Good Foods for the Skin

Different websites are touting the benefits of eating right on your skin to prevent wrinkles and retain that youthful glow. I have a friend who at 50, looked AMAZING and actually looked like she was 40. She credited this youthful, wrinkless, glowing complexion to eating right, drinking plenty of water and taking many supplements. Either her genes were very good and/or the lifestyle was working because she looked incredible.

Lycopene from processed tomatoes provides a great source of an anti-oxidant and also helps to ward off cancerous cell formations. Lycopene, in high doses, flush out free radicals. Since lycopene is not made in the body, we require products such as tomatoes to acquire it.

“Researchers introduced Lycopene into pre-existing cancer cell cultures and the Lycopene prevented the continued growth of these cultures. This is pretty powerful evidence that the health benefits of eating a tomato are really quite phenomenal. It takes as little as 540 milliliters of liquid tomato product to get the full benefits of Lycopene. This means that a daily glass of tomato juice has the potential to keep a person healthy for life.”

Oysters provides zinc which provides that nice little feature of repairing and renewing our skin called collagen. As we age, we lose that ability.

Blueberries prevent cell damage by also being a source of an anti-oxidant. In 2004, a team led by a USDA chemist found that this natural anti-oxidant may lower blood levels of LDL which is the “bad” cholesterol and triglycerides. The pterostilbene in blueberries is similar to the chemical Resveratrol found in grapes. Another claim for blueberries as an antioxidant is the benefit towards slowing down visual loss due to the extract from blueberries. It’s called anthocyanosides and has been found in clinical studies to slow down visual loss.

”A recent study was done in a Boston laboratory by putting one group of young rats on a blueberry-rich diet and another on regular chow. Then the scientist exposed both groups to 48 hours of concentrated oxygen, stirring up in two days the amount of free radical damage that normally takes 20 rat months, or 75 humans to accumulate. Brain cells in the chow group became less responsive to neurotransmitters associated with short-term memory. The brains of the blueberry stuffed rats did not change. He also found that the fruit prevented the kind of short-term memory loss that comes with aging. Blueberries actually stave off declines in brain cell’s ability to send messages to one another.”

Dark chocolate has many benefits to include providing yet another anti-oxidant source. It increases blood flow to the skin which rehydrates the skin and provides additional sun protection.

Walnuts provides omega-3 and vitamin E which is a natural way to ward off psoriasis and eczema. Omega-3 fatty acids also provide benefits ranging from better mental functioning to cardiovascular protection to an anti-inflammatory benefits in asthma.

GentleWaves® LED

Another facial wrinkle remover I just read about is the GentleWaves® LED. It was reported in April 2008, the FDA approved this LED system. Since our skin loses elasticity over time and other culprits such as stress, overexposure to sun, excessive consumption of alcohol, smoking and other pollutants do not help, there are ways to counter that damage. The variety of products are ranging from creams to serums to botox to laser to LEDs and not to forget, surgery.

The GentleWaves® LED provides an alleged option to counter these ill effects on our skin. The GentleWaves® Skin Fitness System claims to help restore and maintain “healthier, smoother and better-looking skin.”

The only FDA-approved LED device for wrinkle reduction around the eyes is delivered through “Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) to activate cells causing them to produce collagen and multiply. By building collagen, wrinkles are reduced and skin retains a more youthful, radiant appearance. LED Photomodulation also simultaneously suppresses collagen-degrading enzymes that assist in the aging process. ” Some of the claims of this product is it improves the skin’s texture, simulates collagen, shrinks pore size and inhibits those nasty collagenase that are the culprits in attacks against our collagen.

“GentleWaves®, the first LED device FDA-approved for wrinkle reduction, offers a totally natural, non-ablative method for skin rejuvenation. In a process similar to photosynthesis in plants, the LED light interacts with cells and stimulates them to produce more collagen and elastin, while decreasing enzymes that breakdown skin. GentleWaves delivers this light in a unique, pulsing sequence that is administered in just minutes.”

Since GentleWaves® does not utilize on thermal (heat) energy, the claim is there is no potential damage to the skin, the patient will experience no pain or discomfort and there are no documented side effects (yet). They state that the procedure not only reduces fine lines and wrinkles but can also reduce freckles, brown spots and skin redness.

They do recommend a series of eight to ten treatments which can be done twice per week.

The procedure lasts less than one minute, there is no downtime, painless, no anesthesia, can be used on all skin types and is inexpensive. Patients report a difference after five to seven treatments.

“LED technology costs about less than half and 35% the cost of comparable laser light therapy,” the inventor says. “It’s a slam dunk for practices who can’t afford these expensive lasers.”

