Sydney, May 19 (IANS): Eating enough fruit and vegetables could be the secret to looking good and having attractive skin, according to a study released on Friday by Australian researchers.

The researchers at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, investigated how young Australians viewed faces in terms of attractiveness, by being able to adjust settings to create the most attractive version of different faces, based on levels of melanin (tanning), or carotenoid coloration which occurs when you consume fruits and vegetables.

The author of the report, Kristine Pezdirc, told Xinhua news agency that the participants were given facial images to look at on computer screens, and then were allowed to adjust the axis to where they thought the image looked as "healthy as possible".

"They had three different experiments where they would look at the melanin axis, then they would look at the carotenoid axis, and then in the last experiment they were both combined, so that is where we got the result of seeing that they preferred the carotenoid to the melanin," Pezdirc said.

Fruit and vegetables contain certain pigments in them which according to Pezdirc, get absorbed by your skin when you are eating healthy amounts of them.

"If you eat a lot of carrots, or other orange fruits, your skin colour can actually change in hue, the carotenoid in the actual pigmentation that changes the skin colour when you are eating these fruits and vegetables," Pezdirc said.

The researcher hopes that the results will influence young people to eat more fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet, as research shows they currently aren't eating enough.

General expert consensus worldwide suggests that people should eat at least five servings of vegetables, and two servings of fruit per day, as part of a healthy diet.