Plant nutrients play a key role in anti aging. Fruit,
vegetables, and plant extracts have an array of chemical
constituents, called phytochemicals or phytonutrients, that are
hugely beneficial to skin health and beauty.
In plants, phytochemicals confer characteristics like color,
which can help the plant by providing an attractive beacon to
passing bees to help in pollination. Or they offer a protective
effect to the plant to prevent insects from harming it, or repel
grazing animals. But they have often been found to have benefits
for human health when analyzed in laboratories. It is these
chemicals in plants that make fruit and vegetables so much more
valuable than simply the macro nutrients like vitamin C.
Antioxidants are one class of phytonutrients, though there are
many. Antioxidants work by supplying an extra oxygen molecule to
those molecules that are missing one, called free radicals. If
antioxidants don't supply the missing oxygen molecule to free
radicals, the free radicals will take an oxygen molecule from
another compound in the body, making one that was previously
healthy and intact itself a free radical. Free radicals are not
'baddies', simply unstable chemical molecules, but the effect
they have on the body is negative, as they can damage cells.
Free radicals are produced as a normal by product of the
metabolic processes of our cells, as well as by our immune
system as it counteracts the effects of pathogens and the
environment.
The trick is to keep the balance in the body where there is
enough of a supply of antioxidants to cope with the body's
production of free radicals.
Free radicals affect the skin in three main ways. They can alter
the fatty layers in your cellular membranes. These fatty layers
provide structure to the cell, and control which nutrients and
other agents can pass in and out. They can alter the DNA within
cells, which aside from the potential to develop into serious
illnesses, can make your skin inclined to wrinkles and sagging
before its natural biological time. Altered DNA creates a
blueprint for collagen and elastin fibers that don't function as
healthy, normal ones would. And to compound matters, the skin's
pores need healthy collagen and elastin fibers to stay tight and
small. So another undesired result is open, large pores.
Free radicals also lead to a process called the cross-linking of
collagen fibers. This occurs in the skin's dermis, as a result
of collagen and elastin fibers becoming hard, thick, and then
binding together. Cross-linked fibers create wrinkles, skin sag,
and cause your regular expression lines to become etched in your
face as a permanent fixture. With healthy collagen and elastin
fibers these expression lines would simply disappear once you
moved your facial muscles in a different way. And enzymes that
metabolize collagen are encouraged by free radicals, which,
given the importance of collagen in youthful looking skin, is
best minimized.
Other phytonutrients in plants that are of importance to skin
beauty are carotenoids and flavanoids. Flavanoids are great for
the health of blood vessels. They strengthen the capillaries
that supply important nutrients to the skin's cells, as well as
supporting cellular membranes. Healthy cell membranes regenerate
quickly, and slow the aging process. Carotenoids also strengthen
cell membranes. It seems carrots are not just good for eyesight!
And flavanoids help reduce inflammation, as well as increasing
levels of glutathione, which is an antioxidant.
References: Erica Angyal, Gorgeous Skin In 30 Days (Lothian
Books, 2005)
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