Ways to slow aging and stop wrinkles....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 8-22-2013

This has two parts.

Stop doing the things that cause the problem.

And, do the things that help prevent it.

1.  Stop doing the things that cause the problem.

a)  Excessive exposure to sunlight and UV lights cause skin damage and over time the damage causes extra skin aging and wrinkles.  So try to avoid more than 10 or fifteen minutes of direct sun exposure between an hour before solar noon to about an hour and a half after.  (In the summer where there is Daylight saving time that’s Noon to 2:30 PM.)

You can get sun exposure more in the morning and in the late afternoon and evening.  Or you can be out in those hours close to Noon but wear clothes that cover most of you and a broad-brimmed hat.

You can take vitamin D3 if you believe you are getting too little sun.  (The evidence and expert opinion we've seen is that most people should take 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day year round for good health in many categories.  In this case, that makes the sun exposure optional.)

(Even if you wear dark glasses in the summer or on grey, overcast, rainy days in the winter, there is SO much light outside during the hours around solar noon, even 10 minutes a day a few days a week is enough to prevent the kind of depression that comes from light deprivation, SAD.  This also works if you wear a hat and cover up.  That’s because the light that does the job comes into your eyes and there is so very much of it!)

You can even buy full spectrum bright lights for inside use that work.  So if you can’t get outside or it’s too hot or ice cold or stormy to be safe, you can get this benefit without going outside at all. 

(One company even sells an alarm clock light that helps you wake up gently to gradually increasing amounts of bright full spectrum light.  And, it only costs about $140 after tax.  It was $129.95 when I saw the ad for it.)

Never use tanning beds.  They tend even in small but regular use to cause this kind of skin damage and even increase your chances of getting melanoma. 

b)  Completely avoid any exposure at all to tobacco smoke! 

It’s dose responsive.  The more you are exposed the more likely you are to get heart disease, many cancers, and heart attacks.  And even a few minutes exposure every day is harmful. 

There is literally no safe amount of it to be exposed to!  Every single exposure helps cause those things!

AND, besides those things, the same thing is true of skin damage and wrinkles.  One sure sign of years of heavy exposure to tobacco smoke is to be unusually wrinkle and aged looking for your actual age in years.

This IS avoidable.

c)  Avoid drinking any soft drinks and eating any foods containing high fructose corn syrup or refined grains and use real sugar very sparingly.

Those foods are heart attack starters and make you fat too!  They make you more likely to get many cancers and speed up any you do get.  Ouch!

But as bad as that is, it gets even worse:  These foods cause what is called glycation in your cell as do the glycated  proteins in the foods they are in that you eat.

The sugars bond to the proteins in your cells in a process that has effects like pouring sand into and engine.  One health writer compared the process to pouring a thick, sugary syrup onto your computer keyboard!  Yikes!

This damage dramatically speed aging and helps cause many diseases.

AND, when it happens in your skin, guess what?!  It directly causes wrinkling!

Stop ingesting all or almost all of this stuff and you no longer get wrinkling it causes!

What else causes this effect?

Cooking foods at high temperatures does it! That glycates the proteins which then harm your cells after you eat them.

So in cooking, use low heat like cooking in crock pot or very low temperature sautéing or use very short heat exposure such as really fast stir frying and avoid long periods of high heat.

Secondly, when you do cook with higher heat or longer times pre-treat the protein foods with  or pair them with protective ingredients.

Marinating in extra virgin olive oil and spices like oregano and rosemary before cooking tends to prevent or reverse this effect. 

And cook protein foods with foods very high in antioxidants and that have some water content  protects your protein foods both ways.  (Making hamburgers or meat loaf that includes finely diced dark cherries does this extremely well.  And it makes your food juicier and still very tasty.)

2.  Do the things that prevent aging and skin damage and wrinkles!

a)  Did you know there are foods you can eat that act like internal sunscreen they are so protective from skin damage?

Yes there are!

One is the whole family of carotenes!

The more of these you eat every week, the healthier you are, the better you look, the healthier you look, the slower you will age, AND the more sun exposure you can get without even getting a sunburn or added wrinkling.  They enable you to have massive protection!

 There are a few supplements such as lycopene that are worth taking. (30 mg a day helps slow or prevent prostate cancer and may even partly reverse the slow growing kind.) Relatively small amounts of beta carotene as are currently found in most multivitamins are safe and likely desirable.

BUT, the very best way is to get ALL the carotenes not just a few. 

Food has them.  There are literally hundreds of kinds of carotenes in foods!

You can get them from raw foods.

But the way to get the most benefit from them is to eat them with extra virgin olive oil in a salad and also lightly cooked and even pureed cooked vegetables with extra virgin olive oil in cooked foods.

(Carotenes are most bioavailable when they dissolve into oil; and the safest and most health beneficial oil by several orders of magnitude is olive oil.)

Perhaps the most important carotene is alpha carotene.  People who have the most in their blood have dramatically better health, fewer disease, age much more slowly, and live longer than those who don’t/

Turns out that carrots have the highest amount of alpha carotene. 

I’m not terribly fond of carrots.  The taste is OK but not great and you have chew them a lot and very carefully or they will harm your teeth.

But, when I found out what eating them did for me, I now eat raw carrot chunks for lunch every single week day!! 

(For the health OK oils, I also eat raw unsalted and un-oiled walnuts and pecans with the carrots in my weekday lunches.)

There are also two kinds of foods that are high in carotenes.

The ones that are red, yellow, or orange vegetables and other foods.

Carrots, all kinds of squash including pumpkins, tomatoes, yams, and sweet potatoes.

(I eat baby food small servings of winter squash, carrots, and sweet potatoes in all my weekday lunches except for my two partial fast days each week.  That takes zero or prep cooking time and I just put them into my lunch container and take them to work.)

The dark green vegetables.  The colorful carotenes are there.  There is just so much dark green it hides them!

Chard, mustard greens, broccoli, and many other dark green vegetables are very high  in carotenes.

By the way, this protection the carotenes give your cells for slowing aging and preventing wrinkled skin have a second benefit!

Their protection provides excellent cancer prevention too!

  >>> And, there is a second food component that is this protective for your skin.

A high or moderately high daily and weekly intake of omega 3 oils from fish or seafood including DHA from wild caught naturally fed fish and seafoods or purified omega 3 or DHA supplements do the job.

These turn out to be so anti-inflammatory and supportive to your immune system getting enough of them also turns out to help prevent aging and skin damage!