben Coyle after finding him on Instagram – and being particularly impressed by his willingness to call the industry out. He has spent most of his professional life as a trained doctor and skin expert – someone who actually does the research and asks the questions. He has an amazing understanding that we are often kept out of the loop when it comes to the plain, simple beauty facts, mainly because more importance is often placed on making money. 

I asked Dr Coyle whether he’d always been interested in sugar and its effects on skin. “I’d never really been taught a lot of this before. Then I went down these rabbit holes of study and learning. I spent so much time over the years reading and studying. I often say to people, you might see a 90-second clip from me on Instagram, but there are hours and hours of research behind that.” 

And aren’t we glad someone is reading the small print?

Dr Coyle doesn’t hold back on his findings. “When you understand sugar metabolism, you realise how much it drives disease – heart disease, strokes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, high blood pressure, obesity. Sugar plays a significant role in many of the conditions we’re trying to treat.”

If sugar feeds disease, then we have to ask: what is it doing to our skin – the organ we are all obsessed with trying to preserve?

“Glycation. That’s the word,” he declared. “We’re trying to build great skin proteins – collagen, elastin. But with a high sugar concentration in your extracellular matrix, it’s like this: imagine your fibroblast is a factory making these beautiful, delicate electronic components. It loads them onto a lorry to ship out, but the second the lorry leaves the building, it’s ambushed by thieves and arrives empty at its destination. That’s what sugar does. It steals those proteins before they can do anything for you.”

And studies worldwide agree. According to Harvard Medical School, glycation contributes to tissue ageing by damaging structural proteins. Cleveland Clinic shares that high sugar intake promotes the formation of Advanced Glycation End Products (AGEs), accelerating visible skin ageing. Mayo Clinic also links excess sugar to chronic inflammation – another key driver of cellular ageing.

That is exactly the crux. We’re investing in treatments designed to stimulate collagen while consuming the very poison that attacks, weakens and degrades it.

So the evidence is real – sugar is terrible for our health and our skin. We all know this, but sometimes it seems we are encouraged to forget. And instead of placing value on opting out of the sweet life, we are bombarded with an array of fixes that mean we can avoid the one thing that will probably help most: quitting sugar.

“We’ve taken the medicine out of aesthetic medicine,” Dr Coyle states. “To just inject someone without talking about the rest? That’s not barbaric – it is inhumane. There’s no integrity in that.”

Everything in the industry places importance on anti-ageing. It’s such a crazy and imposed requirement we have enabled that beauty is defined by looking young, or younger than we are. Ageing gracefully is now really the coolest and chicest way to live, not succumbing to the perverted ideals of beauty as youth, but also living in a way that optimises our true beauty and supports skin and health as much as possible.

Everything in the industry is offered to us as a fix, a betterment, when anti-ageing (as a concept, impossible) might not be so much about what we add as what we remove. 

As far as research tells us, the big drivers of premature ageing are stress, overdone sun exposure, genetics and obviously smoking is devastating. But diet – especially with high sugar intake and alcohol- supercharges ageing from within, and is probably, next to stress, the most aggressive of all.

The beauty is that the way we eat and the way we live are things we can influence daily.

I have played with this no-sugar concept, on and off, for years. For me, the goal here isn’t purely about achieving glowing skin – that’s the icing on the cake – but it’s often been about how sugar makes me feel: more racy, more tense.

It’s crazy how we reach for sugar when we’re feeling off and are encouraged to do so from young. You’re sad? An ice cream will fix it. We are constantly sold to dose up on sugar as a way to cover up what we’re feeling. But what’s not so sweet is that it’s the very thing that ends up doing the opposite. When will we learn that nothing tastes as good as feeling great?

And we know how great it feels to cut it all out – whatever the vice is that aids your relief. I have had many successful spurts of breaking up with sugar, only to be pulled back by a moment of tension, finding myself raiding the freezer late at night, desperately digging for those berry mochi.

Going strictly sugar-free is a greater feat than imagined. Sugar is literally in everything. It’s highly addictive and highly alluring, yet the benefits are empty. I immediately notice when I’m back on the sugar drug – my mood shifts, my clarity fogs, my skin doesn’t feel as glowy, and my sleep is affected. More importantly, when I recently did two months without any sugar (and I mean strict – no apples allowed), I felt amazing, in every part of my life – sleep, clarity, productivity, mood – and my skin absolutely showed this. The real battle is sticking to it.

When I asked Dr Coyle how he avoids sugar in his diet, he didn’t hesitate: “I love meat. A steak is a complete meal: protein, fat, no carbs—unless you add sauces. I could eat meat all day long. My partner needs her vegetables, so I have them too, and they’re not doing me any harm. But sugar? I think of it like a dial. I try to keep mine as close to zero as possible. It’s hard to remove sugar completely unless you only eat meat, but dialling it down is key for skin health.”

And the evidence around protein is there; it stabilises blood sugar, supports muscle and metabolic health, and quite literally provides the building blocks your skin needs to repair and regenerate. Plus, it can put a halt to those sugar cravings – or keep them largely at bay.

The conversation and obsession around topical anti-ageing is exhausting. Dr Coyle states that most of it is unnecessary, “Your skin is the most self-regulating organ in the body. Homeostasis means it knows how to look after itself. Millions of years of biology have made your skin a protective, thermoregulatory and immune organ. Skincare came much later. If your skin is unhappy, it’s not because of the absence of a product.”

Which circles back to the original question. If we are investing in lasers, polynucleotides, skin boosters and facials, but glycating our collagen daily, are we truly anti-ageing? Or are we just offsetting damage? Or trying to anyway.

The reality is this: you can invest in the best skincare in the world, you can book the most advanced facial, but if your bloodstream is inflamed, your collagen is damaged by excess sugar, and your sleep is disrupted by blood sugar spikes – in plain, simple terms, you are working against yourself and your skin. 

Reducing sugar isn’t about deprivation. It’s actually about looking after yourself. Because true anti-ageing is spherical – we can’t compartmentalise healing or health. And yet, we’re all convinced we can have our cake and eat it too.