Saturday, February 28, 2009

Stifling the Affects of Age on Your Skin

By Wendy Jackson

People's preoccupation with anti-aging skin car products that claim to make you look younger, is not surprising when most of us can expect to live longer and have fuller more active lives. This group of products generally work by enabling the synthesis of collagen, which is the main protein of connective tissue in animals and the most abundant protein in mammals. Collagen is related to other anti-ageing substances in the body called anti-oxidants.

You probably know many anti-oxidants by name, including vitamin C, the use of which is still, even now, hotly debated in the science and nutrition community. Unfortunately all skin care treatments that use vitamin C have the problem of atmospheric oxidization to contend with once the product is exposed to the air.

Manufacturers are trying alternative skin care treatments to vitamin C that do not have this oxidization problem or cost as much to produce. However, these anti-aging skin care treatments are not as effective vitamin C based products, although vitamin E and lipoic acid are also anti-oxidants and have similar effects.

The body uses vitamin E as an anti-oxidant and is also used to increase the natural defense we have against disease, including many types of cancer, it is a fat soluble vitamin in people's blood. Another, lipoic acid is in every cell of our body and is used to generate energy for us to live but also helps reduce and reverse the skin's aging process.

Another group of products used to reduce the visible signs of aging are phytochemicals which are compounds extracted from various plants and used in many anti-aging skin care products. Phytochemicals prevent occurrence of certain types of cancer.

Other vitamins from the B group, are also used in anti-ageing skin care like vitamins B5, B6 and B12 for example. The use of anti-ageing skin care products is a huge scientific field to research and has far greater potential than just producing goods that reduce the visible signs of age.

Although current regimes are effective, there are still many challenges to finding better and more efficient ways to combat the effects of time. Hopefully, these challenges will get resolved in due course and better and cheaper anti-ageing skin care products will be produced.

They cannot replace natural skin care remedies. Natural methods are known, but few actually follow them. - 16083

About the Author: