By: Cat Ebeling, RN, MSN-PHN, co-author of the best-sellers:  The Fat Burning Kitchen, The Top 101 Foods that Fight Aging & The Diabetes Fix

It’s summertime and after a long cold winter, it feels so great to get out in the sunshine. But should we fear the sun? Do we need to slather sunscreen all over us or wear long sleeved shirts and hats?

I find it odd to think that back in the days of our hunter/gatherer ancestors, there was no sunscreen, no hats, no umbrellas—nothing. How did they do it?

We actually need the sunlight on our skin for mental, emotional and health reasons. We must have sunlight. It’s essential to our health and wellbeing.

The Health Benefits of Sunlight

Some of the essential benefits sunlight provides include:

• Immune Health—Sunlight actually helps to stimulate our T cells in the skin. T cells destroy pathogens and are an important part of our immune systems.
• Vitamin D—Is a hormone that helps strengthen and modulate our immune system, regulate our sex hormone production, strengthen bones, teeth, protect our heart health, prevent cancer and keeps our genes healthy. The best way to get vitamin D is from the sun–but not if you block UVB (the rays that can burn) rays.
• Nitric Oxide—Helps our blood vessels stay dilated and increases blood flow. It also reduces blood pressure, improves cardiovascular health, and physical performance. Sun increases nitric oxide.
• Circadian Rhythm—Our sleep-wake cycle depends on our circadian rhythms. We need daylight sun and nighttime dark to have a normal sleep-wake cycle. In the daylight, sun triggers serotonin and exposure to sun in the daytime helps our bodies produce melatonin for sound sleep at night.
• Cognitive Function—Since sunlight increases vitamin D production, it has a positive effect on cognitive function—especially in the elderly. Maybe that’s why older folks retire to the Sunbelt.
• Mood–Exposure to sunlight increases the brain’s release of a hormone called serotonin. Serotonin is associated with feeling happy, calm and focused. Low levels of serotonin are associated with a higher risk of depression, especially “Seasonal Affective Disorder” or SAD.

Unfortunately, we’ve been told over and over again to avoid the sun, that the sunlight is dangerous and we should ‘fear’ it. And yes, you can get too much sun. Your skin can get burned or blistered and you can even develop skin cancer from excessive exposure to the sun. So how then, do we get the above benefits of the sun?

The Truth About Sunscreen

Yes, you are correct, getting sunburned is not usually a good thing. This means damage has occurred in your skin and the resulting redness is an inflammatory reaction. A history of blistering sunburns can actually be a predictor of your chances of skin cancer.

However, lifestyle and diet can definitely protect your skin from getting sunburned and can help lessen the damage, including the redness and discomfort of the sunburn.

The sun has two kinds of rays: UVA and UVB. UVB is actually the type that can burn you. Most sunscreens work to block the UVB rays.

However, blocking the UVB rays and just getting UVA rays (the rays that make your skin browner) won’t give many of the health benefits. Vitamin D is actually synthesized the sun’s ultraviolet B (UVB) rays hitting the cholesterol our skin cells, providing the catalyst for vitamin D synthesis to occur.

The trick with sun benefits is to get shorter exposures and build up time in the sun. So that means getting outside but limiting—not avoiding–your exposure to burning rays.

This also means getting real sun, not the kind you get from a tanning bed, which usually only put out UVA rays.

• Eat plenty of antioxidants

This is actually the key to avoid bad sunburns, and to reduce damage to your skin. Colorful vegetables and fruit are basically a type of edible sunscreen. A diet high in carotenoids (a type of antioxidant in red and orange vegetables) can actually protect against sun damage. Lycopene, the antioxidant in tomatoes has similar skin-protective properties. Vegetables that are high in vitamin C and E are also protective, as are anthocyanidins, the antioxidants found in blueberries, red or dark grapes and red wine. Eating lots of red, orange and purple stuff will prevent your skin from turning those colors!

Skin protective foods include: Berries, tomatoes, carrots, red bell peppers, kale and other dark green leafy veggies, pastured egg yolks, sockeye salmon, and shrimp

• Eat more omega 3 fats and avoid inflammatory omega 6 fats

Any processed seed oil such as canola oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, soybean oil, corn oil, or any other “vegetable oil”, is highly dangerous to your health. Seed oils are pro-skin cancer.

How? The short explanation is this—inside each and every cell in our bodies, we have the mitochondria. This is the energy production center of the cell. The cells’ mitochondria need to have specific types fatty acids to communicate with each other and work properly. These fatty acids signal when a cell is damaged or dysfunctional and the cell is destroyed. Omega 6 seed oils shut off the alarm to destroy the dysfunctional cell, and instead it can grow out of control and becomes cancerous.

