I'm canoeing my way through the Ardèche gorge in southern France - and I'm attracting a lot of stares as I do so.
It's early afternoon on a hot July day, and the sky looks like a perfect, cobalt-blue canvas.
Even though the river is bordered by high cliffs and limestone landslides up to 300 meters high, just the radiance of the sun's rays is more than visible to me.
The rays transform the surface of the water into a winding path of dazzling and dazzling light.
I leave nothing to chance; knowledgeable, like an experienced explorer who set off through the Sahara.
My outfit is, as my boyfriend says, "exceptional" - and he doesn't take that as a compliment.
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My arms, hands and torso are fully covered by a long-sleeved SPF T-shirt - ordered online from ozone-depleted Australia, no less - while my head is in complete shadow cast by a floppy fishing hat with a face shield.
The final defense is several layers of high SPF sunscreen, so that the parts of my skin exposed to the sun have a pale, sickly titanium white glow.
There are also sunglasses.
My partner doesn't miss an opportunity to tell me every ten minutes that I'm dressed like a big baby.
Regardless, my vanity knows no bounds and I am determined to avoid any aging caused by the sun's rays.
But are there any hidden benefits that bring such drastic measures?
Is it, in fact, possible that my obsession with keeping my skin healthy is a stroke of genius? The answer to both of these questions is, as it turns out, yes.
The latest research says that our skin is not only a mirror of our style that reflects years of smoking, alcohol consumption, sun exposure and stress, but also an indication of our inner health. In this new, upside-down world, the largest human organ is an active participant in our physical health.
This is the new reality where wrinkles, dry skin and freckles cause aging, instead of the other way around.
A strange discovery
In the same year of 1958, when a law was passed in the United States that would lead to the landing on the moon and the creation of NASA, another great project was silently conceived.
The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging was supposed to be a scientific study of aging with a rather bold and unusual premise.
Prior to this, standard scientific practice attempted to glean insights from the physiology of living people through the dissection of donated cadavers—a practice that dates back to the 19th-century tradition of digging up and robbing graves. This time, however, the research began much earlier, while the heart would still be beating and the bodies would still be alive.
This kind of research, which lasted for decades, involved thousands of adult men (and later women) and followed the development of their health and the way in which it was influenced by genes and environment.
Just two decades later, scientists have already made some intriguing discoveries, from the fact that emotionally unstable men were more susceptible to heart disease to the discovery that our problem-solving abilities decline only slightly as we age.
But one of the most shocking discoveries has confirmed what people have suspected for a long time - a youthful appearance is an incredibly accurate reflection of internal health.
By 1982, those men judged to look older for their age at the start of the study, 20 years earlier, were mostly dead. These results are confirmed by a recent study which revealed that patients who were estimated to look at least 10 years older than their date of birth had health problems in 99 percent of cases.
It turns out that the condition of our skin can be used to predict many seemingly unrelated factors, from bone density to the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases or dying from cardiovascular disease.
However, as the evidence began to accumulate, the story took an unexpected turn.
Is the skin just a mere indicator of accumulated damage, or is the whole thing much more complicated?
Could it, in fact, keep healthy people healthy, and pull those with health problems even deeper?
A different kind of birthday
There are two main ways to determine a person's age. The first represents the standard model also known as chronological age - which is measured by revolutions around the sun.
But there is also biological age, which shows the pace of your physical aging and the maturity of your organs and cells. It varies greatly from person to person, but even within the same organism.
As the years pass, it is common opinion that our chronological age will at some point be reflected in our appearance: the skin becomes thinner and more uneven, its elasticity changes, and the cells responsible for the production of pigment and collagen die or age - which means they stop to renew themselves and remain in a kind of dormant state.
But it is our environment that causes us serious damage.
Although it is ultra-violet B radiation (UVB) that damages our DNA - leading to sunburn, mutations and skin cancer - 95 percent of the total UV radiation that reaches the Earth's surface is ultra-violet A radiation (UVA).
This portion of the sun's rays has a longer wavelength that allows them to penetrate deeper into the dermis, break down collagen and stimulate cells to produce melanin.
At the microscopic level, (photo)aged skin - sun-damaged skin - is thicker, with deformed elastin and collagen fibers.
Such skin is visibly and unevenly pigmented and has significantly more folds.
This applies to very light skin that is unable to darken and has a mark of 1 on the Fitzpatrick scale, but also to very dark skin with a mark of 6, which is incorrectly called skin that can never burn. Even extremely pigmented skin can burn and be susceptible to photoaging, although it will take longer to wrinkle.
It is believed, in fact, that internal factors are responsible for the smallest details that make the skin appear "aged", while UV radiation is responsible for more than eight percent of visible changes in the skin.
If you've spent your whole life indoors, with the curtains drawn, it's possible that your skin won't show significant changes until you're in your 80s.
The key, however, is that your skin also undergoes chemical changes.
And it is possible that this can have the greatest impact on our overall health.
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A chemical cocktail
A radically new concept appeared at the beginning of the new century, in 2000.
A group of scientists from Bologna, Italy, by studying how stress affects organisms, found a new way to think about aging.
In a young, healthy person, the immune system maintains order evenly by patching up damage and warding off infections.
But as we age, or get sick, our body's response to inflammatory processes begins to exceed a critical limit and excessively releases a multitude of potent chemicals that then run wild through our body, destroying healthy cells and destroying our DNA.
Hence we have chronic inflammation - gradual inflammations that participate in the aging process.
This is where the skin comes into play.
The latest research reveals that wrinkled, diseased or damaged skin becomes part of the inflammatory system that releases a chemical cocktail that again leads to further damage and inflammation.
