Soft and beautiful skin may come naturally to the very young, but only great nutrition and cutting-edge skincare treatment will keep it that way. This is an outline of the two keys to beautiful natural skin.

The first secret of healthy, beautiful skin is nutrition. By that I mean the food you eat and the supplements you take. If you eat a diet you know isn't healthy, if a burger, fries and a Coke is a regular meal for you, and you don't bother with nutrition supplements, you're destroying your skin from the inside out. Over the long term, skincare products might help, but they're fighting a losing battle.

Over the years, with that kind of nutrition, your skin's natural healthy beauty will be lost to the big three causes of aging. The Big Three are:

-- Loss of collagen and elastin, the proteins that give your skin both strength and softness (which is not a contradiction; with lots of those essential proteins, the skin is strong but it feels soft, because it's elastic; there's no sagging, just a firm, natural, silky smoothness)

-- Loss of hyaluronic acid, the "glue" that bonds collagen and elastin in the natural matrix of healthy skin

-- And damage to your skin by free radicals, caused by pollution, UV rays, and your body's own inflammatory processes brought about by bad food and lifestyle choices.

All three of those aging processes that lead to sagging skin, wrinkles and age spots can be reversed. But it's nearly impossible, long-term, with a terrible diet and lack of nutrients. So, here are those two keys to beautiful skin...

Number 1: Work on a good diet, and take modern supplements with scientifically-proven ingredients.

You don't have to be impossibly perfect in your diet. You can always begin (my standard suggestion) by adding a couple of deep green salads a week. I do mean deep green. Use baby spinach leaves, or romaine lettuce, and skip that bland white iceberg lettuce. Add the deep colors of other vegetables: broccoli, tomatoes, orange or red peppers, carrots. If you like other salad vegetables, toss them in, too. (No croutons are NOT vegetables!) If you like fruit, enjoy! Favor the deep colors: plums, nectarines, berries (blueberries, strawberries, blackberries). Do you like grapefruit? Have you tried Ruby Red? It's luscious, a little sweeter, a little less bitter than other grapefruit. I love it.

And since none of us eats a perfect diet, add a great modern nutrition supplement for beautiful natural skin.

Number 2: Use a cutting-edge skincare treatment. What is cutting edge? Here are the most powerful skincare ingredients I know, all proven in recent clinical studies with human volunteers:

-- Cynergy TK, which contains natural keratin converted into a functional form that is readily available to the skin. It stimulates your skin to produce more collagen and elastin, and in a recent study showed a sustained 14 percent improvement in skin moisture retention and a 42 percent improvement in skin elasticity.

-- Nano-Lipobelle H-EQ10, which is the powerful antioxidant Coenzyme Q10 in a form that is absorbed readily deep into your skin. Combined in the right proportions with natural Vitamin E, it's a superb wrinkle reducer.

-- Phytessence Wakame, an extract of a Japanese sea kelp, blocks an enzyme that degrades hyaluronic acid in the skin. Over time, hyaluronic acid can build back up to the levels of a much younger person.

These three are the core to the most potent skincare treatments I've ever used.

And there you have them, the two basic secrets of beautiful natural skin. I give lots more details and recommendations on my website.

Kathryn Lane is a health and nutrition researcher. The most valuable and effective products she finds are rarely the most expensive or the most-advertised, she reports on her website: http://www.health-and-skin-site.com/