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Nutriceuticals
The New Super Nutrients for Effective Skin Repair and Regeneration
Advancing on from natural products
It is common knowledge that natural nutritionals such as vitamins and herbs have formed the basis for a significant amount of health and beauty products. It is also a fact that not all-natural nutritionals have the same quality standards, which result in varying degrees of potency and efficacy.
The quality variances and lack of scientific research has posed a constant problem throughout the growing natural health industry, attracting criticism from the medical and scientific community in relation to quality standardisation and insufficient studies.
In light of the enormous amount of anecdotal evidence in support of natural remedies, scientific studies still focused toward synthesised pharmaceuticals, because they provided the researchers with the necessary guaranteed levels of good manufacturing practice, quality assurance standards and specific component specifications.
The difference with Nutriceuticals over conventional natural products is that they present advanced manufacturing outcomes of natural nutritional ingredients under pharmaceutical conditions, to produce quality assured products for the advancement of superior health and beauty.
Nutriceuticals have increasingly come under investigation by scientists, since their recent availability. Having the characteristic of natural derivatives with technologically advanced manufacturing procedures, the nutriceutical is rapidly becoming a mechanism of emerging importance within the scientific medical, natural health and consequently the beauty therapy industry.
Scientific Theory, Research and the Skin
Healthy skin is balanced with oxygen, nutrients, good capillary circulation and excellent lymph drainage. However, there are no blood vessels in the outer layers of the skin.
The ability for the skin to repair itself or to maintain a youthful look is directly proportional to its ability to receive nutrients and oxygen from the capillaries.
Circulation in the capillaries that are responsible for providing these layers with nutrients and oxygen declines rapidly as we age. They become less permeable and so less oxygen and nutrients pass from the capillaries to the extracellular fluid, which surrounds the cells, crucial for the normal metabolic processes of these cells. The restriction of the blood flow deprives the subcutaneous cell tissue of necessary nutrients and decreases tissue oxygen content, resulting in cell hypoxia and cell death.
The biological processes involved must therefore be given assistance in compensation for the deficit f oxygen and vital nutrients to allow the skin to maintain its young appearance.
Proteoglycans and their component glycosaminoglycans (the most abundant heteropolysaccharides in the body) are involved in such cell to cell and cell-matrix interactions as cell adhesion and migration. Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) molecules are long chain, unbranched polysaccharides made up of repeating disaccharide units, which are routinely liked to glycoproteins to give whole proteoglycan structure and are found in the extracellular matrix (ECM) and on cell surfaces.
As definitive organs such as the skin emerge, structurally different proteoglycans partition into highly defined compartments. In skin, these compartments correspond to morphologically and functionally distinct layers. However, during the normal aging process, the relative amounts of structurally distinct domains in glycosaminoglycan apparently vary independently in each of these layers. This was demonstrated, in an indirect immunocytochemical study, through the use of monoclonal antibodies that detect structurally distinct domains in glycosaminoglycan chains of proteoglycans.
An important new finding was that the relative amounts of specific types of glycosaminoglycans varied in an age-and layer-dependent manner. Thus age-related changes in proteoglycan distribution exist and correlate with morphologic and functional changes that occur in the intrinsic process of aging in human skin.
Extracellular protease involved in normal and malignant tissue remodeling also requires GAGs for activation.
Antioxidants
As we age, our body’s ability to control free radical production diminishes and it is the inability to control these atoms and molecules that causes the aging process. We can minimise the effects of aging on our cells and body by taking supplemental antioxidants to help control or ‘deactivate’ free radicals. Therefore, products that contain both antioxidants and oxygen could be of great value in minimising skin aging.