ANTI-POLLUTION
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Protecting skin against air pollution with ahiflower
Greg Cumberford -Natures Crops International Keith Coupland - Northwood Consultants
Since the Industrial Revolution, air pollution has been a common daily experience for most people living in cities and for many people living with smokers or near power plants and factories. Much of the reforms of the environmental movement beginning in the 1960s and 1970s focused on cleaning up and preventing air pollution — smoke, smog, particulates, petroleum distillates, car and truck exhausts and brake dusts etc. — at their sources. These efforts greatly reduced people’s
exposures to air pollution and therefore to ongoing risk for cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases including lung cancer, while also reducing ecological impacts like acid rain harming fish and frogs in watersheds downstream from polluted cities. However, the negative health impacts of air pollution (indoor and outdoor) still is the fifth largest contributor to mortality worldwide and over 90% of people globally are impacted by air pollution.1 Progress has been made. In the 50 years
between 1970 and 2020 in the United States, lung cancer more than halved from the #3 cause of death at 78 per 100,000 (men),2
to
less than 32 per 100,000 of (both sexes).3 Despite real human health and environmental wins resulting from controlling and reducing air pollution, however, much less attention has been given to the impacts of air pollution on the largest organ in our bodies: the skin. This article summarizes recent research on
the pro-inflammatory effects of common air pollution on human skin and then proposes certain natural skin care and dietary protocols using plant-based omega-3 and omega-6
A
polyunsaturated fatty acids to help protect the skin from accelerated harmful effects.
The skin’s role in air pollution protection While our lungs are impacted immediately by air pollution, for example when caught in traffic behind trucks spewing out diesel smoke or by living near coal-fired power plants and oil refineries, our skin is also affected in perhaps less obvious and slower-manifesting ways. Proceeding outward, the skin’s layers are the dermis and the outer epidermis (Figure 1).4 The dermis is composed mostly of cells called fibroblasts which form a flexible connective tissue network and secrete collagen and
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elastin. The dermis also transports crucial nutrients and oxygen to the epidermis, and has nerve endings, hair follicles, sebaceous glands, and blood vessels running through it. Besides providing critical temperature
regulation for the entire body, the dermis mediates key functions like detoxification and wound repair with other cells in the dermal matrix like immune cells, mast cells, T cells, and macrophages. The dermis also provides the matrix for continually generating the outer skin layer: the epidermis. This is the last layer covering nearly
the entire human body and it is composed primarily of cells called keratinocytes — made of keratin — which become progressively more differentiated until they simply slough off as dead cells. Yet during that process, the epidermis
Epidermis Stratum corneum (SC)
Stratum granulosum (SG) Stratum lucidum (SL)
Dermis Stratum spinosum (SS)
Subcutaneous tissue
Stratum basale (SB) Dermis
Figure 1: Schematic overview of human skin. (A) The skin consists of the epidermis and the dermis. (B) The epidermal layers from the stratum corneum (SC) to the stratum basale (SB)
www.personalcaremagazine.com
provides critical UV, water, physical, and pathogen defence functions. Air pollution, particularly from petro-chemicals and endocrine disruptors (including in municipal water supplies that we shower or bathe in), triggers a defensive response by the skin. Indeed, persistent exposure to high levels of air pollution, triggers visible redness, lesions, dark spots, certain skin cancers, and other overt signs of rising toxicity in the dermal layers. One of the key impacts of air pollution on the skin is to cause the formation of pro- oxidizing free radical molecules — reactive oxygen species (ROS) — that trigger an inflammatory cellular response as part of the skin’s natural defence mechanism.
May 2023 PERSONAL CARE
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