Do anti aging products work ?
June 12, 2008
Peoples’ preoccupation with anti-ageing skin care products that claim to make you look younger is not surprising; reducing the visible signs of ageing is the goal for many people as they grow older, and why shouldn’t it be? This group of beauty products generally works by enabling the synthesis of collagen, the main protein of connective tissue in animals and the most abundant in our body; collagen is so abundant, it makes up about a quarter of the total protein content of structural protein found in skin. This area of anti-ageing treatments is connected to another group of products that help people to look young; known as antioxidants, they are the body’s method of slowing down the ageing process.
Although the benefits of vitamin C (an anti-oxidant) are well documented, it is still debated as to what our daily amount should be. Vitamin C formulated skin care treatments suffer with a particular problem of oxidizing on contact with the air which causes a problem for users and manufacturers.
More stable skin care treatments are now available that are almost as efficient and actually cost less to manufacture. These new anti-oxidant products are not quite as good as vitamin C although other naturally occurring compounds, vitamin E and lipoic acid can achieve the same effect.
Vitamin E is an antioxidant and component of human blood whose purpose is to help increase the body’s immune system against diseases including cancer. On the other hand, lipoic acid or alpha-lipoic acid is necessary for energy production which keeps us alive; it is in every human cell and another function is to repair skin damage caused by the normal ageing process.
Phytochemicals aren’t produced by the body but are extracted from a number of plants and used in many anti-ageing skin care products to combat the signs of ageing. A further benefit of these phytochemicals is their ability to prevent the onset of breast cancer, prostate cancer and colon cancer all of which are on the increase globally.
Surprisingly, the group of vitamins; B5, B6, and B12 have also shown that they can be used to help reduce the effects of ageing. Although the area of anti-ageing skin care products is huge, more is being learnt about the whole ageing process and about natural products that can reduce the effects it has on our bodies as well as our skin.
There is no doubt that what has been learned so far is only a small part of the jigsaw puzzle but research is moving forward rapidly and it is only a matter of time before a new generation of products becomes available. The amount of research going on in this field will undoubtedly bring results in time, hopefully bringing down the cost of these anti-ageing skin care products in addition to increasing their reliability.
In some respects the real way ahead lies in our own hands as there are many things we can do to reduce the signs of ageing naturally. Regular sleep patterns, exercise, a good healthy diet and less stress will all contribute to reducing the signs of ageing.
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