IF YOUR grandmother has ever warned you to go easy on the kicap, you’re not alone.
The belief that eating too much dark soy sauce will darken your skin is pretty much widespread across Malaysia and Asia leading some to avoid the condiment religiously.
Some even claim that eating soy sauce after getting a wound or chickenpox will make the scars darker.
The logic seems sound enough: dark-coloured food equals dark skin, right? But can your love of kicap really turn your complexion darker?
Verdict:
FALSE
No, eating dark soy sauce will not darken your skin, no matter how much you drench your char kway teow.
Here’s the thing: if dark-coloured foods actually darken your skin, we’d all have to give up chocolate, coffee, Marmite, black sesame desserts and a whole host of other delicious things.
And if you’re really concerned about logic, shouldn’t eating white rice make you paler?
The myth likely stems from a misunderstanding about how skin colour works. Skin tone is determined by melanin, a pigment produced by specialised cells called melanocytes in your skin.
Melanin production is influenced by genetics, hormones and most significantly, UV exposure from the sun.
Soy sauce is made by fermenting soybeans and wheat. Like any other food, it gets broken down during digestion into amino acids, carbohydrates, inorganic salts and water that your body can absorb.
None of these components have the ability to increase melanin production or darken your skin.
The dark colour of soy sauce comes from melanoidins, pigments created through the Maillard reaction (the same chemical process that gives bread its brown crust and makes steak delicious).
These pigments are broken down in your digestive system and never reach your skin.
Now, here’s where it gets slightly more interesting. Soy sauce does contain an amino acid called tyrosine, which is indeed a building block for melanin production.
Some people have seized on this fact as “proof” that soy sauce darkens skin. However, this compound can only convert into melanin when exposed to UV rays from sunlight.
Without UV exposure, the tyrosine in soy sauce won’t affect your skin colour at all.
Moreover, numerous other foods contain even higher levels of tyrosine than soy sauce, including lima beans, fava beans, lentils, snow peas, cheese, chicken and fish.
If tyrosine in food could darken your skin, we’d all be several shades darker just from eating a balanced diet.
The belief that eating soy sauce after surgery or injury will darken your scars is equally unfounded.
When you have a wound, the skin may indeed darken temporarily. However, this happens because the skin cells are damaged, which activates an enzyme called tyrosinase, leading to melanin production at the injury site.
This post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation has nothing to do with what you eat.
The darkening is your skin’s natural healing response, and it gradually fades as the cells repair themselves and melanin slowly breaks down.
The same principle applies to chickenpox scars. The darkening that sometimes occurs is due to inflammation and the body’s healing process, not dietary factors.
What actually worsens scar darkening is UV exposure. If you expose healing wounds or fresh scars to sunlight, the UV rays will stimulate melanin production in that area, making the scars darker and longer-lasting.
But wait, can food actually change your skin colour?
Interestingly, whilst dark foods don’t darken your skin, certain foods can change your skin tone in a different way entirely.
Enter carotenemia, a condition where eating excessive amounts of carotene-rich foods actually can turn your skin orange.
According to research published in the StatPearls medical database by the National Institutes of Health, carotenemia is a benign condition where consuming more than 20-30mg of beta-carotene per day for several weeks causes yellow-orange skin discolouration.
One medium carrot contains about 4mg of beta-carotene. This means you’d need to eat about 5-10 carrots daily for several weeks to turn noticeably orange. The condition, first described in 1919, is most visible on the palms, soles, knees and nasolabial folds.
Dr Melissa Piliang, a dermatologist at Cleveland Clinic, explains that carotenemia is relatively uncommon but does occur, particularly in young children who consume large amounts of pureed carrots, sweet potatoes or squash in baby food.
The key difference between carrots and soya sauce? Carotenoids are fat-soluble pigments that deposit directly in the fatty layers of your skin.
A study published in PLOS ONE found that increasing fruit and vegetable consumption for just six weeks caused measurable changes in skin colour due to carotenoid deposition.
The changes in yellowness and redness were significant and scientifically detectable.
Unlike soy sauce’s melanoidin pigments, which are broken down and never reach your skin, carotenoids actually circulate in your bloodstream and accumulate in skin tissue.
However, carotenemia is completely harmless and reversible by simply reducing intake of orange vegetables.
One important distinction: carotenemia doesn’t affect the whites of your eyes (which remain white), whereas jaundice, a serious condition caused by liver problems, turns both the skin and the whites of the eyes yellow.
So feel free to enjoy your char kway teow and wantan mee with as much kicap as your taste buds desire. Your skin colour isn’t going to change one bit.
If you’re worried about scars darkening, skip the soy sauce paranoia and invest in good sunscreen instead. Protecting healing wounds from UV exposure is the real key to preventing dark scars.t potato fries, you’re probably safe.
The science is clear: you are what you eat, but only in the nutritional sense. Your skin tone is determined by genetics and sun exposure, not by the colour of your condiments.
Sources:
1. https://www.bbclearninghub.
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
4. https://emedicine.medscape.
5. https://health.
6. https://www.britannica.com/
7. https://uamshealth.com/