An Interview with Julia Hunter – Taking Care of Your Skin

Here (again due to technical difficulties) Julia Hunter MD talks about all the factors that are important in maintaining good skin. She is the number one fan of the Ageless Toolbox!  I just luuurve her southern drawl!  www.juliathuntermd.com

Transcript of Julia Hunter’s Interview

Okay how is the, what is of the best way to take care of, to prevent, to reverse, to slow down the ticking of the clock? What do you do to take care of your skin optimally?

Number one is, you are what you eat. Food is your medicine. Skin is a window to what’s going on in the inside. So, what you eat. If you inflame your gut, that ‘s when you’re going to see rosacea, you’re going to see enlarged pores, acne. All of those things are internal conditions caused by internal issues, internal inflammation. The other thing is aging. Maybe you don’t get acne, or eczema or psoriasis, or enlarged pores or rosacea, but with gut issues, because you are what you eat, it may just age you more quickly. It may cause you to have more brown spots that we all dislike so much. Melasma all of that. Number one is caused by internal conditions. So, number one is you are what you eat. Food is your medicine. Number two, is exercise.

Why do you need to exercise? Number one is, lymphatic drainage. What lymphatic drainage does is it takes out the garbage. It increases blood-flow when your exercise. Which brings in the groceries to your cells. So, you’re feeding your cells and you’re getting rid of the toxins that build up in space around cells. And so exercise is very important. Plus, exercise increases your hormones and a lot of those hormones like thyroid growth hormone make your cells work more youthfully make your skin work more youthfully. And, so that’s slowing down and turning back the clock.

The other thing for your skin is dehydration. You need to drink lots of water. Water really does matter. Again, I’m all about water that’s free of chemicals but drink lots of water, very important.  We dry up, our skin dries up, our whole body dries up as we get older and that is not just water but it’s also healthy oils. That’s olive oil, walnut oil, porridge oil, for most people. So, oils are very important to eat that are healthy for you. Butter is not a good choice. Goat butter is a better choice, but olive oil it’s a much better choice.  Then you need to take care of your anti-oxidants. Because inflammation is the cause of all disease of aging, most skin conditions that you see on the surface: brown spots, acne, rosacea, enlarged pores. All of that is inflammation.

What do anti-oxidants do? They neutralize the inflammation. So, it does matter to take your supplements, your anti-oxidants. And also we live in such a stress-filled and pollution-filled world nowadays that the anti-oxidants are helping to feed the cells. We need our cells our bodies need more supplementation than they used to need because we function at a much more demanding level, basically. And then it’s about skin product. Number one, inflammation is the cause of all disease in aging and you certainly do not want to spend your money on skin products that have ingredients in them which are inflammatory in their own right.

So, you want to avoid skin products that have the inflammatory ingredients. What are some of those ingredients? The parabens, there is methylbutyl there is propylparaben. All sorts of parabens. Tryphenylomine which is also a hormone disruptor. If your hormones in men and women are going down as we go down the path of life, you don’t want to be spending your money on what’s disrupting your hormones faster than life is. Propylene glycols, very inflammatory. Mineral oils, anything that has ureas in it. Those are some of the big offenders that are inflammatory. Why do they put those ingredients in skin products? Because they are cheap preservatives, basically. So, you don’t want to spend your money on what’s inflaming you more than life is.

Then with skin products, it’s about the number of molecules that ‘s in the actual skin products. That’s what makes them therapeutic. Remember, there are marketing facts, and there is science facts. And if you see a result from a skin product that you’re using, then it probably has enough molecules of ingredients in them that’s doing something. I personally, am very much about chirally, which means chemically correct skin products. All drugs were mandated to be chirally correct, which means that the body has a receptor for them. So that when you put those ingredients onto the skin, the body recognizes those ingredients and it turns on a good function and not a bad function. So, those are the most important things that basically are a good guide of how to best use your time and money to take care of your skin in the best way.