The Skin Immunity Landscape
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.
We'll all of us soon understand that beauty was always about adaptiveness, resilience and "immunity" against environmental challenges, including a mix of toxic and microbial threats. The catalyst for this epiphany is the ripening of Ecological Damage in the 21st Century. Despite the smoke and mirrors of industry lobbyists citing the wonders of the stylistic of good "stewardship" that was supposed to moderate and even enlighten the exploitation of resources and people, Ecological Damage has continued to accelerate across Planet Earth, especially in the places out of sight, short of political influence or simply desirous not to fall behind economically.
This won't be news to the people breathing the PM2.5 or drinking the murky waters of New Delhi, or Seoul, or Detroit, or Flint, or Budapest, or Beijing; or the millions who witnessed the Red Sky of California.
Climate Change and the Decline of Human Health aren't different events. Recurring bouts of novel illnesses that we struggle to describe and name (#autoimmune #atopic #sjogrens) are the manifestation of chaotic patterns of Climate Change within our own bodies; or, more precisely, the interface and dialog between our bodies and the damaged biosphere (which includes very sick bats and pangolin).
Despite what you may have heard on the Discovery Channel or from any of a number of wiz-bang Techno-Pundits, we aren't virtual beings synthesized digitally by our computers and mobile devices.
We're creatures of Nature.
And Nature is in deep, deep trouble.
Nature—in time—will no doubt ADAPT • RESOLVE • REPEAT into a new equilibrium that is more tolerant of air pollution, poisoned soil and water laced with micro-plastics. What we regard as the pathology of waves of unusual lifeforms and quasi-lifeforms invading our bodies is likely simply Nature asserting its intention and natural right—beyond our subjective metrics of good and evil—to persist on a damaged planet, whether we in our self-appointed role as good stewards like it very much or not.
The real question is whether we—who are adapted and genetically hard-wired to eat, drink and procreate only in a pre-industrial, pre-petroleum Paleolithic environment—will continue to occupy our current position of #anthropocene dominance in this altered ecology of the future.
Viewed this way, Health is a competition against an emergent State of Nature that is evolving powerfully and mercilessly in response to Ecological Damage. Our suggestion is that we now engage more competitively with Nature; that we recognize that we too must ADAPT • RESOLVE • REPEAT so that our Paleolithic bodies can remain beautiful, durable and resilient despite the uncertainties of a volatile transition to an unfamiliar post-Climate Change planet.
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 toxic particulate matter.
It's important to observe that the enhanced production of gamma / delta T-Cells is a pre-existing biological function in response to keto-adaptation. This is characteristic of physiological processes that depend on food rather than highly-engineered, often-toxic pharmaceuticals that are new to human experience.
Thus, #KetoImmunity seems to be a true #Paleō process. Super-production of gamma-delta T-Cells is a natural biological response to food that is latent but well-coordinated and well-tolerated, so that it is possible to revive this functionality, though modern systems of food and agriculture have suppressed this natural capacity.
What's very intriguing is the notion that up-regulation of innate immunity coincides with keto-adaptation because our bodies become ketogenic rather than glucogenic (that is, sugar-driven) during times of environmental distress when normal food sources have grown scarce, which has happened countless times over millions of years of evolutionary development. A pre-existing playbook of adaptive functions of this sort likely helped us as a species to survive severe hardships occasioned by rapid ecological change over the millennia as the equilibrium between Man and Man and Man and Microbe repeatedly broke down.
It may be odd to posit a condition of food scarcity in the 21st Century, when many of us are only a "Buy Now" button away from a double cheesburger or a bag of keto snacks that look oddly like chocolate chip cookies. However, there is food scarcity, if the objective is to find foods that are free of petroleum-derivative stabilizers, sulfites, glyphosate, genetic modifications or any of tens of thousands of other contaminants.
Our abundance is a veil.
And there is real hunger on the streets of Winter 2021 as well, as we begin to witness the onset of a painful reorganization of the social order driven by technology, an imperfect sense of true fairness, and ambitions to retrieve national and ethnic primacy even as global governance systems grow more distributed and far less centralised.
Against this chaotic backdrop, it's deeply comforting to hypothesise that #KetoImmunity developed over the course of aeons precisely to help our bodies survive and adapt to the many ecological and societal emergencies of the past that are lost to memory but mysteriously remembered by our bodies in preparation for a future that was always in doubt. The struggles of our forgotten ancestors of the far past reach out to us, their love undiluted by time or our foolishness, offering us possibilities and new chances in the face of threatened or feared annihilation.
We can't know these sorts of things lost to Denisovan and Neanderthal pre-history. But as a father to a pre-schooler, I can certainly imagine the sentiment as we walk through the park, my hand reaching down to tighten the mask over his nose as I try to WILL him to remain healthy despite the risks lurking quite literally in every breath.
#Goodbye2020.
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 against the challenges 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. 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 appreciate 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.
It is not an over-simplification to say that Skin is the Central Organ of human immune response.
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.
And let's not forget that the Fat Soluble Vitamins are very powerful #antioxidants that are more important for healthy Skin than #VitaminC.
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.
#SkinImmunityLandscape
#KetoImmunity
