Of course, Skin Matters.

However, why and how Skin Matters from our point of view is likely to be a bit more expansive than what you’re accustomed to hearing.  We do not at all diminish the importance of the appearance of human Skin.  We’re actually quite focused on the aesthetic qualities of Skin, because—undisguised—the appearance of Skin is a gauge of the efficiency of very important biological and bio-chemical functions, which a Socio-biologist would argue form simply the living, organic and scientific micro-structure of the socially relevant characteristic we call beauty.

But let’s take the long path towards our discussion of the Skin Immunity Landscape and the three levels or varieties of immunity—from barrier to innate to the adaptive—the last of which is the sort of immunity we’re most familiar with from school and our vaccination programs.  Also, some discussion of the difference between a blunderbuss boosting of immunity and a more refined modulation or even sometimes a selective suppression of inflammatory immune responses will be important.  

We’ll get there, but rather than leaping in a single bound I think it will be best to advance step by step.  We need to go somewhat slowly because there is a systematic bias against taking the Skin and its complexities very seriously.  It might be because any thought about Skin is presumed to be somehow purely feminine and therefore related to cosmetics and beauty rather than health.  

This is a view with which we very strongly disagree, not least because, in truth, men suffer from serious Skin conditions at a rate three times greater than women.  

One of our working hypotheses is that ecological damage—particularly air pollution—is the main driver behind recent declines in Skin health.  There is an important nexus among three global super-dynamics:  ecological damage • compromised skin health • and, a slide into chaos of vital immune processes. There is a scientific relationship of cause and effect amounting to a cascade that links each of these super-dynamics.  This is why the Skin Immunity Landscape has deteriorated alarmingly around the world, creating an open field of play for present and future opportunistic pathogenic vectors.  It would be foolish to set aside a concern of this magnitude merely because its connection with Skin and the aesthetics of Skin challenges your bias towards viewing all matters Skin-related as cosmetic and therefore trivial. 

In this series of posts, we’ll also discuss some of our findings based on a comprehensive review of medical research in connection with the Skin Immunity Landscape.  A very exciting study from Yale University, published in November 2019, suggests that keto-adaptation promotes a healthy modulation of the innate immune response by increasing production of gamma / delta T-Cells during viral infection events, greatly improving the efficiency of the immune defense.  However, what we found more interesting was how research going back as far as 1979 had already discussed how keto-adaptation combined with fat soluble vitamins—particularly Vitamin E—provided significant protection against air pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone and diesel exhaust, which contains high concentrations of fine particulate matter.  

Before the advent of genetics—and, now, epigenetics—studies into how diet at the level of macro- and micro-nutrients might be adjusted to improve human health in the context of industrialized modern life were categorized under the heading of environmental medicine.  This seems quaint and maybe even a little hippie-ish now, when the analytic tools of biological and medical research have advanced so far, largely due to the combination of genomics with tremendous computational power.

Yet, we ourselves have a great affinity for the lost arts of environmental medicine, largely because we believe the most significant threats to human health in the 21st Century are essentially related to environment and ecology.  Frankly, we’d like to see far greater research intensity applied to the question of how ecological damage affects human health, because health and ecology aren’t entirely different quantities.  In reality, they are inseparable.  We also like the emphasis that environmental medicine from the past placed on prevention as opposed to intervention after a crisis has already has begun.  Now that all of us have experienced the excitement of simultaneous crises exploding at once, I think we might appereciate better the quiet wisdom of prevention.

As one considers a body of research going back many decades, what is bound to happen is that complexity retreats and simplicity begins slowly to emerge.  There are certainly complex dynamics at play on our planet today: political, climatological, economic, loss of species diversity, our discovery of the microbiome just in time to watch it disappear environmentally and in our very guts, Thucydides and China, monetary regime change, the rise of K-Pop, medical elitism, civilisational paradigm shift, the death of petroleum, consequent Green Crisis, democracy at risk… etc.  However, when the question one is trying to answer is how we might use the assets and tools available to ordinary people to help shield the health of those we love—our children, our parents, our spouses, and close friends—what gradually emerges as a simple truth from the scientific work of decades from the 20th to the 21st Century is that taking care of Skin—the largest organ of the human body—is of tremendous importance.

The Skin, after all, is the medium we use to interact with our environment.  And when that environment—in its air, soil and water—has grown hostile to us, the Skin (and related epithelial tissue) is what we deploy to protect us against the challenge of a chaotic ecology.  And if our primary defense against ecological hostility is our Skin, then we’d likely be best advised to provide the Skin with what it needs to maintain maximum strength and efficiency across the Skin Immunity Landscape.

Because there’s no rational basis in 2020 for asserting that men somehow breathe a different, cleaner air than women, we think it’s safe to posit that all of us, irrespective of gender, age or other demographic should accept as true that…

#SkinMatters.