What Actually is the Skin?

The skin is the largest organ in your body and the outer most portion of the nervous system. Because the skin is part of the nervous system, stress can have a major impact on it. The three layers of the skin are the epidermis, dermis, and the hypodermis. Some roles that the skin plays are absorption, elimination, receiving light. Your skin does not operate in a vacuum. This means that the health of other organs effect the health of the skin because it’s all connected.

What is Holistic Skin Care?

Holistic skin care is the concept of taking a multi model approach including diet, movement, sleep, and stress management to generate glowing skin from the inside out. We also talk about what most people think when they hear skin care like cleansers, moisturizers, and the like.

Nutrition

Avoid-

1. Dairy can be a trigger for a lot of people for skin issues. This is not an issue for everyone but you may want to pull this out of your experiencing skin issues. Modern dairy is not the same as our ancestors had. The cows are bread to produce A1 casein milk, which is more allergenic than A2.

2. Sugar can cause advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which is sugar binding to your protein and damaging it. Sugar can also stress the liver by creating access fat after glycogen stores have been filled. This not only goes for the more processed forms of sugar, but also for the more natural sugars such as fruit, honey, and molasses. The more natural ones have benefit, but we can over do it.

3. Grains can also cause AGEs because they contain very fast absorbing carbohydrates like amylopectin A, which hits the blood stream very fast. They also contain many anti nutrients such as lectins, which make your way in to your small intestine and cause leaky gut. Then something called molecular mimicry can occur. This is when after you get leaking gut and food particles are making their way in to the blood stream undigested, and because your immune system knows it’s not supposed to be there, it goes and attacks it. The problem is that it doesn’t stop there. Then your immune system tags those same proteins in the food and attacks anything in your body. This may be the skin, thyroid, colon, or other organs depending on your genetic predisposition. I’m not saying everyone should avoid grains, especially if they’re prepared properly, but this may be something to look at.

Skin Care Products

Many of us who focus on are health are very adamant about the food we eat. We make sure that there is no crazy ingredients, and eat as clean as possible. We need to do the same for our personal care products. This industry is largely unregulated, and companies can pretty much put what ever they want in the product.

1. Anti-perspirants

These literally clog your skin and stop it from doing it from what it’s designed to do. Sweating is how your body eliminates toxins and cleans itself. Most anti-perspirants also contain aluminum, which is a neurotoxin. There are many healthy alternatives that do the job well that actually benefit your skin. Even using something as simple as coconut oil can be effective because it’s antibacterial, antiviral, antiparasitic, and antiseptic.

2. Soap

Our skin is naturally acidic, so using all these chemical driven alkaline soaps can strip our skin of it’s oils and moisture. In addition, avoid antibacterial soaps. These dramatically disrupt your skin microbiome. Having a healthy skin microbiome keeps everything in check and insures healthy skin. There are many natural soaps that can add to your skin health, and not take away. Also, we don’t need to be washing every part of our body, the only parts that are really necessary are the ones with high sweat glads like the arm pits and growing. Your skin has a microbiome that cleans itself.

3. Moisturizers

Your skin is a mouth, and absorbs everything you put on it. About 60% of what you put on your skin ends up in your circulation. This is why doctors will prescribe hormone creams for hormone therapy. We don’t want to be rubbing in a ton of synthetic chemicals in our skin. You can actually use simple oils, such as coconut and olive oil for the skin.  Your skin is mostly saturated fat, and putting fatty oils on them can be very helpful. someone with oily skin, the reason why it’s oily is because your skin is trying to over compensate for the dryness, and produces more oil. So, adding healthy oil will actually help the problem. Also, we want to avoid rancid oils, such as corn, canola, cottonseed, soybean, safflower, and sunflower.

Hydration, Movement, and Sunlight

Drinking high quality water is important to keep your skin hydrated. Drinking half your body weight in ounces is a good start. You may need more or less depending on you state of health. Movement is important for skin because of the lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is responsible for moving extra-cellular waste out of the body. This system doesn’t move unless you move. So movement will help detoxify the skin, not to mention sweating, which will as well. Also, sunlight is food for the skin. The more melanin you have, the more sun you need. Melanin is the dark pigment you seen in the skin, and very powerful antioxidant that protects you from the sun. I would avoid conventional sunscreen as well because they ironically cause skin cancer themselves. There are some better alternatives, even coconut oil as a small amount of SPF. Really, we want to build up our exposure, to be more tolerant of the sun so we don’t need sunscreen.