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Life experience has taught me that people don’t like to be compared to vegetables. But the thing is, there are some similarities between us and our friends in the plant kingdom that we can learn from. When I was a botany student, one of the best courses I took was called Postharvest Physiology. Once a crop is picked – whether a flower, fruit, vegetable, or grain – the process of dying begins, which is known as senescence. In order for the crop to get to the consumer looking fresh, everyone involved in packing, transporting, and retailing the product should ideally know at least a little bit about how to slow down senescence – without causing an unnatural kink in the process.
Everyone knows about refrigeration, for instance. Generally, the colder we keep our produce, the slower it ages. But if we over chill it, we can stop ripening or cause irreparable damage. If you’ve ever had a peach that was dry and mealy inside, this is called “wooliness” and it means that someone involved in the storage of that peach got it colder than it could handle.
Another major intervention for prolonging the life of harvested crops is reducing water loss. The loss of water from flowers, fruits, and veggies parallels a loss in quality. When leafy greens lose water they wilt. When carrots and celery lose water they aren’t crunchy anymore. When potatoes lose water they get wrinkly and corky. When oranges lose water they become dry and fibrous. Essentially, all of these produce items shrink when water evaporates from them. And humans go through a similar process as part of our own senescence.
Food producers do all sorts of things to reduce water loss. They raise the humidity of storage environments, they pack produce in sealed bags to contain escaping water (this is also the concept behind the crisper drawer of your fridge), veggies that can handle being wet get packed wet (such as baby carrots) or are displayed under sprinklers in the store, many crops are coated with oils or waxes to block water from evaporating (tomatoes, apples, peppers, citrus, eggplant, cucumbers, potatoes and others), and flowers are, of course, always drinking water from a bucket or vase.
In order to preserve your own youthfulness, my recommendations really aren’t all that different from how we treat our crops. Like potatoes, we shrink as we age, making skin wrinkly and saggy. We need to control moisture loss and maximize rehydration.
First, environmental control. Having moved from ultra-moist Portland to ultra-dry Boulder a couple years ago, I’ve been more acutely aware of my skin than ever before. The parched air seems to be sucking the water out of me. And I can’t help but notice that many people who have lived here for a few decades have skin that looks significantly older than that of Portlanders of the same age. Both climates present their own issues.
If you live in a very moist place, you need to watch for mold in your home and workplace, which can cause respiratory problems (which can indirectly affect the skin) and rashes, but for the most part, you should consider your skin lucky. If you live in a dry place, get a humidifier. I have an expensive humidifier and even after it has run for several hours, the relative humidity in the room will have risen by only one or two percent. So, you need to have one running constantly. A better option is a whole house humidifier, which is typically connected to your furnace, and requires less maintenance.
When you live in dry air, the water in the superficial tissues of your body will naturally move from the inside to the outside, attempting to equalize the moisture inside and outside. So, if there’s more water in the air around you, you’ll keep more of the water that’s in your skin. But this doesn’t apply to actually being immersed in water. When you bathe, especially if you take long showers or baths, and especially if you use very hot water, and especially if you use soap, you strip moisture from your skin. Therefore, if dry skin is a problem for you, shorten your bathing time (or take a bath with moisturizers added to the water), use cooler water, use less soap or at least use soap with moisturizers in it, and be sure to apply a moisturizer afterwards.
Another big difference between my old home and my new one is that Boulder is high and sunny and Portland is low and cloudy. Again, Portlanders’ skin benefits from this situation since sun damage is a rarity there, while it’s quite common in the intense sun of Colorado. In any case, a good sunscreen is important. Although we have yet to discover the health implications of applying nanoparticles of metals to our skin, at this point I recommend a mineral sunscreen (titanium and/or zinc based) rather than a synthetic chemical screen. Also, while I think it’s important to avoid sun damage, I believe moderate sun exposure is also a good thing; it’s one of the main reasons I moved to the Mountain West. So, don’t avoid sun altogether. It gives us life.
