Skin Ageing
Although ageing is inevitable, you can significantly delay the onset of ageing in your skin by making sensible lifestyle decisions and by using products that optimise the long-term health of your skin.
Clients generally address ageing in 2 ways – wrinkle reduction and skin firming. Both of these are linked to the structure of collagen and elastin in skin and these structures in turn are influenced by a range of factors.
A rule of thumb – if your barrier function is impaired and your skin is in an inflammatory state the rate of ageing is doubled. So pay attention to optimising skin health before trying to treat symptoms.
LIFESTYLE CONSIDERATIONS
- Try to maintain microbial diversity – this applies to both gut and skin health. Eat unheated fermented foods like sauerkraut or kimchi and spend time in nature. Gardening counts so long as you do not use toxic herbicides and pesticides. Take a good quality ingestible probiotic and apply a probiotic skincare treatment that contains live strains of beneficial microbes to outcompete pro-ageing species.
- Essential fatty acid intake – either 15g of flax seed oil per day or 600 mg of long chain omega-3 fatty acids (DHA and EPA).
- Reduce free radical exposure – covering up in the sun is always a first option but if you do use a sunblock, use a mineral one. Chemical sun blocks generate free radicals when exposed to UV which increase the rate of ageing.
- Maintain consistent blood sugar levels by eating “whole foods”.
- Supplement with trace minerals – make sure that copper and zinc are balanced. Many supplements avoid copper because it induces nausea but they mostly supplement zinc at high doses. These two minerals compete for a common absorption site so this often results in copper deficiency and you need copper for collagen and elastin synthesis.
