7 Ways Your Exposome Ages Your Skin

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My blog post on "third hand smoke"

Environmental Working Group

ABOUT DR. SHIPPY

TRANSCRIPTION:

One of the most exciting areas of medical science right now is around a term called exposome. You're gonna be hearing so much more about this. It is looking at the lifetime accumulation, beginning before birth all the way up to your last breath, to see how those environmental exposures of chemicals, toxins, those kinds of things along with your lifestyle and diet choices impact your gene expression, called epigenetics, and your physiology to ultimately impact your health. So an example of that of monitoring would be if you've ever gone in for an x-ray. The people that are doing the x-rays have to wear a little device to see how much radiation they're being exposed to over time. So at some point, we're gonna be able to wear a device that measures that and thousands and thousands of other things to help to know what those impacts are having on our particular genetics. Super exciting, right? So one of the areas that's very interesting is how the exposome is impacting skin aging. There are seven things that I'm gonna run through that now the research is showing can heavily impact what your skin does over time, and then often, the skin is a reflection of what's going on inside at a cellular level. The most common thing that you're already aware of is how the sun impacts you. So it turns out that UV radiation causes photoaging, and we know to avoid sunburns and to wear sun screen, but it's turning out that even low daily doses of UVA radiation from the sun is really impacting what's going on with our skin. So that makes it even more important to put on some daily sunscreen or even wear a hat to avoid that exposure. With that, though, it's really important that you monitor your vitamin D and take appropriate levels of vitamin D to get you into a nice vitamin D range because that has such a negative impact on health when we don't have enough vitamin D. The other thing that you're probably aware of is what happens with smokers. So tobacco makes over 3,800 chemicals just in one puff that really impairs what's going on with our fibroblasts. So those are the cells that make our collagen. And then it turns out you can read in one of my blogs that even the chemicals that are left behind from smokers, like going into a smoker's house or riding in their car, can have lasting impacts and impact you, as well. So you might want to take a look at that one. Less aware is the impact of pollution. So we have both indoor and outdoor pollution. The outdoor pollution, you might know to avoid smog, but even car exhaust, lead, ozone, the particulate matter and the volatile organic compounds can have a huge impact. We can't change that so much as where we live, but inside the homes, the indoor pollution can also have even more of an impact since a lot of us spend so much time indoors either in our homes or in our work. So we want to be making choices in what we bring into our homes as far as paint and floor and cabinetry, the chemicals that we use to clean things. We want to make the lowest impact possible, but then even running the air filters to help to purify the air can make a big difference. Stress is a big one as far as impacting what our genes do in this exposome, and that's another thing that certain things we can control like we can make some choices that make our life less stressful, but then things like meditation can help to mitigate some of those impacts of the stress that we can't control, and that's also just something easy to add into your day. It can be five minutes or 20 minutes. And then prioritizing sleep, sleep can actually is part of the exposome that can make a big difference. So getting seven to nine hours of sleep most nights helps this aging process. Another thing that we can really impact is our nutrition, and this is a big category for the exposome. So having a diet that's deficient in a lot of the antioxidants, vitamin C, vitamin A, can heavily impact, as well as choosing food that it does not have hydrogenated oils, avoiding sugar and minimizing our adding in the char broiled or smoked meats. Then we also want to be very mindful of what we put on our skin. There's good data showing now that cosmetics are a huge problem if they have a lot of chemicals in them, and we have a great resource through the through the Environmental Working Group called cosmeticdatabase.org that we can go and look at every product that we use and choose the ones that have the lowest impact to our exposome. If you found this information helpful, please share it, spread the word. I'm on a mission, and you can help me to share this with family and friends to make Every Life Well®. See you next time.