Finally, Colorado is also a lot windier than the Pacific Northwest, so applying a physical barrier to minimize moisture loss is also important. I’m not saying Portlandians are off the hook here, but it’s much less critical if you forget your lotion for a day. As with preserving the post-harvest life of vegetables, we can use oils and waxes – in the form of straight oil (olive, coconut, jojoba, avocado, macadamia, hazelnut, grapeseed, sesame, or others) or lotion (a blend of water and oil and sometimes bee or plant wax). Some of the most richest moisturizers for very dry or chapped skin include castor oil, beeswax, and shea butter. Aloe, which we hear so much about in skin products, is a nice soother, but not a good moisturizer on its own.
These oils don’t just function as a barrier, of course; they also enter and nourish the skin. Our skin is much more permeable than we give it credit for. So there’s real lasting benefit to regularly feeding our skin and the underlying connective tissue in a direct way.
Meanwhile, rehydration must become part of your lifestyle. I think people can occasionally go overboard with their water consumption, but I see way, way, way more folks who are underconsuming it. As a starting point, divide the number of pounds you weigh in half. (For example, if you weigh 160 pounds, divide that in half to get 80.) Now take this number and divide it by the number of hours you’re awake each day – let’s say 16. (80 divided by 16 equals 5.) This is the number of ounces of water you should be drinking each hour of the day. If you like, you can further divide this number in half to get the ounces of water you should have every half hour. Or divide it by four to get the number of ounces you should have every fifteen minutes. (5 divided by 4 equals 1.25, which means a 160 pound person should drink just over one ounce of water every fifteen minutes.) Don’t go more than an hour without drinking water. Your need for water may be greater than this if you you’re subject to more water loss by living in a dry climate, sweating, having the heat on, being sick, or taking drying or diuretic medications.
In addition to water, it’s important to nourish skin moisture by consuming ample amounts of beneficial fats, since fats are integral in all cell membranes, such as nuts and seeds, oily fish, and high quality egg yolks. It’s also important to consume adequate protein, since part of why we shrink and sag as we age is because we lose muscle and collagen, both of which are protein based tissues.
Give these recommendations a try, perhaps adding one new practice at a time. As with the post-harvest handling of produce, these are mostly preventative measures rather than restorative ones, so you’re not likely to see huge changes, but you will feel better, and someday, when you’re 80 and you look like you’re 40, drop me a line and send a photo.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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There’s never been a better time to get clear on who you want to be and what kind of life you want to create. And one of my favorite practices to support these choices is to come up with really clear, succinct, powerful statements that you read every morning. Following are some examples.
First I want to offer as a guideline that you keep the statements in the positive - for instance, rather than "I won't smoke today," you might say something like, "I choose to breathe only clean, pure air today."
Second, you may have trouble with intention statements that directly contradict your present reality. For instance, if you have $17 in your bank account and you say, "I have millions of dollars," your mind probably won't let you get away with that.
So below I've shared many options of verbiage you can use that your mind won't argue with. Instead of saying things are different than they are, we're saying what amounts to "I'm open to having life improve" or "This is what I intend as I move forward."
Third, I recommend setting aside some quiet time, distilling your favorites down to a handful, and writing them on a nice piece of paper with a good pen. Keep that paper next to your bed or somewhere where you know you'll see it every morning, and take just a few minutes every morning to say (and FEEL) your statements.
❤️ I AM... (e.g., I AM a warrior of Truth and Love; I AM an emissary of Peace; I AM playful and fully alive...)
❤️ I CHOOSE... (e.g., I CHOOSE to keep my heart open today; I CHOOSE to see opportunities for growth, love, and healing; I CHOOSE to trust myself...)
❤️ I ALLOW... (e.g., I ALLOW my Highest Self to lead me; I ALLOW life to be magical; I ALLOW myself to be free; I ALLOW simplicity and ease into my every moment...)
❤️ I WELCOME... (e.g., I WELCOME peace and lightness into my heart; I WELCOME an experience of ease into my life; I {gratefully} WELCOME an abundance of money to come to me...)
❤️ I LET GO / RELEASE... (e.g., I RELEASE all negative stories about myself; I LET GO of needing to control the world; I RELEASE my resistance to reality...)
❤️ I DEVOTE MYSELF... (e.g., I DEVOTE MYSELF to seeing the good in every situation; I DEVOTE MYSELF to Peace and Love; I DEVOTE MYSELF to my own optimal health...)