The more (healthy) omega 3s you consume, the more protection from the sun you enjoy.

Skin protective fats include: Salmon, cod, other wild caught fish, grass-fed beef, pastured eggs, grass-fed butter.

• Know your own skin type and get the right amount of sun

The lighter your hair and skin, the less sun you need to get enough vitamin D and the other health benefits the sun provides. However, darker skinned people need more time out in the sun, and if you are dark-skinned and living in the northern hemisphere, you may need to take supplemental vitamin D.

• Get good sleep and get out in the sun early in the day

Did you know your skin’s ability to handle the sun has to do with your circadian rhythm? The skin’s defense against the sun actually works best the first half of the day. So if you are headed to the beach, do it early, not late in the afternoon, when you skin can handle it better.

Early morning sunlight is rich in UVB rays, which also helps prepare your skin for the UVA tanning rays in the afternoon by enhancing its UV resistance.

Daily sun vs sun ‘binging’

People who get out in the sun on a regular basis actually have better defense against skin damage than people who only get intermittent sun exposure. Holiday vacationers who binge on the sun for the week or two they are on vacation are far more likely to be at risk for sun damage, skin cancer and melanomas.

A daily low to moderate dose of the sun is much healthier than occasional sun binging.

What about sunscreen?

Granted, there are times when we all need sunscreen, even if we follow the above guidelines. Camping, a raft trip, boating, fishing, hiking—you name it, if you are outside for long periods of time, sun protection is probably important.

The problem with sunscreens is that the majority of them use chemicals to filter out the sun (mostly UVB) and unfortunately, those chemicals are quickly absorbed into the skin and into the bloodstream where they can be pretty toxic. Some of the more toxic ingredients include:

• Benzophene–Many sunscreens with chemical sun block also come with endocrine disruption. Some forms of the chemical benzophenone will inhibit the action of your thyroid hormones. Result, thyroid hormones T3 and T4 are lower than normal for several days after applying sunscreen with benzophene.
• Octyl-methoxycinnamate–Another common ingredient, octyl-methoxycinnamate is considered a xenoestrogen (artificial estrogen) and disrupts normal hormone function in men and women.
• Oxybenzone—This ingredient filters out UV rays, but it is also an artificial estrogen, which blocks testosterone in men, and can cause estrogen-based cancers in women—in addition to throwing female hormones out of whack. Oxybenzone is also dangerous to unborn children, as this study shows. And sunscreen and bug spray don’t mix—when you apply both, you absorb even more of the toxic bug-killing ingredients as well.
• Octinoxate—This chemical is the most widely used UVB-blocking ingredient. Octinoxate produces estrogen-like activity and also affects thyroid function. The scariest thing about this chemical is how easily it is absorbed into the body and the bloodstream. It has been detected in human breastmilk as well.
• Homosalate – This chemical is also another common UVB-blocking chemical that acts as an artificial estrogen in the body. Homosalate also will increase the amount of pesticides we absorb through the skin, if you happen to use buy spray as well.
• Parabens—One more endocrine disrupting/xenoestrogen synthetic preservative found in cosmetics and conventional sunscreens. Parabens can be tricky to find on labels. Look for ingredient names like methylparaben, propylparaben, isoparaben or butylparaben.

What is SAFE?

If you need to find less toxic protection from the sun, look for formulas that list zinc oxide or titanium dioxide as the active ingredients. Both of these sit on top of the skin, and physically block the sun with little to no absorption through the skin or into the bloodstream.

For a complete list of sunscreens to avoid, and safer sunscreens to use check out this article from Dr. Josh Axe.

Bottom line–if you must spend a long amount of time out in the summer sun, eat a skin-healthy diet, and protect your skin with a safe and natural zinc oxide or titanium oxide based sunscreen too. And enjoy the summer sun!

References
https://bit.ly/3x966CE
https://www.marksdailyapple.com/sun/#ref-11
https://draxe.com/beauty/best-sunscreens/

The post The Truth About Sunscreen appeared first on thenutritionwatchdog.com.

Most of us think of exercise in terms of how we want to look—losing weight, a carved six pack, the firm fanny, or chiseled arms. Sure, those are great, but exercise has wide-ranging benefits that go far beyond just looking good.

Aside from the health and physical benefits, did you know that exercise–especially weight training and High Intensity Interval Training–can actually slow down the aging process? Yes, it has been scientifically proven to slow aging dramatically! Researchers have discovered a way to actually shave as much as ten years from your age with vigorous exercise. And no, you do not need to start training for an Ironman, you just have to start getting exercise in your life.