Anyone try it and have any opinion on it?

Lifestyle Lift

I saw an advertisement in this month’s Martha Stewart’s magazine and then searched for other recent reviews on WordPress for this procedure. The claim to his is in “about one hour” a person “can look years younger.” According to their website, they have over 80 doctors working on this procedure across the US and have served over 100,000 people to date.
They also claim, “in order to offer the very best outcome, Lifestyle Lift® is committed to working only with the very best board-certified doctors, including those from renowned institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, Vanderbilt, Duke, Emory and Cornell.”
They do add this to add “credibility to their claims and procedure:”
The Lifestyle Lift Code of Internet Conduct and Assurance
Lifestyle Lift® pledges that all Internet communications accompanied by the trademarked Lifestyle Lift® logo are fair and accurately represent the latest in medical information about facial firming procedures. The comments and photographs are from actual patients and fairly represent the results and opinions of thousands of our patients. Lifestyle Lift® is proud to take a leadership role in establishing new standards of Internet conduct and communications. We promise that any Internet communication accompanied by our logo can be relied upon as true and accurate; and all communications originating from our practice will be clearly identified with the Lifestyle Lift® logo. If you have any questions or concerns about the authenticity of any internet content or postings, please contact Lifestyle Lift®.
I did find some reviews at http://www.realself.com/Lifestyle-lift/reviews. The final tally from this site was:
33% said it was worth it
67% said it wasn’t worth it (pretty bad actual reviews actually)
Average cost $5407
This positive review good but then when you keep reading near the bottom, it’s owned by Lifestyle Lift: http://www.mylifestylelift.com/lifestylelift.html
To top it off, this person blogged about how Lifestyle Lift was fined in NY for providing false reviews on realself.com <— note this is the same website I noted above!. http://www.localseoguide.com/fake-reviews-will-cost-you-real-just-ask-lifestyle-lift/
LifeStyle Lift – Fake Reviews Will Cost You Real $
July 15th, 2009
Just caught this article in the NYTimesabout how Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had fined Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, $300,000 for ordering its employees to write fake reviews of its face-lift procedure on sites like RealSelf.
Let’s put aside the ethics of faking reviews for a minute and reflect on how effective a strategy this was for Lifestyle Lift:
Pros:They probably didn’t factor this in, but because they got caught, their site is now generating a lot of links. Variations of “facelift” or “cosmetic surgery” are not hugely expensive to buy ($5-$10 CPC), but I guess if they could translate those links into some page one rankings it could easily be worth $300K.
Cons:Page one of Google for “lifestyle lift”is already littered with results about this story. My bet is unless they do some reputation management SEO these aren’t going away anytime soon. So even if they do rank on page one for some great terms, sooner or later a prospective patient is going to Google them, see this story and likely bail. Hmm, something like this could tank their whole business pretty quickly. Maybe it wasn’t worth the page one rankings?
It’s too bad Lifestyle Lift went down this route, but it’s understandable. There probably was a lot of negative word of mouth about them already in the cosmetic surgery communities. Here’s the first thing I saw after I clicked on the third SERP result for “lifestyle lift” – “Lifestyle lift for jowls, turkey neck – unsure if it was worth it”
While it’s hard to overcome a bad product or service, perhaps if they had consulted with a knowledgable SEO/Reputation Management pro at least they could have come up with an alternate strategy that would not have cost so much, or if it had, at least it would have had a better ROI. Some tips for Lifestyle Lift in the future:
1. SEO your site! At least update your title tags with some good keywords. Hell update your whole site. It’s a bit of a tired, hard-to-read thing as is. If you can’t control what people are saying about you online at least try to get some traffic for valuable keywords and bypass them.
2. Participate in social media without faking it. If Ms. Turkey Neck is not saying nice things address her concerns. Maybe you need to redo her turkey neck. I guarantee if you turn her turkey neck into a swan neck, she will be your loudest supporter in these communities. And what would that cost you? My guess is the margins on turkey necks, among other things, are pretty fat.
3. Work with a reputation management pro who can help you move a lot of those pesky little negative links off of page one.
4. Better yet, give your customers reasons to say nice things about you online.
Even if you don’t have a problem with the ethics of fake reviews, they do often violate the terms of service of the reviews website. And as Lifestyle Lift discovered, that little fact can cost you. So next time you are thinking it might be a good idea to post some fake reviews of your business on the Web, remember you might be blowing all the cash you saved up to fix your damn turkey neck.
I think I’ll pass on this procedure ….