The One Thing to Ditch to Keep Your Skin Young Naturally ~ Holistic Dermatology

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The One Thing to Ditch to Keep Your Skin Young Naturally

All of us want to keep our skin looking young naturally.

Today, I want to speak about one of our sweetest poisons. I say sweet poison, it’s very attractive to all of us, including me, and that is: sugar.

You might not realize sugar has at least 3 different ways that it can aggravate disease, aging and acne.

First, it can lead to overgrowth of the wrong kinds of organisms in the intestinal tract and elsewhere the body. Those organisms include yeast and harmful bacteria.

Second, those organisms can lead to inflammation of the intestinal lining, causing a condition known as leaky gut and that leaky gut allows allergens to invade other parts of the body.

Third, eating sugar often causes tooth decay. If you eat sugar, you don’t brush your teeth right away, and it sits in your mouth, the bacteria are going party–they will chomp away at your teeth.

And chronic infection in the teeth can lead to infection in the bone in the jaw. Chronic infections in the jaw are often very hard to get rid of during your lifetime. And they can “weep” gram-negative bacteria and gram-negative toxins down into your lymphatic system, down to your heart, down to your breasts, and out also into various organs of the body, causing real damage.

The last way that sugar can cause problems is by elevating the insulin level. When you eat a lot of sugar, your sugar level spikes ways up and insulin is released in order to get that sugar into the cells. The more sugar you have and the more often you have it, the more you release insulin.

When you do this over and over again, you wind up causing high insulin levels, and the receptors for the insulin stop becoming so willing to hold the insulin. Then, the insulin has to go up higher and higher. You then get a molecule released called Insulin-Like Growth Factor. That Insulin-Like Growth Factor has a variety of actions, and one of them is to aggravate acne.

It’s so worthwhile to monitor your sugar usage and cut back however you can manage. It’s a challenge, but a very worthwhile one. You can keep your skin looking young naturally.

One Way Your Face Ages and How to Fix It ~ Holistic Dermatology

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One Way Your Face Ages and How to Fix It

When your face ages, it’s often perceived by wrinkles and creases. Some of those wrinkles and creases come from having the same expression over and over again.

That expression is usually is one of squinting or anger or looking with interest listening to a friend speak. These are all expressions that cause a kind of additional wrinkling that you don’t need to have.

These are habits. If they occur over and over, year after year, decade after decade, you begin to get permanent creases in those areas. So you want to try to relax, and not have repeated wrinkling occurring from squinting or anger.

You can even try looking in the mirror and seeing what you are doing with your face on a repeated basis, and try to relax and let that go.

That can do a lot for reducing the creases and the wrinkles that often associated with aging of the skin. Collagen and elasticity are another matter, which we’ll discuss in a future post.

3 Natural Eczema Healing Treatments ~ Holistic Dermatology

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3 Natural Eczema Healing Treatments

Let’s talk a little bit about natural eczema healing. Eczema is something that a lot of people experience, and I see more and more people with it in my practice every year.

There are some parts of the world, especially industrial cities like Liverpool, where the population with eczema is approaching 20% of children. Now what is going on here? Why is there so much eczema?

What causes eczema and how do you heal eczema naturally? It’s caused by a number of things. One of those causes is a defective barrier of the skin. That defective barrier can be caused by excessive washing.

GENETICS

But it can also be caused by a genetic tendency not to make the right peptides that keep the barrier to be intact. Those peptides are manufactured, and they evolve and have a number of different roles as they move through the skin. The first role is as a barrier, but as they move through the skin, they also become part of the anti-microbial peptides that cause the skin to kill trouble-causing bacteria. People who have have this genetic tendency not only have a less strong barrier, but they have less ability to break down the bacteria that are always attacking the skin.

People with eczema have the tendency to develop staph and streptococcus infections. And those staph and strept infections have a vicious cycle effect. Because they cause more cells to get alerted; more immune cells get turned on to be reactive and create more inflammation, which creates more itching, which creates more scratching, and more and more eczema.

So it’s really important for those people to use proper anti-bacterials and do whatever they can to keep from scratching and destroying their skin. And to use various kinds of things that enhance the barrier of the skin.

BARRIERS

Recently there has been a lot of work on using various kinds of waxes that contribute to the skin barrier for natural eczema healing. Pioneering dermatologists in San Francisco explored these waxes, which are now the basis of a lot of really popular products used to protect the skin for those with eczema.

Of course, any kind of lipid or fat or oil can add some benefit. But if you have eczema, the paradox is that it’s likely that if you use something over and over, you are going to become allergic to it. So people who have eczema soon become allergic to everything that they start putting on, partly because of the nature of the original barrier itself. Creams are much more elegant to put on than Vaseline or coconut oil. But they contain many different components, like detergents, to keep the oil and the water mixed.

