Chapter 1
An Overview of the FACE Program
The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
- Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect, 1867-1959
If you're wondering what the FACE program is all about, I can sum it up for you in a single sentence: The outward appearance of beautiful skin starts on the inside, and wrinkled, blemished skin is not an inevitable result of aging. FACE, as you discovered in the Introduction, is an acronym for Free radicals, Advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), Cortisol, and Eicosanoids-bodily processes that need to be understood and controlled for the health of your skin and total body. Fortunately, this is what the FACE program does so successfully. As a multipronged approach to simultaneously addressing multiple causes of aging, this program can in many ways be thought of as a "Unified Theory of Aging."
Good Reasons to Sign Up for the FACE Program
Considering all the "miraculous" antiaging solutions that are vying for your attention, what's the advantage of giving the FACE program a try? Because it's the only truly comprehensive approach to ultimate skin health. Also, the FACE program does not claim that there is one single "aging demon," the control of which will do everything for everyone.
For example, some popular antiwrinkle programs focus on controlling inflammation. Although this is a great place to start, inflammation is only one of the primary causes of premature aging; therefore, inflammation-control programs are automatically limited in their overall effects and benefits. Then there are the anti-acne programs that focus only on slathering the skin with topical creams to control pimples-but do nothing to modulate the day-to-day skin metabolism that leads to acne in the first place. Likewise there are antiaging programs that focus on controlling free radicals with topical antioxidant creams or supplements, or that focus only on controlling glycation by eating less sugar and by eating foods with a lower glycemic index. The result? Limited programs with limited focus lead to limited benefits for you.
I'm not against all such programs. I think many of them offer some hope and some help. But why give yourself less than the whole solution? Why would you choose a program that was more complicated to follow and more limited in scope, when the FACE program enables you to control all four metabolic aspects of aging at the same time with a single, easy-to-follow regimen?
Getting to the Roots of the Skin-Damage Cycle
Being more than skin deep, the FACE program nourishes your skin by getting to the roots of the skin-damage cycle.
Scientists and doctors both agree that excessive inflammation (which is caused by eicosanoids and cytokines) can lead to accelerated skin damage and breakdown, so it makes a lot of sense to control inflammation to promote skin health. But if we look deeper to find the causes of inflammation, we quickly see other factors that we can control. Since oxidation (which is caused by free radicals) leads to inflammation at the cellular level, why not control oxidation? Great idea-but why not look even further up the metabolic chain of events to see if we can control or modulate the causes of oxidation.
When we do this, we see that glycation (cellular damage caused by sugars) can lead to oxidation (which can, in turn, lead to inflammation)-so we have another factor that we can address. Should we stop there? Of course not, because when we look even higher up the metabolic stream, we see that stress (and the cortisol exposure that stress causes) can lead to glycation, which can lead to oxidation, which in turn leads to inflammation. Unfortunately, we don't currently know enough from scientific or medical research to go any further "upstream" with regard to the metabolic control of cellular aging. Stress is as far upstream as we can go at this time-but that's still pretty good.
This gives us four aspects of metabolism that we can address to control skin structure and function-and, therefore, appearance. Perhaps the best news of all is that each of these four aspects of metabolism is easily controlled by factors related to lifestyle: diet, exercise, stress management, and the use of natural products, such as supplements and topicals.
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