❤️ I INTEND… (e.g., I INTEND to love and nourish my body; I INTEND to be kind in all my communications; I INTEND to run three miles today…)
❤️ I WILL... (e.g., I WILL stay conscious while eating; I WILL keep my agreements today; I WILL look people in the eyes; I WILL stand up for my core values…)
❤️ I RECEIVE... (e.g., I RECEIVE miracles and reconfiguration for my highest good; I RECEIVE and accept all the blessings that are coming to me; I GRATEFULLY RECEIVE love today...)
❤️ I OPEN MYSELF... (e.g., I OPEN MYSELF to having an easy and gratifying day; I OPEN MYSELF to experiencing abundance; I OPEN MYSELF to meeting new friends; I OPEN MYSELF to hearing what is for my highest good; I OPEN MYSELF to perceiving the guidance of my soul...)
❤️ I CREATE... (e.g., I CREATE {or "I choose to create"} a life that is an expression of my virtue and playfulness; I CREATE myself as a lighthearted and peaceful Being...)
❤️ I INVITE... (e.g., I INVITE my strength to fill me; I INVITE space into my consciousness throughout the day; I INVITE grace into every moment; I INVITE financial abundance into my life...)
❤️ I TRUST... (e.g., I TRUST in the Great Loving Truth of all of this; I TRUST that The Universe is giving me exactly what I need in order to heal, grow, and thrive...)
❤️ I REMEMBER... (e.g., I REMEMBER my purpose today; I REMEMBER to be present for the grace in every moment; I REMEMBER to come from a place of love in all that I do...)
Please share your own unique intention statements with us in the comments. We'd love to hear what you come up with!
Be so well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => A Step-By-Step Guide to Crafting Powerful Intentions and Setting the Tone for Your Day
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When you think about people, chances are you think about skin. Most of what we see that isn’t covered up by clothing is skin, after all. Humans are skin bags. Sorry, did that make you feel kind of gross? Anyway, like it or not, the quality of our skin can have a big influence on how others perceive us. It’s why we get so distressed by things like acne, wrinkles, birthmarks, warts, and scars, even though they don’t actually compromise our function or health.
When people come to me for help with a cosmetic skin issue, they often act a bit sheepish about it, as if they believe I’ll consider them shallow for caring about their appearance. But I recognize how much our feelings about our appearance affect our happiness and the way we relate to others. I think that as long as we’re not obsessive about it, we should do whatever we need to do to feel pretty or handsome.
More importantly, skin health is an expression of overall health. This doesn’t mean you won’t get wrinkles if you’re healthy, but even a wrinkly face can look vibrant if it’s part of a vibrant body and spirit. Last month I discussed some basics of vehicle maintenance – i.e., taking care of your body – with regard to nutrition and digestion. Now I’m going to cover basic mechanics and maintenance of your skin.
There are a number of factors that affect skin quality, including genetics, climate (wind, dryness, sun, chlorine, smoke, pollution, etc.), and our internal environment, to name just a few. We have more control over certain factors than others. Obviously, your skin will need different things in a dry, windy place than in a hot, damp place. But regardless of your particulars, there are two main things worth focusing on for healthy skin: good nutrition and good detoxification.
This week I’ll focus on detoxification. Most naturopathic physicians see dull skin and chronic skin problems as an expression of internal toxicity, which often results from digestive imbalance and/or a sluggish liver, plus a history of exposure to chemicals and/or problematic foods. When we cleanse the liver and gut (and support the lungs and kidneys while we’re at it) skin problems frequently clear up. Even without rashes or other obvious problems, our skin tends to be flat, dry, or irritated when our detoxification mechanisms aren’t at their best.
Here are four basic starting points for supporting internal and external detoxification:
- Drink plenty of water. For any kind of skin problem, from acne to eczema to wrinkles, you should first make sure you’re well hydrated. The body functions better when well hydrated, and this includes our detoxification mechanisms. I recommend drinking half the number of pounds you weigh as ounces of water per day (thus, a 100 pound person would drink 50 ounces of water). And this should be consumed evenly over the course of the say, and should not be ice cold.