Any cream with oil and water mixed together, can get infected easily so you have to have a preservative system. And there are only a handful of different preservatives that are used to protect these different creams from germs. So if you switch from one cream to the next, you are likely to wind up with the same preservative system one out of four times. So you still have trouble because you can have an allergic reaction to the preservatives.

On top of this, if you look at most of these creams you’ll find that there are a number of chemical substances whose names you can’t pronounce. Some of those chemicals can be potential allergens as well.

It’s not unlikely that after a while you are going to become allergic to either the components or the fragrances in those creams. So you’ve got to be very careful with what you’re putting on your skin if you have eczema.

I do help people who have these chronic issues to finally break the cycle, but I share all this to say that if you’re having a hard time controlling your eczema, you’re not alone, and the treatments don’t make it easy. That’s my holistic dermatology perspective for natural eczema healing.

1 Easy Habit for Anti-Aging: Dry Skin Brushing ~ Holistic Dermatology

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Dry Skin Brushing: 1 Easy Habit for Anti-Aging

I’d like some thoughts on anti-aging of the skin. Aging skin needs a little bit of extra stimulation in order to be really as thick as possible to keep the collagen active. This keeps the lymphatics in the blood supply moving. Part of that is good old exercise and outdoor enjoyment, and hopefully protecting yourself from the sun.

Another part of it is stimulating your skin to kind of wake it up in the morning is by dry skin brushing. You take a soft brush, and you brush your skin. Brush it all towards the area right below your navel which is where all the lymphatic material collects. And you do that all over very lightly and gently. You shouldn’t do it with a brush that is stiff enough to hurt you or to mark your skin. If you have some kind of skin problem that doesn’t allow that, then that’s not the thing to do. But the dry skin brushing can be a very nice method for keeping your skin stimulated.

If you don’t have a brush you can use Turkish towel or a wash cloth. That little bit of stimulation moving towards the center of the body can be very helpful to get your skin woken up and keep it alive and invigorated.

What’s Your Spirituality Have to Do with Your Skin? Holistic Skincare

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What’s Your Spirituality Have to Do with Your Skin?

I’d like to talk about spirituality and skin disease from a holistic dermatology perspective. What does spirituality have to do with skin disease? We know skin disease is related to your skin, it might be related to allergies, it might even be related to the food you eat and what you absorb. So what does spirituality have to do with that?

Let me start with the process of digestion. Digestion breaks down your foods so that they get absorbed as single amino acids or small peptides. Molecules that are so small that they don’t set off a reaction; they don’t cause an allergy. But if you don’t break your food down into small molecules, big pieces get through; molecules big enough to set off an immune response. The receptor in the lymphocyte sees a big peptide in, say 8 amino acids, and it reacts. So we want to avoid having big peptides getting into your bloodstream and your lymphatics. And the way we do this is by enhancing digestion.

If you’re eating and you are on the telephone and you are buying something on the internet or you are worrying about your classes, or your career, or your income taxes, or what your friend said on Facebook, or any number of things, you’re interrupting your digestion. If your mind is in that place, you are in a reaction mode, or stress mode, which we call a flight or fight response. That’s known technically as Sympathetic Response. And if you are in Sympathetic Response mode, you shut off your digestion. Because evolutionarily, thousands of years ago, you didn’t need good digestion if you were being chased by a tiger. You needed to get away and use your muscles and shut off your digestion–or you’d get digested yourself.

But if you are in stress mode when you are eating or you are watching a TV program that has some horrendous scary thing going on, you are back in stress mode, and you are not going to digest your food optimally. And if you don’t break down your food adequately, then you are going to absorb bigger pieces, molecules, food substances that are big enough to set off an allergic response where they hit in the skin. Or these molecules might put you to sleep and make you drowsy or other kinds of things.

So, the old-fashioned method of taking a moment before you eat is good. Relax and let go of your thoughts, your worries and cares, and then take an additional moment and become thankful for the universe providing this and filling your whole body with that thankfulness. And then fill your body with the joy of the food you are about to eat. That gets the digestive juices flowing, and that’s very important for breaking down allergens and for preventing allergic disorders of all kinds especially skin diseases.

My Favorite Secrets to Slowing Aging ~ Holistic Dermatology

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My Favorite Secrets to Slowing Aging

I’d like to talk a little bit more about slowing aging. One of the things that happens in aging is that the collagen breaks down. Collagen is the part that gives skin its tough surface and lasting quality. It gives the skin the ability to come back to its original shape. Collagen breaks down with age. The collagen breaking down is often seen as cellulite or less elastic skin.

What breaks down the collagen? There are enzymes in the skin that break it down, and those enzymes get activated by a variety of things. One of those things is inflammation, and another one is by something called glycation which comes from an excess of sugar and fried foods.

So if you want to look old faster, eat a lot of sugar. Eat a lot of foods that are high in glycation, like fried foods. These will all help set those enzymes into action, chomping up your collagen. Now, it doesn’t happen overnight. But over a period of years, it makes a big difference. So a healthy diet really makes a big difference over time.

