Asparagus: Great Food for Your Skin ~ Best Natural Skincare Diet

Another great food for your natural skincare diet!

Asparagus is another great food to eat when you’re looking to care for your skin naturally. Those spears of asparagus help your body in many different ways. They contain an amino acid called asparagine, which you probably have noticed, has an distinctive… smell. And if you have the right genetic capability, you will also excrete that in your urine and be able to smell it! It’s a very valuable food to eat, and it should be enjoyed when it’s in season, as fresh as possible.


Heartbreak of Psoriasis: Natural Healing ~ Integrative Dermatology

Heartbreak of Psoriasis: Natural Healing

Let’s talk a little bit about a condition known as Psoriasis or sometimes the Heartbreak of Psoriasis. Psoriasis involves thick red patches of skin often in the pressure areas or elsewhere throughout the body on the skin. It can be very mild and barely visible or it can be extremely widespread and for some people very disturbing.

Now, eczema is a much milder condition. But Psoriasis tends to be thick it can be itchy or painful and it is caused by the type of inflammation that enlarges the blood vessels in the skin. This causes the skin cells to reproduce and turn over much faster, that is like 4 to 6 days instead of 28 days before they get to the top.

And that over production of the skin cells causes the thickening and the scaling that occurs. So we need to cut down the inflammation that causes that. That is a lymphocytic delayed hypersensitivity celli or immune response causing it. And we know that partly by the new drugs that poison that response and we know that if we can take away what is setting off that inflammation, we can also calm it down. And we can do that through diet as well as through the modern drugs. If you need help with the heartbreak of psoriasis, contact my office for an appointment.


Could Environmental Toxins Aggravate Acne? ~ Best Natural Skincare

Could Environmental Toxins Aggravate Acne? ~ Best Natural Skincare

We know that acne can be aggravated by chlorinated oils that are used as cutting oils, and that can be a real aggravator for people who are in a profession, like plumbing where they are cutting pipes on a regular basis.  

Another toxin that can aggravate the skin is from soot and way back in the 1700’s, it was identified as a cause of cancers in chimney sweeps.  Another type of toxin that’s much more common would be the various types of pesticides that sometimes are absorbed through the skin and can cause problems in the skin and of course, elsewhere.

Other types of more common exposures are to detergents which irritate by stripping the oils off the skin and causing dryness by breaking the barriers so that other problems develop on top of that, like secondary infection.  We’ve got to be careful about the use of various things that are on the skin and observe whether they’re  aggravating and avoid carefully if they are.


Anti-aging: the newest study on keeping your skin young…

Enjoyment. Free Happy Woman Enjoying Nature. Girl OutdoorGreat news about exercise and your skin: stay active and you’ll look younger! A series of scientific studies by Mark A. Tarnopolsky, MD. He recently showed that 3 month of vigorous exercise in older individuals actually causes the skin to look younger, both grossly and microscopically, and to have more collagen and other characteristics of younger skin.

All of this emerged out of his study of the mitochondria (energy-producers inside cells) in mice. In one set of mice with defective mitochondria, their skin aged dramatically if they were sedentary. But with regular exercise, the mice looked normal, without the aged skin. So he studied humans. He found exercise helps us overcome mitochondrial defects, too. The lesson here is that keeping an active life style with vigorous exercise on a regular basis will make you and your skin look younger.

To your health,

Dr. Dattner
Holistic Dermatology & Integrative Medicine
New York


Yellow & Orange Vegetables: Best Natural Skincare Diet


Yellow and orange vegetables like squash, carrots, or even fruits, like cantaloupe, or orange and red peppers have antioxidant capabilities that protect your body. The family of antioxidants in those foods are called carotenoids. Now, I know there’s been some bad press about beta carotene. But that was an isolated compound. Plants don’t have pure beta carotene. They have a whole variety of caratonoids in them, and if you eat a wide variety of foods, you get an even wider variety of caratonoids, and that network of caratonoids is what the plant is using to protect itself from oxidative damage (which causes aging), so doesn’t it make sense to use not just the most active ingredient, but also the whole broad spectrum that’s present in those plants? So eating those things has a wonderful protective activity in your body, and of course they protect your skin.

