
Your Skin and Noni
The Skin is the major indicator of health and vitality. We estimate age, personality, status, race, and health merely by looking at a person’s skin. The development of grey hair, facial wrinkles, and changes in skin coloration and texture comes along with the aging process. These changes may also be due to environment (i.e. sun, wind, dry heat, chemical preservatives) and lifestyle choices i.e. alcohol, tobacco, loss of sleep and stress. It is also a fact that as we get older our skin becomes more vulnerable to these factors. Skin problems are more as the person gets older and older. It is also a bliss that vast majority of the skin conditions are preventable. Healthy diet, sufficient hydration and common sense precautions and Noni play a central role in preventing and helping skin diseases.
The skin is one of the largest organs of the body and it accounts for the 15% of the total body weights. It includes the nail, hair, and various types of glands. Though skin does not do any dramatic functions like purifying blood, running, digesting or thinking it requires a seriously burned person or a person who has serious skin infections to realise the importance of our skin.
Out of the two layers, epidermis and dermis of the skin, the dermis has abundant blood vessels through which nutrients are supplied to our skin. Keratin, a fibrous protein produced by epidermal cells and melanin, offers protection to our skin against ultraviolet rays.
What happens in aging ?
As the age increasing, one notices the skin losing its glow and becoming dry and rough. This is due to decrease in the moisture content of the stratum corneum or to a decrease in vertical height of epidermal cells.
Decrease in the number of Langerhans cells decreases the skin’s immune response. The reduction of Melanin and decreased immunity, increases the risk for tumorigenesis.
In elderly persons the dermis has a decreased density with fewer cells and blood vessels. The total amount of collagen decreases one percent per year in adulthood. Therefore the skin thickness decreases linearly with age after 20. The remaining collagen fibres become thicker, less soluble and more resistant to digestion by collagenase with age. Noni prevents this.
The rate of nail growth also decreases with aging. Nail plates usually become thinner, more brittle and fragile. Hair greying occurs due to loss of functional melanocytes. Of course heredity also plays an important role in hair greying. A decrease in the number of hair follicles in the scalp increases baldness.
Collagen is one of the compounds of connective tissue which occurs not only within the dermis layer of the skin but also found in every organ and structure of human body. Connective tissue is composed of collagen fibres, elastic and the extracellular matrix but the amount and conformation of collagen is different in any given tissue.
Although flexible, collagen fibres offer a great resistance to any pulling force. Collagen fibres are fairly simple proteins and are made up of chains of amino acids. Amino acids are delivered from circulation to the cell called fibrocytes that manufacture Collagen. The three important nutrients of collagen namely glycine, hydroxyproline, hydroxylysine are naturally present in Noni. Very rarely any other animal protein contains all the three of these nutrients.
With aging this collagen simply becomes metabolically inert. It loses its responsiveness, flexibility, fluidity, and strength. In the skin, the change in the quality of our collagen manifest as a loss of smoothness, plumpness, and luster. These changes are modifiable and largely preventable. Noni when used both internally and externally promotes the maintenance of healthy skin. The skin apart from protection also helps to absorb nutrients.
Noni because of its ‘amphoteric nature’ that is the presence of fatty acid like linoleic acid as well as water, when applied externally aids healing of rashes, inflammation prickly heat, rosacens, or other allergic manifestations. These symptoms and allergy may be due to the release of histamine. Noni resists the release of histamine and protects the skin against allergies.
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