During red carpet season, we ogle celebrities at the award ceremonies, examining their skin and hair, along with “who they’re wearing.”

It’s hard not to notice women who have clear, radiant, vibrant-looking skin, which is a sign of good health. While celebrities spend a lot of time improving the appearance of their skin from the outside, the real key to young-looking skin is proper nutrition and healthy habits.

In addition to eating healthfully and exercising, there’s a little-discussed supplement that can help prevent the wrinkling and dryness that contribute to old-looking skin. It’s called hyaluronic acid (HA). HA is a glycosaminoglycan that acts as the intracellular cement or glue of connective tissue. Connective tissue, as the term suggests, serves the function of supporting and binding other tissues. The loose connective tissue holds the skin and internal organs in place, while the fibrous connective tissue includes tendons, ligaments, and cartilage. In essence, hyaluronic acid not only helps to provide the structural framework of connective tissue, it is the actual “glue” that holds our body together.

Maintaining HA in body tissues is an important anti-aging strategy. One of the reasons our skin develops lines and wrinkles is due to the loss of HA. By the time most people reach the age of 70, the HA content in their body has dropped by 80% from when they were 40. After the age of 45 or so, HA levels in the skin begin to plummet.

There is a great deal of evidence that applying HA topically helps prevent wrinkles. But now researchers have discovered that taking hyaluronic acid orally is also beneficial for restoring moisture and youthful suppleness to the skin. Recent clinical studies using oral HA in patients with dry and rough skin have shown that patients given a supplement consisting of purified, bioavailable hyaluronic acid had a significant increase (46%) over baseline values in the moisture content of their skin.

Hyaluronic acid is a substance found in our bodies that’s essential for health, but now we know it’s also a key to beautiful-looking skin.

There has been a great deal of study in recent years about what causes us to age, and whether it’s possible to slow down our genetic clock.

For many years it was thought that cells were immortal if given an ideal environment. This long-held belief was discarded in the early 1960s when Dr. Leonard Hayflick observed that human fibroblasts, a type of cell in tissue culture, would stop dividing after about fifty times, a phenomenon that became known as “the Hayflick limit.” As these cells approach fifty divisions, they begin looking old. They become larger and accumulate an increased amount of lipofuscin, the yellow pigment responsible for “age-spots”—those brownish spots that appear on the skin as the result of cellular debris and lipofuscin clumping together.

Your Genetic Clock Is Ticking
Based on the Hayflick limit, experts on aging have theorized that there is a genetic clock ticking away within each cell that determines when old age sets in. The latest, and most likely, theory of aging is the telomere-shortening theory. Telomeres are the end-cap segments of DNA (our genetic material).
Each time a cell replicates, a small piece of DNA is taken off the telomere and gets shorter. The shorter the telomere gets, the more it affects gene expression. The result is cellular aging.

In addition to serving as a clock for aging, the telomere is also involved in protecting the end of the chromosome from damage—controlling gene expression and aiding in the organization of the chromosome. In short, the telomere not only determines the aging of the cell, but our risk for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and other degenerative diseases associated with aging.

Factors that Slow Down Your Clock

The key to extending the human lifespan will ultimately involve preserving or restoring telomere length to the DNA. Until then, there are steps we can take now. It is well known that lifestyle and dietary factors that can slow down telomere shortening. Let’s look at these more closely.

Lifestyle Factors. The ideal lifestyle for prolonging the life of telomeres and cells includes:

• Stress management.
• Regular exercise.
• Getting a minimum of 8 hours sleep per night.
• Maintaining ideal body weight. Perhaps the biggest cause of premature telomere shortening in North America is resistance to the hormone insulin that occurs in obesity, prediabetes, and type 2 diabetes, as recent studies have documented that insulin resistance is associated with shorter telomeres. Achieving ideal body weight and utilizing strategies to increase the sensitivity of the body cells to insulin is a critical goal to preventing telomere shortening.  (See: 7 Tips to Tame Your Sweet Tooth)

Dietary Factors. Dietary factors that are known to slow down aging include:

• Eating a low-glycemic diet. As mentioned above, the best easy to prevent insulin resistance that speeds up the aging process is to each foods that are low on the glycemic index. Type “low glycemic foods” into your search engine to learn the best foods to eat.
• Consuming a diet rich in fresh vegetables and fruit.
• Taking a multiple vitamin and mineral formula. Research has shown that many nutrients help fight telomere shortening, especially B vitamins like folic acid, vitamin B12, and niacin; zinc; magnesium; and vitamins C and E. The best way to insure adequate intake of these and other nutrients to prevent telomere shortening is to take a multiple vitamin and mineral supplement.

Nutritional Supplements. There have been lots of studies showing the positive effect of certain nutritional supplements on cell longevity. These include:

• Omega-3 fatty acids from fish and fish oil supplements—Higher levels of the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA in the blood have been shown to reduce telomere shortening in a long-term study. The recommended dosage of fish oils is based upon providing a daily intake of 1,000 mg EPA+DHA.
• Vitamin D— at least 2,000 IU daily. In one study, scientists studied the effects of vitamin D on the length of telomeres in white blood cells of 2,160 women aged 18 to 79 years. The higher the vitamin D levels, the longer the telomere length.
• Polyphenols and flavonoids—from grape seed, pine bark, and green tea. These substances are not only associated with reducing markers of inflammation, but also preventing telomere shortening in experimental studies. The recommended dosage from extracts providing at least 90% polyphenols is 150 to 300 mg daily.

One of the basic goals of the body in order to function properly is to maintain the proper balance of acidity and alkalinity (pH) in the blood and other body fluids. The acid-alkaline theory of disease is an oversimplification, but it basically states that many diseases are caused by excess acid accumulation in the body. There is growing evidence that the dietary acid-alkaline balance may influence certain disease states like osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, gout and many others. For example, osteoporosis may be the result of a chronic intake of acid-forming foods consistently outweighing the intake of alkaline foods, leading to depletion of alkaline minerals (calcium and magnesium) from the bone in order to buffer the excess acid.

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Just as a car can’t run without that initial spark, the human body can’t get going without CoQ10. It is an essential component of the mitochondria, which produce the power that cells need to divide, move, contract and perform all their other functions. CoQ10 also plays a critical role in the manufacture of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy that drives all body processes. What’s more, CoQ10 is a very important antioxidant that protects the cells against damage.

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A woman who consumes fish oil-type supplements during pregnancy decreases the number of colds early in her baby’s life. In fact, cold symptoms occurred 24 percent less often among babies whose  mothers took fish oil during pregnancy than in those whose mothers didn’t. Cold symptoms also resolved faster throughout the first six months of life for the supplement group compared with the placebo group.

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