Exercise has the ability to not only change the VERY cells in your physical body to slow down aging, and actually change the structure of your brain as well, making you feel stronger, more confident, happier and more focused. Starting an exercise program today, no matter how old you are, will absolutely change your life for the better!

After the age of 35, most adults begin to lose 8-10% of their muscle mass per decade. That means by age 55, you have lost up to 20% or so of your muscle mass—if you aren’t exercising. This sneaky condition means your metabolism—and your ability to burn fat—decreases drastically with loss of muscle, and that worst part is that you probably don’t really notice the muscle loss, until you get to a point where everyday activities become difficult. Muscle is one of the most metabolically active parts of our bodies, so losing muscle means our metabolism drops!

Research from UCLA suggests that the more muscle mass older people have, the longer they can expect to live. These findings add to the growing evidence that overall body composition—how much muscle you have, versus how much body fat you have—not the more commonly used and less specific measurement of body mass index (BMI), is one of the best predictors of all-cause mortality.

Aging can make our joints and bones more subject to arthritis (inflammation) and osteoporosis (weak bones). Obviously, these two things can lead to injuries and immobility as we age. Lifting weights and most kinds of weight-bearing exercise actually help to manage arthritis pain and create more mobility in our joints.

Strengthening the muscles around joints not only helps to support, lubricate, and strengthen your joints, but the tug on your muscles and bones created by resistance exercise (like weight training) actually will help to strengthen bones and counter osteoporosis.

Even people with mild to moderate hip arthritis can avoid the surgeon’s knife and hip replacement surgery by exercising. And exercise helps to improve flexibility, movement and joint range of motion as well.

Have you put on a few pounds as you have gotten older? Muscles and the mitochondria in our cells are strong determinants of our metabolism. Metabolism, as you may know, has to do with how many calories you burn in a day and how much energy you have. As mentioned above, losing muscle mass also creates a drop in your metabolism. Think of muscle mass as our ‘engines’. If you want to boost that metabolism back up, start a weight training program, which revs up our physical engines. Adding muscle to your body, is like adding high octane gas to our body’s engines! More muscle, more ‘horsepower’, more metabolism—and more energy!

Men who are looking to replace their declining levels of testosterone and DHEA will be happy to know—just 12 weeks of strength training significantly increases levels of free testosterone and DHEA. Testosterone and DHEA (a pre-cursor to testosterone) not only helps men in the bedroom, but it also benefits the body’s ability to burn fat, but it helps prevent heart attacks, and helps with feelings of empowerment, confidence and mental clarity as well. And ladies, this is for us too! Women actually need testosterone and DHEA for libido, mental clarity, confidence and ability to burn fat too!

We don’t need to set a goal of looking like fitness models to feel like our workouts are paying off—simply working out consistently will improve your health, your fitness AND your appearance. Strength training, aerobic training or HIIT will not only help you start to burn off some of that body fat, but your muscles will become a bit more defined, you will stand a little taller and walk with a bit more confidence too.

Exercise will help your body to burn off that dreaded belly fat as well. Exercise scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that healthy men who did 20 minutes of daily weight training had less of an age-related increase in abdominal fat compared with men who spent the same amount of time doing aerobic activities.

Exercise also improves your skin tone and helps you avoid the droopy skin look. We women especially hate that droopy skin/fat on the backs of our upper arms, but if you build up and strengthen those arm muscles, you can firm up this area, and have nicely defined arms. And it works for all those other areas of your body prone to drooping too! Because exercise speeds up your circulation and flushes out toxins, your skin begins to glow as well.

A study of almost 6,000 adults in the U.S., showed that those who exercise regularly are younger on a cellular level than those who lead sedentary lifestyles. Researchers can look at the telomeres on your chromosomes to determine how fast or slow your cells are aging. Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of your chromosomes in each of your cells. Telomeres are a little like those plastic ends on shoelaces that keep them from unraveling. Every time our cells divide, the telomeres shorten. When the telomeres become too small, the cells die, which is a big part of how we age. Short telomeres are related to many age-related diseases, including cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular disease.

In the study, an exercise science professor from Brigham Young University compared the telomere lengths in those who did regular vigorous exercise and those who were sedentary. His conclusion was startling: the more physically active we are, the less our biological aging. In other words, exercise truly does slow down our biological aging clock.

In fact, vigorous physical activity can take about ten years off your age, and moderate physical activity can turn back the clock about seven years. Who doesn’t want to be 7-10 years younger??

The best thing is, you don’t have to be an Olympic athlete to reverse the clock; it only takes a minimum of 30-40 minutes of running or other moderate to vigorous exercise five days a week.

