Protect Your Skin In Winter - 10 suggestions

Largest organ of your body is your skin! We only start caring this precious organ when winter starts knocking the door. Here are few information gathered from different researches by different researchers, which will help you to know and care your skin better.

1. Stress Can Harm: Your complexion get messed up if you are stressed physically or mentally. Free radical surge in stress damage almost all part of your body including the skin. You can see how quickly the person look older, when stressed in real life example.
   Though it is difficult to avoid stress in day to day life at home or, work but Yoga, deep breathing exercises, aerobic exercises, and optimum intake of antioxidants will help you combat the damage.
2. Care Your Food: A research showed 23 people put on low glycemic and high protein diet for 12 weeks got their skin much better than their counterpart. This proves nutrition plays an important role on the texture of your skin. So for now onwards, beware when you are heading for those yummy pastries, chocolates or mithai.
3. Rely On Fruits And Vegetables: A recent study in UK said regular consumption of tomato paste reduces the sun burn. Tomato contain lypopene, a powerful antioxidant, which shield your skin from the harmful effect of the sun rays. Several other researches proved fruits and vegetables protect and restore the skin. Green leafy vegetables, citrus fruits, rich in Vit A, and Vit C, both are powerful antioxidants, should be included in your daily diet.
4. Milk Is Not Always Good: It has been found some teens get their acne worse with the consumption of milk. May be the cow hormones, those are naturally present in the milk is the reason. If you are susceptible to such condition avoid milk and substitute milk with any soya products.
   
5. Shower Will Rejuvenate You: Every time you sweat, your body is covered with oily secretions. Don't ever feel lazy for a shower when you in such condition. Bacterias grow abundantly on the secretions very quickly and produces bad smell and cause harm to your precious skin. Frequently rinse your face with cool water and any good quality face wash.
6. Choose Your Moisturizers Right: Don't believe blindly on the advertisements and the promises those are made on a product. If the product you are using does not match your skin, you are not only wasting money, but also actually damaging your skin. Hyaluronic acid and glycerin are the two ingredients you should look for in you moisturizer. They keep your skin soft and supple.
7. Delicate Parts Of Your Skin Need Special Attention: Face is bare and continually exposed to the harmful UV rays of the sun. Lips, Skin around your eyes and upper part of the chest are thinnest and most delicate. They need special protection with sunscreen lotion and lip balms.
8. Little Explanation Of The Sunscreen Products: You must have noticed the ingredient 'SPF' in the sunscreen products. SPF means sun protection factor. SPF 15 protect 94% of UV rays while SPF 30 up to 98%. Better choose SPF 30 when possible. Sunscreen with zinc oxide is even better.
9. Complicated Cosmetics May Harm: While choosing your cosmetics look at the ingredients they have. Try to limit the number of ingredients up to 10, otherwise overload of cosmetic ingredients may actually harm your skin.
10. Look At Yourself When You Get Up: Do you look shiny after a snooze? There were several hormonal reactions going on you body while you were sleeping and produced enormous amount of oily secretion on your face. You can prevent this by a proper overnight treatment of your face.
    

The War Within - How Do We Produce Our Enemies!

We must know who are the culprits who are producing free radicals, if we want to win THE WAR WITHIN!

Strenuous Exercise:

Don't misunderstand me! Exercises do increase the free radical load in our body but that does not mean that you should stop exercising. Side effects of sedentary lifestyle are even more dangerous. Excessive strenuous exercise is harmful - is the message here. Moderate amount of antioxidants, which we get from our diets and supplements suffice the protection against the moderate exercise, which is desirable. The athletes, on the other hand, need to balance their diet so that significant amount of anti oxidants must be available to neutralize the free radicals they produce.

Stressful Life:

As with exercise emotional stress significantly raises the free radical levels in our body. More the stress, the more we produce them. You must have noticed how sickly you feel after any kind of emotional stress or heard about someone who had a heart attack following prolonged stress at work or elsewhere!

Air We Breath:

Today's city atmosphere is another major factor for increasing the free radical load in our body. The counterpart of us, who are in villages are much less prone to heart diseases or, other chronic degenerative diseases than us.

Air pollution contains ozone, nitrogen di oxide, sulphur di oxide and several hydro carbon molecules. They all genarate free radicals. Air pollution is responsible for asthma, chronic bronhitis, heart attacks and even cancers.

Another aspect of air pollution is occupational exposure to different chemicals like mineral dust, asbestos fibres etc. These cause host of occupational diseases like asbestosis, lung fibrosids, and even deadly cancers.