- Make sure your bowels are moving regularly. Constipated people are retaining toxins in the colon for longer than is healthy. If you’re not having at least one big, complete feeling bowel movement a day, here are some measures you can take. Try drinking a glass of hot water first thing in the morning. Adding some honey may help. Consider prune juice if necessary. As I mentioned above, be sure to get enough water throughout the day. Eat plenty of good fats for lubrication (olive oil, walnuts, chia seed, flax seed, oily fish, coconut and coconut oil, avocado, etc.) and plenty of fiber to scrub your colon. Get exercise that engages your abdominal muscles. Stop tensing your abdomen throughout the day if this is a habit of yours. If you need more help, get some powdered magnesium (such as Natural Calm) and gradually increase the dose until your bowels start moving more freely.
- Practice dry skin brushing. Get a natural fiber skin brush and brush over all of your skin, always working toward the heart. Start at your toes, brushing firmly up your feet and legs, going over the same area a few times, and gradually coming up the legs to the torso. Work from the fingers to the torso next. Then cover the torso itself. Be gentle over delicate areas, and don’t brush so hard that it hurts. When done, jump in the shower, finish with cool water, and then give yourself a quick massage with a high quality oil, like jojoba, coconut, or sesame.
- Sweat. You can induce sweating through exercise (a great option) or through heat (sauna). Take a cool shower afterwards. Sweat carries toxins, including heavy metals, out of our bodies. Spending a long time in a medium hot sauna, just to the point of glistening skin, is more sustainable than going into a very hot sauna and dripping sweat.
- As a basic cleanse, consider abstaining from all grains, meat, dairy products, nightshade family vegetables (tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, peppers), and anything processed. The bulk of your diet should be vegetables, including some raw greens (bitter ones are good), and basic homemade soups. Some fruit is ok, but veggies are best. If you need something starchy, bake a sweet potato in foil at 400 degrees for 90 minutes. Try it for one to seven days. You’ll feel great, and your skin will become more clear. On an ongoing basis, try a low dose liver cleansing formula such as silymarin (milk thistle), artichoke, and turmeric (you can get this as a premade formula called S.A.T. made by Thorne), or just take plain milk thistle or dandelion.
Give these strategies a try and report in the comments section on your results. Stay tuned for more on nutrition for healthy skin next week.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => Skin Care 101: Five Detox Strategies for Better Skin
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Life experience has taught me that people don’t like to be compared to vegetables. But the thing is, there are some similarities between us and our friends in the plant kingdom that we can learn from. When I was a botany student, one of the best courses I took was called Postharvest Physiology. Once a crop is picked – whether a flower, fruit, vegetable, or grain – the process of dying begins, which is known as senescence. In order for the crop to get to the consumer looking fresh, everyone involved in packing, transporting, and retailing the product should ideally know at least a little bit about how to slow down senescence – without causing an unnatural kink in the process.
Everyone knows about refrigeration, for instance. Generally, the colder we keep our produce, the slower it ages. But if we over chill it, we can stop ripening or cause irreparable damage. If you’ve ever had a peach that was dry and mealy inside, this is called “wooliness” and it means that someone involved in the storage of that peach got it colder than it could handle.
Another major intervention for prolonging the life of harvested crops is reducing water loss. The loss of water from flowers, fruits, and veggies parallels a loss in quality. When leafy greens lose water they wilt. When carrots and celery lose water they aren’t crunchy anymore. When potatoes lose water they get wrinkly and corky. When oranges lose water they become dry and fibrous. Essentially, all of these produce items shrink when water evaporates from them. And humans go through a similar process as part of our own senescence.
Food producers do all sorts of things to reduce water loss. They raise the humidity of storage environments, they pack produce in sealed bags to contain escaping water (this is also the concept behind the crisper drawer of your fridge), veggies that can handle being wet get packed wet (such as baby carrots) or are displayed under sprinklers in the store, many crops are coated with oils or waxes to block water from evaporating (tomatoes, apples, peppers, citrus, eggplant, cucumbers, potatoes and others), and flowers are, of course, always drinking water from a bucket or vase.
In order to preserve your own youthfulness, my recommendations really aren’t all that different from how we treat our crops. Like potatoes, we shrink as we age, making skin wrinkly and saggy. We need to control moisture loss and maximize rehydration.
