How to Slow Aging, Part V
Protecting our Cellular Barriers

Healthy Aging

Armor up against aging

For five weeks, we are covering the peer-reviewed Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism paper highlighting the most exciting avenues that scientists are pursuing to slow aging and help us enjoy more healthy years.

This week, let’s talk about how to protect your body’s natural barriers against aging.

Our bodies are covered with blankets of protective cells that have an important job: protect us against tissue breakdown and inflammation so that we can stay healthier, longer. As we age, however, this defensive line faces an increasingly uphill battle.

Where exactly are these barriers, and how do they break down?

Numerous studies have covered the importance of barrier function to our gut and skin health. This research is teaching us how our natural barriers break down – and how we can reverse that process.

Let’s start with explaining how our gut and skin barriers become impaired, especially as we get older.

• Stress, meet your gut’s barrier lining. While it has long been known that day-to-day stress can cause intestinal upset, we are now understanding why. In a paper by Soderholm and Purdue, they show that increased stress can induce mast cell activation, which compromises the integrity of our gut’s protective lining by making them more “leaky”. This results in damaged intestinal lining that induces inflammation, which further damages our front line that protects our gut health.
• Dry skin in the barrier game. You know what we’re talking about – that red and dry skin which becomes, well, redder, drier and angrier. There is an ongoing debate about whether our skin health is impaired from the Inside-Out, or Outside-In. That is, does systemic inflammation cause our skin barrier to break down, or does a weakened skin barrier cause systemic inflammation?

In an argument for the Outside-In hypothesis, Silverberg & Silverberg discuss how impaired skin integrity results in skin dehydration, tissue injury, and inflammation – which then creates whole-body over-reactions, including to old and new allergens. Meaning, if we protect our skin barrier, we can protect our whole bodies, especially as we age.

Key nutrients to take (or avoid) to fortify your body’s armor

In a review article, Suzuki summarizes how nutrients can help (or harm) our body’s natural barriers against injury and aging.

• Turn down the sugars. Diets high in glucose and fructose have been shown to increase the leakiness of barrier cells in the gut and inhibit growth of healthy barrier cells in the skin. Minimizing dietary sugar intake can help keep your gut and skin barriers in better shape.
• Turn up amino acids. Both glutamine and tryptophan have been shown to protect barrier cells. These nutrients can be found in meat, seafood/fish, whole fat dairy products, eggs, or nuts. Keep in mind that balance is key, and that too much tryptophan may actually impair barrier function.
• Know what is essential. Vitamins A and D have been shown to protect the integrity of our gut barrier lining, while nutritional deficiencies in vitamins A, C, D and E have all been shown to cause skin disorders related to impaired skin integrity. Be sure to get your vitamins!