I’m boating in the Ardèche gorge in southern France and attracting some strange looks. It’s a July afternoon and the sky looks like a perfect canvas of blue.
Although there are 300m high cliffs and limestone on both sides of the river, the bright sunlight has never felt more intense to me. Its rays have turned the surface of the water into a path of shimmering light, bright enough to blind the eyes and I’m not taking any chances.
I also chose my outfit like an explorer trekking in the Sahara.
My boyfriend says the dress is ‘extraordinary’ and he doesn’t mean it as a compliment. My arms, hands and torso are fully covered by a long sleeve shirt. The dress has spf protection that I ordered online from Australia while my head is covered with a hat that comes with a face shield.
Also, I’ve applied several layers of sun cream on my skin, so my skin has a white glow and I’m wearing sunglasses.
Although I’m determined to avoid the effects of sun exposure, could these extreme measures have other hidden benefits? Is my obsession with maintaining healthy skin a coincidence? The answer to both these questions is yes. it is just like this.
The latest research shows that our skin is not only a mirror of our lifestyle, reflecting the effects of years of smoking, drinking, sun and stress, but also our inner health.
The largest organ of our body i.e. the skin plays an active part in our physical health. It’s a strange new reality where wrinkles, dry skin and sun spots actually cause aging itself.
In 1958, when the United States passed a law that led to the moon landing and the creation of NASA, another major project was quietly launched. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study was a bold and unconventional initiative based on the scientific investigation of aging.
Previously, it was standard scientific practice to try to glean information about the physiology of living people from donated cadavers. It was a practice that had its roots in the 19th century tradition of exhuming bodies from graves.
But this time the hearts of those to be studied were still beating and their bodies were alive.
The study followed thousands of adult men, and later, women, over decades to see how their health developed and how it was affected by their genes and environment.
In just two decades, scientists have made some exciting breakthroughs, from the discovery that less emotionally stable men are more likely to develop heart disease to the discovery that our problem-solving abilities decline with age. A slight decrease occurs.
But one of the most surprising findings confirmed what people have long suspected is that how young you look is an impressively accurate reflection of your inner health. ‘
Men who looked particularly old for their age at the start of the study in 1982 are more likely to be dead now. This is supported by recent research, which found that 99 percent of patients who looked at least 10 years older had health problems.
It turns out that skin health can be used to predict a number of seemingly unrelated factors, from your bone density to your risk of dying from neurodegenerative diseases or heart disease.
However, as the evidence begins to mount, the story takes a surprising turn. Is skin just a living collection of the damage we’ve accumulated, or is it more complex?
Could it actually keep healthy people healthy and cause unhealthy people more harm?
There are two main ways to measure a person’s age. The first is the standard method, known as chronological age, which is tracked by rotation around the Sun.
But you also have biological age, which refers to the rate at which you are aging physically, including the maturation of your organs and cells. It can vary enormously between different people and even within the same body.
As we age, it’s common sense that our digital age eventually takes its toll on our appearance, with the skin becoming thinner and rougher, with less elasticity, as the skin responsible for pigmentation and collagen production. Cells die or become ‘sensitized’. Which means they stop renewing themselves and exist in a sort of dormant state.
But it is the environment that does the real damage. Ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation can damage our DNA, leading to sunburn, mutations and skin cancer.
95% of the total UV radiation reaching the Earth’s surface is ultraviolet A (UVA). This part of the sun’s rays has a longer wavelength, which allows it to penetrate deeper into the skin where it breaks down collagen and stimulates cells to produce melanin.
At the microscopic level, photoaged skin is ‘sun-aged skin’ that is thickened, with elastin and collagen fibers that have become deformed.
On the surface, it is often irregularly darker in color and noticeably more wrinkled. This is true whether your skin is too light to tan, called a type one on the Fitzpatrick scale, or a very dark skin type six, which the scale incorrectly describes as never burning.
Even darker-toned skin can burn and is sensitive to photoaging, although wrinkles will take longer to appear.
In fact, it is thought that internal factors are to a lesser extent responsible for the ‘aging’ look, while UV rays are responsible for over 80% of visible skin changes.
If you’ve spent your entire life indoors with the curtains drawn, chances are you won’t notice significant changes in this organ—the skin—until you reach your 80s. Importantly, however, along with these effects, the skin also undergoes chemical changes. And this is something that can have a profound effect on our overall health.
A chemical cocktail
At the beginning of a new century in the year 2000, a revolutionary new concept emerged. A group of scientists from the University of Bologna in Italy have proposed a new way of thinking about aging by observing the stress response of most organisms.
In a young, healthy person, the immune system works to maintain discipline, reducing damage to the body and warding off infection. But as we age, or when our health deteriorates, this inflammatory response can cross a certain critical threshold. A point beyond which they go into overdrive, releasing powerful chemicals that spread around the body, destroying healthy cells and changing our DNA. This inflammation goes hand in hand with the aging process.
