Savvy marketers tap into our natural human desire to keep our skin radiant and younger looking by showcasing glamorous females on television to sell products like Oil of Olay. Their slogan-pitch used to literally be: “Now you can look younger too.”
It may interest the reader to know that I apply 100% pure coconut fat/oil onto my face daily as part of my total skin care and overall health regimen. But this superficial application is the lesser part of the total and I personally advocate working from the inside out (based on nutrition) as the greatest part of the whole for creating better skin and health.
In other words, a 'younger look' begins from the inside and rests on the notion that form follows function. You must eat quality fat and oils in order to create vibrant health; radiant skin and positive attitude are but a final outward expression of this vibrancy.
But why is it that dietary fat is more important than water for keeping skin radiant and healthy? Let’s explore this by looking at the anatomy of the skin itself and the dynamics between oil and water.
Oil & Water Do Mix.
Your skin, like all the cells of your entire body, are made of fat at the outer edge of the cell membrane called a lipid layer. Like wood left in the hot dry sun, skin will dry out unless water is kept from evaporating off the surface, and it is a special fat - called sebum – that prevents water from evaporating off the surface of the skin to keep it lubricated, soft, and radiant.
Thus, your skin looks more radiant for two reasons due to fat. One: The skin membrane is literally made of fat. Two: The sebaceous gland beneath the surface of your skin secretes a fat/wax mixture that coats your skin like the Thompson’s Water Seal does to wood. Anybody who has a massage therapist that uses almond oil or some other type of oil knows that his or her skin glistens afterwards. Water is by far the lesser part of the whole reason why skin looks hydrated and radiant.
So…skin dries out mainly in two ways. The quick way is what happens when you bathe for too long and the sebum is washed away. This makes your skin feel dry and your fingers look wrinkly due to the elimination of the protective ‘waterproofing effect’ from the sebum. Thus, water absorbs into your skin, makes the skin expand, and so it looks wrinkled from uneven expansion, not loss of water!
The ‘slow way’ for skin to dry out happens because the cell membranes of the skin don’t get the right nutrition. The types of fat you eat will become part of the cell membranes of your skin. For example, some Australian dairies remove the saturated fat from milk and replace it with polyunsaturated vegetable oil. Unfortunately, this oil deposits itself into skin membranes. Why is this unfortunate? It is because polyunsaturated oils oxidize very easily, especially when exposed to UV light! Not a good idea to have this in your skin in a sunny place on Earth!
All this means that the types of fat you eat are critical for creating not only healthy skin but also healthy cell membranes in your total body. Now here comes the big surprise. A crucial fatty acid your skin requires comes from the fat of grassfed animals. The fat from these animals contain a special form of an essential fatty acid called conjugated linoleic acid – or ‘CLA’. Unfortunately plant sources do not provide this nutrient. Consumption of CLA has dropped due to commercialized grains fed to animals as well as the increase of low-fat products on the market.
Cream-on-top yogurt and milk, butter, and beef are the principle sources. Now I’ve opened the Pandora’s box to a whole new way of thinking about ALL the different types of fatty acids that you generally don’t hear or read about in mainstream sources on nutrition. We will explore these details in future articles.
www.udoerasmus.com/articles/udo/cla6.htm
http://www.eatwild.com/cla.html
Physiologics.org