One of the biggest and best new forms of exercise to hit the mainstream is HIIT, or High Intensity Interval Training. This is a fast-paced, intense form of exercise that creates the biggest effect in the shortest amount of time. HIIT has been known to burn the most calories and increase overall fitness in the shortest period of time. HIIT exercise works like this—it alternates short intervals of maximum effort combined with several short recovery times. Often those intervals are 3-5 minutes or less of hard exercise with a couple minutes of rest. There are many different varieities of HIIT workouts, but they all have the same benefits. HIIT can boost your metabolism for hours, melt off fat, build muscle, and maximize those awesome exercise endorphins that give you that wonderful exercise ‘high’.

Now, the Mayo Clinic also says HIIT can stop the aging clock as well. The study, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, involved 72 sedentary adults in two age groups—young (18 to 30) and older (65 to 80). The participants were assigned to one of three 12-week workout routines: high-intensity interval cycling, strength training with weights, or a combined strength-training and cycling plan for three months.

The HIIT training plan required three days of cycling with four, 4-minute high-intensity intervals and 3-minute recovery periods), and two days of steady, brisk treadmill walking. The strength-training group performed upper- and lower-body exercises twice a week, while the combined-training group worked out five days a week at a steady state, and for less time.

At the end of the study period, all three groups had gained lean muscle mass and improved their aerobic capacity. But the HIIT group had noticeable changes at the cellular level. Younger volunteers experienced a 49% boost in mitochondrial capacity—the cell’s ability to take in oxygen and produce energy—while the older age group had a dramatic 69% increase!

Mitochondria are our cells’ powerhouses and are important to vitality, oxygen-burning capability metabolism, and energy. In essence, the health of our cells, and our bodies (which are made up of cells) is directly tied to the function of our mitochondria.

The bottom line is that adding short bursts of high intensity exercise is a great way to boost the benefits of exercise even more. Even finding a path where you can run for short bursts or pedaling your bike up hilly sections in a road will work. Obviously, you want to gradually ease into this type of exercise. There are many different types of HIIT workouts online as well.

What if you could do something that would immediately improve your mood, your focus and your memory while protecting your brain from Alzheimer’s, dementia, ADD/ADHD, and banish depression and anxiety? That’s exercise!

According to neuroscientist, Wendy Suzuki, exercise actually helps your prefrontal cortex which is involved in focus, attention, personality and judgement, to improve and grow, improving your capacity for focus and improving your mood. And what’s more, exercise helps to increase your long- and short-term memory.

A single 30-minute workout increases your ‘happy’ brain chemicals of dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline, improves your focus and attention as well as your reaction times. Exercise actually helps your brain make new brain cells and helps your brain to expand and become stronger. And these benefits stick with you!

Your body changes for the better, your health improves, your metabolism improves, your moods improve, you gain confidence, you move better, you feel stronger, you stand up straighter, and your whole life improves with regular exercise.

Don’t ever feel like it is too late! All of these benefits happen, no matter what your age. We don’t have to become fitness models or superathletes, we just have to start moving and start exercising. It only takes 3-4 times a week of 30-40 minutes to make this work. (Of course, if you want to go longer or harder that’s even better!)

So, start now–whether it’s simply walking, running, cycling, strength training, or High Intensity Interval Training—or any combination of the above exercises. You will feel better–mentally, physically and emotionally–and your body and brain physically change for the better as well.

In the words of neuroscientist, Wendy Suzuki,

“Bringing exercise into your life will change your life for the better making you happier and more productive. You can actually CHANGE THE TRAJECTORY of your life for the better–and those around you.”

Don’t wait, start now. It’s never too late!

If you find this article interesting, our friend Steve Holman shows you what exercises can SLOW the aging process, and which ones actually can accelerate it.

This article shows you how to AVOID the exercises that accelerate aging in your body…

References
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/weight-training-appears-key-to-controlling-belly-fat/
http://www.shrinkinguy.com/blog/5-anti-aging-benefits-of-strength-training
https://www.ted.com/talks/wendy_suzuki_the_brain_changing_benefits_of_exercise?language=en
https://www.newsweek.com/exercise-anti-aging-younger-cellular-level-telomeres-607228
https://dailyburn.com/life/fitness/strength-training-aging-study-100714/
https://www.fasebj.org/doi/abs/10.1096/fj.13-245480?journalCode=fasebj
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743517301470?via%3Dihub
https://academic.oup.com/ageing/article/43/6/748/2812353
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131(17)30099-2

The post Five Ways Exercise Actually Makes You Look YOUNGER appeared first on thenutritionwatchdog.com.