And here the skin also becomes a part of it all. The latest research shows that dry, diseased, or damaged skin becomes part of this inflammatory system, releasing a chemical cocktail that causes further damage and inflammation.
Toba Masrat Ansari, a postdoctoral researcher at Jiichi Medical University in Japan, explains that these chemicals damage collagen and elastin, causing the skin to thin, wrinkle and lose elasticity.
“They also disrupt skin barriers, increasing the risk of dehydration and stress,” she says. ‘
The feedback loop is further complicated by senescent cells in the skin, either caused by natural aging or UV damage, which also release their own inflammatory chemicals.
But this is only the beginning. As the body’s largest organ, the skin can be profoundly affected.
Chemicals released from diseased and dysfunctional skin soon enter the bloodstream, where they circulate and damage other tissues. By causing inflammation in the body’s systems, these chemicals can travel through the skin and damage organs that seem completely unrelated, including your heart and brain.
This results in accelerated aging and the risk of developing most or possibly all related disorders. Until now, aging or diseased skin has been linked to heart disease, type 2 diabetes and dementia, as well as the onset of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
While we are all aware of the dangers of smoking, drinking, overeating and lack of exercise, you could argue that poor skin health is a serious problem that we all regularly ignore. The good news is that there’s a lot you can do to improve it.
Skin moisture balance
The first step to skin protection and overall health, according to this new theory, is to stay out of the sun.
The most popular method is the ‘Slip, Slope, Slip’ potocol, which was first launched in Australia in 1981.
Today it includes five core rules: wear a T-shirt or other protective clothing, apply high-factor sun cream, wear a wide-brimmed hat, wear sunglasses, and stay in the shade. Because protecting the skin from the sun is very effective in preventing the visible signs of aging.
In an early study, people who applied SPF 15 sun cream daily for four and a half years showed no further signs of skin aging during that period. However, it only provides 15 times the duration of protection against sun damage, meaning that if your skin would normally start to turn red in 10 minutes, you’ll only be in the sun for 150 minutes, or two and a half hours. Can be able to.
The experiment did not specify the level of protection of the sunscreen against UVA radiation, the type that causes skin aging. Skin experts recommend that you always check the UVA rating label as well.
There is strong evidence that sun cream can prevent much of the inflammation that occurs when the skin is exposed to the sun, which is the beginning of age-related diseases.
But this is not the only way to keep your skin in good condition. In fact, moisturizing is by far the easiest way to improve the health of this organ, the skin, and there is direct evidence that it reduces inflammation and that it can help prevent dementia.
Both skin with uneven skin tone and wrinkles with age and photoage—skin that ages from the sun’s rays—are noticeably drier.
The moisture level of human skin peaks around the age of 40, after which it declines, depleting its natural moisturizers lipids, filaggrin, sebum, and glycerol. This is a problem because dehydrated skin becomes less effective as a barrier between our body’s internal and external worlds. When our skin is dull and dry, its normal functions of keeping away infection-causing agents, environmental toxins, and allergens, as well as maintaining moisture, all become significantly more difficult.
However, adding back moisture isn’t as complicated as cosmetics ads suggest, and this simple anti-aging intervention is showing remarkable results.
In one study, an international team of researchers asked elderly volunteers to apply a topical moisturizer twice a day for one month.
Compared to older participants who did not receive any treatment, the patients had significantly restored skin with lower levels of three different types of inflammatory chemicals.
These promising results were soon followed by another study by the same team, which involved treating adults over the age of 65 with a moisturizing cream twice a day for three years.
Participants were measured at the beginning and end of the study, and after three years, those who were hydrating their skin had not worsened.
“Decreased levels of stratum corneum hydration, which is the outermost layer of the epidermis, is probably the biggest cause of inflammation,” says Mao Qiangman, a research scientist at the University of California, San Francisco.
They explain that because dry skin has a higher level of inflammation, it can feel itchy and if you give in to the urge to scratch, you may notice that the inflammation gets worse.
But Maine says many natural ingredients can help. These include glycerol, petrolatum, hyaluronic acid and lipids that are normally found in this layer of skin, common ingredients in even the most basic moisturisers.
It’s possible that simply drinking more water can help hydrate the skin, although the evidence for this is limited. Some studies show that this has not yet been confirmed, but some claim that it can help.
It also has not been directly studied as a way to prevent inflammation or related diseases. To get an idea of how the skin can affect the rest of your body, think about how much of the body it covers, then remember that whatever skin you see on the outside is also on the inside. Spread over the area and when your skin is damaged, every inch has the potential to release toxic chemicals.
So protecting your skin from the sun really pays off, but don’t forget moisturizer.