How Antioxidants can work for you
You shouldn't have to be an ace in chemistry to understand why your skin looks older and has more fine lines. Peptides? Electrons? Free radicals? You just want to free your skin from looking old and worn out! Lots of corporations talk a lot about hard-to-understand scientific explanations to convince you to buy their products, which are usually mixes of artificial chemicals which can cause irritation for people with sensitive skin. Since it is difficult to understand what is really going on with your face, you take their word for it and try their products. Actually, you've probably tried everything from orange juice to cereal, that supposedly has antioxidants, in the hopes that it will reverse the signs of aging.
Here's what's going on with your face, in plain English. When your skin starts to look 'aged', it's usually due to various reasons. A large part of the problem is environmental pollution, cigarette smoke, and damage from UV rays. Besides this, the other reason your skin ages is due to the fact that when your body uses oxygen, some of your atoms lose electrons and become 'unstable'. The scientific name of these cells with less electrons is called 'free radicals.' Free radicals are very destructive because they are unstable cells and they alter our DNA, resulting in more diseased and dead cells. Worst of all, in order to stabilize themselves, they try to take electrons from the natural proteins in our skin. This, as you can imagine, causes a chain reaction of destruction and damage, because as free radicals take electrons from other cells, they leave those cells with fewer electrons also!
As you probably thought, the body is not without defenses against these unstable cells. There are enzymes in the body which try to neutralize these free radicals. But, according to scientific studies, the quickest and easiest way to get rid of these cells is by special chemicals called 'antioxidants', which are mainly found in our diet and through external supplements. Up until a short time ago, there wasn't much public knowledge about antioxidants, other than having heard the name around somewhere. However, the scientific community has started to reveal some of the exciting breakthroughs about this topic, and the media has begun whetting our thirst for knowledge. The sports world has been following this topic particularly closely, because antioxidants could help athletes perform better.
Natural Ingredient Curbs Premature Aging
Antioxidants work by sharing an extra electron that they have with the free radicals. The advantage to this is that the free radicals don't die off, rather, they become normal, healthy cells again. The antioxidants then help the cells by neutralizing external forces (such as damage from the sun, pollution, etc) and internal factors (such as stress, emotions, metabolism, and the presence of excess oxygen). What better way to keep your face young-looking and radiant than to give it these antioxidants that it urgently needs? There are a range of ways to get antioxidants. You can find antioxidants in foods rich in vitamins (especially vitamin C), and in drinks like green tea. Fruits and vegetables that have beta carotene (like carrots, peaches, spinach, etc), are also good sources. One recommendation is that you include these things in your diet to rejuvenate your skin. However, now we have to deal with the other problem we talked about, which is the damage that harmful UV rays do to your skin. Sadly, we live in a world with a thinner and thinner ozone layer, and therefore greater and greater danger to our skin.
Conscious of the benefits of these antioxidants, scientists have recently started to create natural products full of antioxidants that you can apply as a face cream, which will neutralize your free radicals and save you from the harm of powerful UV rays. They even contain a special ingredient that 're-trains' your damaged and abused skin cells how to behave like normal healthy skin again! This has been such an amazing breakthrough for the medical and scientific communities. So, to recap, if your skin is aging prematurely, all is not lost. Remember the pointers experts give us to keep your skin soft, young and rejuvenated: eat lots of vitamins, drink green tea, and try the natural skin care products that are on the market now to flood your skin with antioxidants, to insure your body is getting all the help it needs to revive damaged cells. If you really make the effort to do this, you should start to notice a difference in your skin almost immediately!
The body is constantly exposed to free radicals through stress, environment or simple bodily processes. To find antioxidant rich products that treat the premature aging of the skin or skin damaged by sun exposure visit our website and turn the tables on aging.
Published October 18th, 2007
Filed in Beauty