"Chronologically aged skin shows higher levels of a panel of inflammatory cytokines and chemokines," says Mao-Kiang Man, a research scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who says the same is true for sun-damaged skin.
Locally, these chemicals degrade collagen and elastin, causing further thinning of the skin, wrinkles and reduced elasticity, explains Tuba Musarat Ansari, a postdoctoral researcher at Japan's Djichi Medical University.
"They (also) disrupt the walls of the skin, promoting increased water loss and susceptibility to stressors," she says.
The feedback loop is further complicated by the aging of skin cells - caused by either UV radiation or aging - which further creates inflammatory chemicals.
But all this is just the beginning.
The skin, as the largest organ in the body, has an essential influence on this process.
Chemicals released by diseased and dysfunctional skin quickly enter the bloodstream and begin to damage other tissues as well.
Due to the resulting and systemic inflammation, chemicals from the skin are able to reach and damage organs they have nothing to do with - including the heart and brain.
The result of all this is accelerated aging and an increased risk of developing most - or even all - related disorders.
Aged or damaged skin has so far been associated with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and cognitive decline, as well as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
Although we are all well aware of the risks brought by smoking, alcohol, excessive food intake and lack of physical activity, it can be said that diseased skin is the phenomenon of the elephant in the room - a factor that we all routinely overlook.
The good news is that there are still many things we can do to improve this problem.
Skin moisture
The first step in protecting the skin, and therefore, as this theory says, general health, is to avoid the sun.
The most famous method is the Australian "Slip, Slop, Slap" protocol from 1981.
Today it has been expanded to five central principles; put on a t-shirt (or even better - some other protective clothing), apply sunscreen with a high protection factor, put a wide-brimmed hat on your head, put on some sunglasses and disappear from the sun into the shade.
Additionally, if the relationship between skin damage and age-related diseases isn't compelling enough to make people wear wide-brimmed hats and apply sunscreen, there are two other very good reasons to try.
The first is that by protecting the skin from the sun, we prevent visible signs of aging extremely effectively.
One of the early studies found that those who used broad-spectrum SPF15 sunscreen daily for four and a half years did not show any signs of aging during that period.
All this happens despite the fact that such a low factor usually protects the skin from sunburn 15 times longer than unprotected skin can withstand - so if your skin starts to redden after 10 minutes, with a cream like this you will be able to you stay in the sun for a full 150 minutes (two and a half hours).
Moreover, the sunscreen from the experiment does not have a specified level of protection against UVA radiation, which is the cause of skin aging.
In many parts of the world, products that protect the skin from the sun must, in order to be classified as broad-spectrum products, prove that they not only absorb or reflect UVB (indicated by the SPF rating), but also UVA radiation. In any case, the degree of their success varies quite a bit.
Dermatologists recommend that you always check the label for protection against UVA radiation, which is usually marked with UV-PF or PPD.
Another reason is that there is strong evidence that sunscreens can prevent almost all inflammation that occurs when the skin is exposed to the sun—which is the first step toward developing age-related diseases.
However, this is not the only way to keep your skin in good condition.
The simplest way to protect the health of this organ is, in fact, skin hydration.
There is also direct evidence that hydration reduces inflammation, but also that it can help prevent dementia.
In addition to uneven skin color and wrinkles, chronologically and sun-damaged skin is noticeably drier.
The moisture levels of human skin reach their highest level around the age of 40, after which they begin to drop precipitously and produce less and less amounts of natural moisturizers - lipids, filaggrin, sebum and glycerol.
This presents a problem, because dehydrated skin is less effective as a barrier between the inside of our body and the outside world.
When our skin is dry and scaly, its usual tasks - stopping infectious agents, toxins and allergens and keeping the skin moist - become even more important and challenging.
In any case, post-moisturizing isn't particularly complicated, regardless of what the cosmetic ads tell us.
And in the field of aging, this simple intervention gives exceptional results.
In one study, a team of researchers from various countries - including Mann - asked elderly volunteers to apply the cream twice a day for a month.
Compared to older participants who did not receive any treatment, their skin was significantly regenerated and had lower levels of three different classes of inflammatory chemicals.
Such promising results were accompanied by another study conducted by this same team, in which adults over 65 participated.
They applied the moisturizer twice a day for three years.
The cognitive functions of the research participants were measured at the beginning and at the end of the study, and after three years - although the control group saw a significant decline - those who applied the moisturizing cream showed no deterioration.
"Decreasing the level of hydration of the epidermal layer is most likely the main cause of inflammation," says Mann, who also explains that because dry skin shows a tendency towards higher levels of inflammation, itchy skin also appears.
And if you succumb to the impulse to scratch yourself - yes, you guessed it - the inflammation itself becomes more pronounced.
However, says Man, many natural ingredients can help.
These are glycerol, petrolatum, hyaluronic acid and lipids that are normally found in this layer of the skin - normal ingredients in the most basic moisturizers.
It's also possible that simply drinking large amounts of water can help hydrate the skin, although the evidence for this is rather murky - some studies say there's no basis for such claims, while others say it can help.
There is no study that has directly addressed this as a way to prevent inflammation or related diseases.
To better visualize the extent of the skin's influence on the rest of the body, think about how much skin you have, and then remember that, just as you probably expected, all that skin you can see on the outside of your body takes up that same surface area. from the inside. And when your skin is damaged, every inch of it is capable of releasing toxic chemicals.
That's why protecting your skin from the sun's rays really pays off - but never forget about hydration.
I'm off now to get my SPF50+, sunglasses, an umbrella and that silly little hat that fishermen wear...and I still have some work to do in the garden.
Watch the video: Her skin looks like scales, but she doesn't give up
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