Now, a caution, if you eat too much of these, like you’re juicing them every day in large quantities, you may find that you get a slight yellow tint to your skin! That’s not necessarily harmful, but a lot of people find it somewhat objectionable to start turning yellow or orange on the palms and other parts of your skin. So, within reason, these are very important plants to add to your diet.


What Really Causes Acne? ~ Holistic Acne Treatment

WHAT REALLY CAUSE ACNE? ~ Holistic Acne Treatment

A long time ago, we used to think everything had one cause. Now we know there’s a whole network of different causes and those come together push the body so it begins to mis-fire. We know that hormones cause acne in many different people because it develops at the time of puberty and gets worse with, say, a menstrual cycle in women.

We also know that some people break out from various foods and there are many different mechanisms by which this happens. It’s not just one thing. One of those reasons is hypersensitivity reaction which is going on in the follicles.  Another reason is that it disturbs sugar metabolism and insulin metabolism.

There are also various kinds of oils and improper oils that come in through the diet and those seem to be contributors to acne in some people as well. So there are many different factors there, different in different people, and as we look at somebody’s story, we begin to understand which ones are most involved.


Fish: Great Food for Your Skin ~ Best Natural Skincare Mediterranean Diet

Let’s talk about some great foods for your skin! One of the best foods for your skin, if you are not a vegetarian, is northern fish. Fish that comes from cold water and grows in cold water and basically is living off the food chain that starts with the krill in the cold water. These fish contain a number of beneficial things, one of which is Omega-3 unsaturated fatty acids, and they will help the membranes of your body both be healthy and be less inflammatory.


Green Tea: Great Food for Your Skin ~ Best Natural Skincare Diet

Green tea has antioxidant activity and anti-inflammatory activity–and anti-tumor activity. So, drinking green tea can help protect you against a lot of the environmental damage that’s occurring from a number of different sources.

Green tea has less mold in its production than black tea, so it seems to be more beneficial in that way, and various compounds isolated from green tea have been tested for decades and shown to have anti-cancer activity in the test tube. Those products include something called EGCG, and a number of other related compounds. So I recommend that green tea become a regular part of your diet if you’re not sensitive to the small amount of caffeine in it.


What is Making Me Itch? ~ Scratching the Itch Naturally

WHAT IS MAKING ME ITCH? ~ Scratching the Itch Naturally

You know “itch” is caused often by allergic reaction and sometimes by various chemicals that set off a reaction.  For instance, various kinds of bits from insects, various kinds of plants that cause allergic contact dermatitis, like poison ivy. When you have itching, it’s a sign that something is going on that needs to be remedied or avoided. It’s really important to think back about what is going on when the itching started and what was going on a few days before the itching began in case it was something you contacted with and set it off with a delayed response.

Finding out the cause of an inch is a detective game that you are the deputy detective here and you need to start looking back at what was going on and put that information together so you can present it to your doctor or your dermatologist. Now, if this is been a complex long-term problem, it can take some real serious detective work.  This is when digging in deeper to the causes can make a real difference. This is where real holistic dermatology begins.


Broccoli: Great Food for Your Skin ~ Best Natural Skincare Diet

This time to the center of the stage, let’s have: broccoli! Broccoli has a lot of benefits, not only for your skin, but for the rest of your body. Especially because it has various substances in it that help you detoxify chemicals in your body. Things like indole-3-carbinol and di-indo-methane are related to the substances in broccoli that are so valuable for protecting you. I think it’s best to cook your broccoli. Why is that? Because in uncooked broccoli, there are substances called goiter-ages, that will bind-out iodine. And if you eat too much raw broccoli and its cousins like kale, raw, from the broccosica family, you’ll pull out iodine and you’ll put a stress on your thyroid. So I recommend steamed broccoli as a great food for helping your skin and helping detoxify your body from potential carcinogens.