First, environmental control. Having moved from ultra-moist Portland to ultra-dry Boulder a couple years ago, I’ve been more acutely aware of my skin than ever before. The parched air seems to be sucking the water out of me. And I can’t help but notice that many people who have lived here for a few decades have skin that looks significantly older than that of Portlanders of the same age. Both climates present their own issues.
If you live in a very moist place, you need to watch for mold in your home and workplace, which can cause respiratory problems (which can indirectly affect the skin) and rashes, but for the most part, you should consider your skin lucky. If you live in a dry place, get a humidifier. I have an expensive humidifier and even after it has run for several hours, the relative humidity in the room will have risen by only one or two percent. So, you need to have one running constantly. A better option is a whole house humidifier, which is typically connected to your furnace, and requires less maintenance.
When you live in dry air, the water in the superficial tissues of your body will naturally move from the inside to the outside, attempting to equalize the moisture inside and outside. So, if there’s more water in the air around you, you’ll keep more of the water that’s in your skin. But this doesn’t apply to actually being immersed in water. When you bathe, especially if you take long showers or baths, and especially if you use very hot water, and especially if you use soap, you strip moisture from your skin. Therefore, if dry skin is a problem for you, shorten your bathing time (or take a bath with moisturizers added to the water), use cooler water, use less soap or at least use soap with moisturizers in it, and be sure to apply a moisturizer afterwards.
Another big difference between my old home and my new one is that Boulder is high and sunny and Portland is low and cloudy. Again, Portlanders’ skin benefits from this situation since sun damage is a rarity there, while it’s quite common in the intense sun of Colorado. In any case, a good sunscreen is important. Although we have yet to discover the health implications of applying nanoparticles of metals to our skin, at this point I recommend a mineral sunscreen (titanium and/or zinc based) rather than a synthetic chemical screen. Also, while I think it’s important to avoid sun damage, I believe moderate sun exposure is also a good thing; it’s one of the main reasons I moved to the Mountain West. So, don’t avoid sun altogether. It gives us life.
Finally, Colorado is also a lot windier than the Pacific Northwest, so applying a physical barrier to minimize moisture loss is also important. I’m not saying Portlandians are off the hook here, but it’s much less critical if you forget your lotion for a day. As with preserving the post-harvest life of vegetables, we can use oils and waxes – in the form of straight oil (olive, coconut, jojoba, avocado, macadamia, hazelnut, grapeseed, sesame, or others) or lotion (a blend of water and oil and sometimes bee or plant wax). Some of the most richest moisturizers for very dry or chapped skin include castor oil, beeswax, and shea butter. Aloe, which we hear so much about in skin products, is a nice soother, but not a good moisturizer on its own.
These oils don’t just function as a barrier, of course; they also enter and nourish the skin. Our skin is much more permeable than we give it credit for. So there’s real lasting benefit to regularly feeding our skin and the underlying connective tissue in a direct way.
Meanwhile, rehydration must become part of your lifestyle. I think people can occasionally go overboard with their water consumption, but I see way, way, way more folks who are underconsuming it. As a starting point, divide the number of pounds you weigh in half. (For example, if you weigh 160 pounds, divide that in half to get 80.) Now take this number and divide it by the number of hours you’re awake each day – let’s say 16. (80 divided by 16 equals 5.) This is the number of ounces of water you should be drinking each hour of the day. If you like, you can further divide this number in half to get the ounces of water you should have every half hour. Or divide it by four to get the number of ounces you should have every fifteen minutes. (5 divided by 4 equals 1.25, which means a 160 pound person should drink just over one ounce of water every fifteen minutes.) Don’t go more than an hour without drinking water. Your need for water may be greater than this if you you’re subject to more water loss by living in a dry climate, sweating, having the heat on, being sick, or taking drying or diuretic medications.
In addition to water, it’s important to nourish skin moisture by consuming ample amounts of beneficial fats, since fats are integral in all cell membranes, such as nuts and seeds, oily fish, and high quality egg yolks. It’s also important to consume adequate protein, since part of why we shrink and sag as we age is because we lose muscle and collagen, both of which are protein based tissues.
Give these recommendations a try, perhaps adding one new practice at a time. As with the post-harvest handling of produce, these are mostly preventative measures rather than restorative ones, so you’re not likely to see huge changes, but you will feel better, and someday, when you’re 80 and you look like you’re 40, drop me a line and send a photo.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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