A diet that includes a lot of fresh vegetables, a lot of fresh fruits and foods that are cooked a lower temperature.  Sometimes you want a treat of course, but let the cake be for a special occasion, rather than for a meal. If you live on chips, on junk foods, and fried foods, and things heated to high temperature, and lots of sugar, it takes its toll. And you have to decide. Is that fun worth more than looking great for a longer period of time?

3 Reasons Your Skin Wants Organic Food ~ Natural Dermatology

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Organic Food: 3 Natural Dermatology Reasons Your Skin Wants It

Organic food is really important, and I’d like to say a bit how it fits into health and fits into treatment of skin disorders with holistic dermatology. Now if someone has been eating a lot of foods sprayed with pesticides, it’s really important to let the body get a break from that. And one way of course is to eat organic foods.

Now when we say organic foods, really that’s a technical definition in this country. The term organic allows certain kinds of pesticides to be used. And when I think of organic foods, I think of foods that are grown without pesticides or toxins at all. And that’s my favorite. So there are probably some places that have wonderful foods that are grown without pesticides that are not registered as organic, because the registration process is expensive. But they could be even better for you than the ones that have the organic label but are grown with the allowable level of pesticides. So that’s one of the questions you need to ask when you are at the farmer’s market or your grocery store.

The next thing is that there are certain foods that are heavily sprayed and apparently soak up more chemicals than other foods, and those are the ones to definitely choose organic. Leafy vegetables, celery, strawberries and just a few of those. Find places to shop for your fruits and vegetables where you can learn what sorts of chemicals are being used. Because if you can wash the off with soap and water or a food detergent (found in your local health food store), that may be acceptable.

So using organic food can be beneficial because it avoids toxins. And some of those toxins inhibit the process the body does to suppress allergic reactions. So avoiding toxic foods and eating organic foods can help reduce allergic reactions. But personally I sometimes choose to use the regular, non-organic foods if they are not known to be heavy in pesticides. And I also choose locally grown foods that come from farmers who don’t use pesticides who are not necessarily organic, as mentioned above.

Of course organic can also mean using foods that have been given natural fertilizers, which again is another important thing to make the foods more healthy. And finally, interestingly enough, foods that are grown organically have more stresses on them, so that the plant has to make its own pesticides. And some of those pesticides are called cell versants. And those products that the plants make have anti-cancer properties. So, there maybe additional benefits in those “stressed” organic plants or pesticide-free plant that cause them to make products within them that will protect you much further.

So another vote for organic food from the holistic dermatology perspective. To your health!

3 Skin Secrets of the Mediterranean Diet ~ Natural Skincare

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3 Skin Secrets of the Mediterranean Diet

There are many different perspectives on diet that can enhance your health, and help your skin as well. One of them is the Mediterranean diet. Now let’s talk a little bit about what makes the Mediterranean diet so useful. Mediterranean diet is basically conceptually what people would eat if they were living around the Mediterranean base, in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, in Northern Africa, Morocco, those areas. So what does that include? First of all when you think about Mediterranean diet, you think about olive oil.

Now olive oil is a terrific oil to be part of your food. It’s a mono-saturated oil. It has a nice flavor. Some of that green color is anti-microbial property of the olive leaf and the olive. So it has some benefits in that direction and also it’s avoiding so many nasty things that we have in our current oils which are really not healthy. It’s avoiding the toxins. Because when you think about the Mediterranean diet, you are not thinking about somebody spraying the olive tree. You think about a more organic and natural olive.

The second thing is it avoids high temperature heating oils, and oils that are saturated fats or oils that are very highly unsaturated that would become rancid. So all those things are being avoided when you are thinking of that. It’s avoiding things that are really; who knows what they are, like Canola. There is no such thing as a canola bean! Canola is the name of a conglomerate type of product.

So getting to olive oil is the real basic step that makes you healthier. So Mediterranean diet involves fresh foods and vegetables, involves fresh fish and meat. And a diet that has limited amounts of carbohydrates in it. And that could be tremendously important, both for the good things it’s bringing with all those products and also for the terrible things it’s avoiding.

Heartbreak of Psoriasis: Natural Healing ~ Integrative Dermatology

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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.

4 Things You Need to Know about New Natural Anti-Aging Products

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A combination of new products, and rediscovered herbal remedies have been found to have anti-aging effect for the skin.

Some of these have protective effects when take orally, and others are improve appearance applied directly to the skin. At least 4 groups of factors must be considered in choosing applied products:

  1. They must be effective for you.
  2. There must not be any ingredients that will also cause an allergic or other outbreak.
  3. The ingredients must work together to produce a synergistic effect, and not chemically react with each other or you to cancel out their effects.
  4. Finally, since many of the creams on the market contain synthetic ingredients to prevent spoilage, enhance smell, appearance, and feel, the product must be acceptable to you according to your sensibilities and the potential risks that these products may bring. Since you may differ from others on each of these points, my recommendations for each person may vary and may take time be formulated.