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Undo The Sun’s Damage To Your Skin

Plus: how to escape from a despairing mood

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The 10almonds Team
September 30, 2024

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

Thirty days hath September, and here we are now enjoying the 30th! A great time to pause and plan for the next month; what new healthy habits to implement, whether to make a reprise of any we previously dropped (and how), what we want our health to be like by the end of October.

In A Rush?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

  • Our skin is a large and important organ; not least of all because it protects the rest of our organs. It also takes almost all of the damage done by the sun.

    • Today’s main feature explores a way of reversing that damage, by speeding up the rate at which your skin rejuvenates itself.

  • How’s your hydration looking today? For most people, at any given time, it’s not great. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

    • Today's sponsor NativePath is offering a 365-day money-back guarantee on their range of electrolyte and amino acid drink mixes, which are great for your kidneys, bladder, and pelvic floor muscles.

  • Today’s featured recipe is for crispy tempeh and warming mixed grains in a harissa dressing; comfort food with lots of protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats, and more polyphenols than you can shake a fork at:

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Gut Drugs Under Fire

❝Which gut drugs might end up in a lawsuit? Are there really links with cancer and kidney disease? Should I stop taking them?❞

Watch and Learn

How To Escape From A Despairing Mood

When we are in a despairing mood, that’s when it can feel hardest to actually implement anything we know about getting out of one. That’s why sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best:

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

Monday’s Research Review

Undo The Sun’s Damage To Your Skin

It’s often said that our skin is our largest organ. Our brain or liver are the largest solid organs by mass (which one comes out on top will vary from person to person), our gut is the longest, and our lungs are the largest by surface area. But our skin is large, noticeable, and has a big impact on the rest of our health.

The sun is one of the main damaging factors for our skin; assorted toxins are also a major threat for many people, and once the skin barrier gets broken, it’s a field-day for bacteria.

So, what can we do about it?

Tretinoin: the skin’s rejuvenator

Tretinoin is also called retinoic acid, not to be mistaken for retinol, although they are both retinoids. Tretinoin is much stronger.

As for what it’s stronger at:

It’s usually prescribed for the treatment of sun-damage, acne, and wrinkles. Paradoxically, it works by inflaming the skin (and then making it better, and having done so, keeping it better).

In few words: it encourages your skin to speed up its life cycle, which means that cells die and are replaced sooner, which means the average age of skin cells will be considerably younger at any given time.

This is the same principle as we see at work when it comes to cellular apoptosis and autophagy in general, and specifically the same idea as we discussed when talking about senolytics, compounds that kill aging cells:

About that paradoxical inflammation…

❝The topical use of tretinoin as an antiacne agent began almost a half century ago. Since that time it has been successfully used to treat comedonal and inflammatory acne.

Over the intervening years, the beneficial effects of tretinoin have grown from an understanding of its potent cornedolytie-related properties to an evolving appreciation of its antiinflammatory actions.

…

The topical use of clindamycin and tretinoin as a combination treatment modality that includes antibacterial, comedolytic, and antiinflammatoiy properties has proven to be a very effective therapy for treating the various stages of acne

…

It is now becoming increasingly clear that there may be good reasons for these observations.❞

~ Drs. Schmidt & Gans, lightly edited here for brevity

Against damage by the sun

The older we get, the more likely sun damage is a problem than acne. And in the case of tretinoin,

❝In several well-controlled clinical trials, the proportion of patients showing improvement was significantly higher with 0.01 or 0.05% tretinoin cream than with placebo for criteria such as global assessment, fine and coarse wrinkling, pigmentation and roughness.

Improvements in the overall severity of photodamage were also significantly greater with tretinoin than with placebo.

…

Several placebo-controlled clinical studies have demonstrated that topical tretinoin has significant efficacy in the treatment of photodamaged skin. Improvements in subjective global assessment scores were recorded in:

49–100% of patients using once-daily 0.01% tretinoin,

68–100% of patients using 0.05% tretinoin, and

0–44% of patients using placebo.❞

~ Drs. Wagstaff & Noble

…which is quite compelling.

This is very well-established by now; here’s an old paper from when the mechanism of action was unknown (here in the current day, 17 mechanisms of action have been identified; beyond the scope of this article as we only have so much room, but it’s nice to see science building on science):

❝Tretinoin cream has been used extensively to reverse the changes of photoaging. It is the first topical therapy to undergo controlled clinical testing and proved to be efficacious. These results have been substantiated with photography, histopathologie examination, and skin surface replicas.

…

Tretinoin cream has an excellent safety record; a local cutaneous hypervitaminosis A reaction is the only common problem.❞

~ Dr. Goldfarb et al.

Is it safe?

For most people, when used as directed*, yes. However, it’s likely to irritate your skin at first, and that’s normal. If this persists more than a few weeks, or seems unduly severe, then you might want to stop and talk to your doctor again.

(in the case of a young woman who used it 4x daily instead of 1x daily)

Want to try some?

Tretinoin is prescription-only, so speak with your doctor/pharmacist about that. Alternatively, retinol is the strongest natural alternative that works on the same principles; here’s an example product on Amazon 😎

Take care!

Our Sponsors Make This Publication Possible

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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between millet and buckwheat—we picked the buckwheat (click here to read about why), as did 85% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

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Recipes Worth Sharing

Crispy Tempeh & Warming Mixed Grains In Harissa Dressing

Comfort food that packs a nutritional punch! Lots of protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats, and more polyphenols than you can shake a fork at:

Click below for our full recipe, and learn its secrets:

One-Minute Book Review

The Oh She Glows Cookbook: Over 100 Vegan Recipes to Glow from the Inside Out – by Angela Liddon

Let’s get the criticism out of the way first: there are about 80-odd recipes here, if we discount recipes that are no-brainer things like smoothies, sides such as for example “roasted garlic”, or meta-ingredients such as oat flour (instructions: blend the oats and you get oat flour).

The other criticism is more subjective: if you are like this reviewer, you will want to add more seasonings than recommended to most of the recipes. But that’s easy enough to do.

As for the rest: this is a very healthy cookbook, and quite wide-ranging and versatile, with recipes that are homely, with a lot of emphasis on comfort foods (but still, healthy), though certainly some are perfectly worthy of entertaining too.

A nice bonus of this book is that it offers a lot of available substitutions (much like we do at 10almonds), and also ways of turning the recipe into something else entirely with just a small change. This trait more than makes up for the slight swindle in terms of number of recipes, since some of the recipes have bonus recipes snuck in.

Bottom line: if you’d like to broaden your plant-based cooking range, this book is a fine option for expanding your repertoire.

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Wishing you the most well-informed start to the week,

The 10almonds Team