Smoking:

One of the greatest cause of oxidative stress is SMOKING. Smoking active or passive is associated with a host of diseases. To name a few are bronhial asthma, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, lung cancer, cardio vascular diseases. Smoking releases various amount of toxins, those in turn produces plenty free radicals not only in the lungs but through out our body, each time we smoke. No other addiction harm our body like smoking does.

Water And Food We Consume:

To be frank, unless you are drinking distilled water, an impractical practice, you are at risk of increasing free radicals in your body.

The municipal water, or the tube well water we are getting in our country, India are not only contaminated with bacterias and viruses but also contaminated with host of other chemical agents and heavy metals even arsenic! The totally unregulated market of mineral water also offer to guarantee of protection.

What about the food? We are adding thousands of new chemicals each year in the form of herbicides, fungicides, pesticides to increase the crop yield; but at the cost of our health. Everything we consume be it fruits, vegetables, or grains are loaded with them and are responsible for our oxidative stress.

Medicines Are Not Innocent! :

Each chemotherapeutic agents, like antibiotics, anticancer drugs, radiation work by creating oxidative stress within the causative organisms or cells, thereby killing them. While doing these the damage also is transmitted to the normal cells of our body. Every drug you consume is actually a foreign material to your body and your body's all organ like kidneys, liver has to work hard to metabolize and eliminate them. This process produces plenty of free radicals and our body is under oxidative stress!

The War Within - Behind the line force

It will be easier for you to enjoy the article, if you quickly go through the previous post with the heading - The war within..

Every organized army need to have a behind the line supply system, so is our body's defense.

Only the soldiers cannot win the battle unless they have adequate supply of arms and ammunition, food, water, clothes etc. Similarly only having antioxidants in our body may not be the final answer of our defense. They need sufficient antioxidant minerals like copper, zinc, manganese and selenium. They aid in the chemical reactions of the antioxidants, so that they can do their job efficiently.

Other kind of supplies required for an army like mechanics, fuel tanks, engineers. In our body they are co factors, primarily the B factors like Vit B1, B2, B6 and B12.

The battle ground is really complicated. The number of free radials, that will be produced per day is never known to our body and this depend on various factors, fortunately most of which we can control !

my next few posts will be regarding the factors by which we increase our enemies, the free radicals in our body.

Stay connected.

The War Within - Defense Force Of Our Body

From my previous posts you read the story of the war. If not, I will request you to go through them quickly, so that you can appreciate our defense.

God did not leave us defenseless against the onslaught of the free radicals. It is amazing, how beautifully our body is made, that we have our own army of antioxidants, which neutralize the free radicals and render them harmless.

If you remember the example in my earlier post of a fireplace; antioxidants are like the glass door or, fine wired mesh place in front of the fireplace preventing the cinders to fly on your carpet.

Antioxidants are the substances, which the unruly free radicals the electron, they are missing and make them neutralized and disciplined. You don't have to remember the names, but these are three major antioxidants produced inside our body - i) superoxide dismutase, ii) catalase, and iii) glutathione peroxidase.

Our body cannot produce all the antioxidants we need, but we must provide required to protect our body in the form of food and supplements, if we want to win the war within. As long as there is sufficient antioxidants available in our body to neutralize free radicals our body is safe. When the ratio alters towards the free radicals our body comes under oxidative stress. If such situation persist for long, we are prone to develop different chronic degenerative diseases, losing the war within.

The antioxidants we get from vegetables and fruits. The most common antioxidants are Vitamin C, vitamin A, Vitamin E, and beta carotene. The other antioxidants, which we get from our food are Co enzyme Q10 (CoQ10), alpha lipoic acid, and the colorful bioflavonoid antioxidant.

Like well organized army, different antioxidants has different role to perform and at different sites of our body. Some of them has ability to regenerate other antioxidants, so that they neutralize more free radicals. Vitamin C, being the water soluble vitamin is best antioxidant to target the free radicals in the water compartment of our body, blood and plasma. Vitamin E, on the other hand is fat soluble fights within the cell membrane, an area rich in fat. Glutathione works within the cell itself. alpha lipoic acid works both in the cell membrane and plasma. Vitamin C and alpha lipoic acid has the ability to regenerate Vitamin E and glutathione, so that they are recycled and used again.

In summary - The more the antioxidants we will have in our body, more strong will be our defense system. Our goal is to achieve a balanced army of antioxidants in sufficient amount to neutralize all the free radicals produced in our body and WE MUST WIN THE WAR WITHIN.