Hi! I'm Dr. Terrie Van Alstyne, I’m a Naturopathic Doctor and Chef and today I want to talk about some anti-aging tips.
We may be blessed with good genes and born with great skin but over the course of our lifetime exposure to toxins, alcohol, chemicals, heavy metals and sun damage causes the lines and wrinkles to form. If we have a lack of antioxidants in our diets the free radical damage that we're exposed to continues to impact our skin. It's important to be taking high doses of antioxidants in supplements and in foods. The supplements would be vitamins C, A, E. and D. and bioflavonoids. In food, we need fruits and vegetables with bright colors such as berries, which are high in antioxidants.
Having dry skin causes the skin to age and it's often caused by a lack of essential fatty acids. We get these in fish oils and in vegetarian versions of EPA and DHA. The key with fish oils is to make sure it's the smallest fish possible, like Krill, Sardines, Herring and Anchovies. Smaller fish have much less heavy metal toxicity, that's why it's important to take them in small doses every day.
Sun damage is another thing we all know is aging the skin and wearing natural sunblock when the sun's at its highest peak is important. But it's also important to expose yourself to sunlight the rest of the time without sun block, because we need to convert vitamin D from the sunlight into the active form in our body, which helps with calcium deposition into the bone, enhancing bone density, it boosts the immune system and regulates mood. In fact, there's vitamin D receptors in every cell in the body and it's required for every cellular and systemic function in the body. In the winter, make sure that you're taking vitamin D. I find the easiest one to take is the liquid because you can do a dropper full once a week and you'll getting enough.
Another key cause of skin aging is liver toxicity. The liver becomes toxic when we drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, take drugs, take prescription drugs and are exposed to heavy metals and other toxins and chemicals. A huge source of chemical exposure is fragrances, and these are perfumes, the plug-in perfumes that we have in our houses, skin care products that have perfumes in them and laundry detergents with perfumes. All these things are toxic to the body and the liver.
Another cause of toxicity is all the heavy metals we are exposed to. There are heavy metals raining down on us because they're in the pesticides, herbicides, rodenticide and fungicides sprayed onto our produce and on to the crop row covers between the rows of produce. Those row covers are burned at the end of every season and all the toxic chemicals go into the atmosphere and then they come down in the rain and that goes into our water system and we’re drinking it! So. it's important that we have a good quality water filter, like a triple filtration reverse osmosis system, so that we can drink clean water and cook with clean water. I take my reverse osmosis filter with me wherever I move, that way I'm not contributing to pollution with plastic water bottles and I’m drinking and cooking with safe clean water.
Dark circles under the eyes are a sign of liver toxicity as well. There are 2 other causes of dark under eye circles:
• Insomnia, a lack of sleep will obviously cause dark circles
• Adrenal exhaustion, when we burn ourselves out
As we age, we notice that our under-eye circles are getting darker and darker and that is because of toxicity in the blood. The liver tries to filter out all these toxic chemicals and it struggles because of the high levels. If we're eating a high protein, high fat diet it causes the liver to become sluggish so it can't perform the 2000 tasks that it normally performs. Those toxins then spill out into the bloodstream, into the digestive tract and throughout the whole body, including the skin. This is what causes free radical damage to the skin.
So, what can we do about this? We can use good quality skin care products. For example, there is rosehip oil, one brand of it is by Esano. It can be rolled into the skin with the dermal roller. The dermal roller has tiny little needles on it and deliver whatever you're rolling right inside the skin. You roll it in 6 directions, and this can be done several times a week. The dermal rolling creates micro traumas to the skin and helps the skin build more collagen and elastin- which is what we need because as we are aging, we're losing the collagen and elastin and that's what's causing the wrinkles and the thinning of the skin.
Another great product that I use is a rosehip cleanser. All these things are found at health food stores. They are made with clean ingredients and no chemicals, which is what we're trying to avoid.
Another product is Weleda Hydrating Day Cream.
For the hair there is Argan oil, which is an excellent product to use to help hydrate the hair.
We can also eat lots of fruits and vegetables. A great way to get lots of them in at once is in a smoothie. Doing a fruit and leafy green smoothie is a great way to get tons of fruits and vegetables in, and it's easy!
I am running an ongoing online 6-week healing and detoxification program because detoxification is an integral part of the healing process. By detoxifying we can heal from so many conditions and remove so many health symptoms, clear up our skin and, actually reverse aging. I'm 53 and I looked older seven years ago than I do now and detoxification was a huge factor in how I reversed the aging of my skin. I do some other great natural treatments as well which I can talk about another time. This stuff really works. Thank you so much and we'll see you next time.