7 Bonus Dangers Of Free Radicals For Acne

Free radicals are the chief among invisible acne villains which are covering every corner of our civilisation.

We’ve discussed their main acne dangers numerous times. Firstly, and most importantly, there’s oxidation of squalene, which forms 26% of your skin’s oil (sebum). This creates squalene peroxide, a mutant compound which clogs pores like there’s no tomorrow, and kickstarts acne inflammation itself.

Secondly, as reported by beauty magazines everywhere, free radicals are the masters of premature ageing. Air pollution, cigarettes and heavy metals can and will cause early wrinkling and looseness.

However, you cannot underestimate the sheer number of more minor acne dangers free radicals have. 

Free radicals flood your entire body, oxidising cells in every organ. They roam the bloodstream colliding with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Aluminium is the king of Alzheimer’s disease, fluoride lowers your IQ, but free radicals bring your entire health down a notch, including areas behind acne.

By their very nature, they spread so easily. A free radical is an unstable molecule missing an electron, which is forced to steal an electron from healthy cells to restores its equilibrium. However, that cell then becomes a free radical in its place. Thus, chains are created which reverberate all over the body like a thousand bouncy balls. The only hope are antioxidants, which have carry bonus electrons to donate harmlessly.

Therefore, here are 7 more reasons to keep your free radicals in check. If you’re a regular reader, then some of this science will be familiar to you. Let’s get started:

 

One – oily skin (insulin)

A classic subtle free radical danger which you’ll never directly notice, but bubbles away beneath the surface.

The danger of insulin is that it’s the single most important hormone for oily skin. It doesn’t matter that insulin is an ancient hormone which existed in primitive amphibians over 300 millions years ago and deserves your respect. All acne patients should keep it under control, and your insulin strategy is divided into two clear halves.

The simplest one is eating less carbohydrates and getting more exercise, to prevent your glycogen (energy) stores from filling up, and insulin becoming ever higher in a desperate attempt to cram more in. Secondly, you have the jigsaw puzzle of endless minor strategies, which collectively add up to something huge. For example, vitamin D and magnesium are both necessary for insulin receptor function, so that energy stores can detect that insulin is present…

…and one other minor strategy is suppressing free radicals. It’s a very simple mechanism. Insulin molecules travelling through the bloodstream are vulnerable to oxidation, and if repeatedly assaulted, your body will have to make more.

However, recently, more complicated connections have come to light. Your insulin receptors have transporters called GLUT4 which, after sensing insulin’s presence, increase absorption of glucose from the bloodstream and into energy stores. For example, vitamin D works wonders by being integral to GLUT4’s very function. Olive oil is now gaining attention for diabetes because its signature compound oleuropein can somehow upregulate GLUT4, despite not being an essential nutrient.

It turns out that free radical overload can decrease the activity of GLUT4, by blocking a pathway called PI 3-Kinase which insulin stimulates prior to activating GLUT4. How and why this evolved is anyone’s guess, but to compensate, the same scenario happens. Your pancreas pumps out more insulin in a desperate attempt to get noticed, and your skin’s oil pumps crank up their activity. Interestingly, in one study, free radicals damaged GLUT4 activity but not GLUT1. GLUT1 is the normal glucose energy transporter in all cells, whereas GLUT4 only exists in the realm of insulin responses.

In fact, some people are even suggesting that oxidative stress is the root cause of insulin resistance. This definitively isn’t true, because you can’t ignore carbohydrate mania…

…but if you have sky high insulin, and thus oily skin, free radicals will make curing it harder. 

 

Two – stress hormones (vitamin C)

Vitamin C is the main-water soluble antioxidant in your body, as opposed to fat soluble antioxidants like vitamin E. It doesn’t protect the squalene in your skin’s oil, for example, but vitamin C prevents oxidation in the blood vessels, heart and lungs alike.

Therefore, breathing in invisible clouds of free radicals will strongly deplete your supplies. This is seen everywhere in studies. For example, with each puff on a cigarette you ingest 100 trillion free radicals, and heavy smokers have seriously depleted vitamin C levels. It’s estimated that smokers require 35mg more vitamin C daily than healthy people. Snorting cocaine in a glass penthouse also generates free radicals, and cocaine users generally have low vitamin C levels.

Depleting collagen is one danger, as vitamin C is required to manufacture it, but free radicals already have that covered, through directly attacking the proteins. The unique danger is increasing stress.

Vitamin C is the body’s natural antidote to sky-high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. In fact, during times of stress, goats can naturally manufacture 100,000mg daily, but humans have lost the genetic power to make vitamin C ourselves.

Studies on professional athletes and nervous public speakers have shown stress-reducing benefits. Furthermore, the adrenal glands create cortisol, and vitamin C is vital for their proper functioning. Some doctors are suggesting that vitamin C should become a default treatment for anxiety.

If you’re convinced that stress is causing your acne, then free radicals will make it harder to control. 

 

Three – slower wound healing (collagen)

This danger is one step away from free radicals’ most famous one – rapidly ageing until you resemble a wise old wizard. It stems from the free radical’s destructive effects on your precious collagen supplies.

It’s not a complicated power, as all wounds, including recently dead (probably squeezed into a mirror) pimples, require collagen to heal. It starts with stage 3 collagen, which places a rough scaffolding down, followed by stage 1 collagen, which replaces the breached and broken flesh with healthy tissues. NOTE: type 2 collagen is found in your joints. 

It’s well established that free radicals can damage collagen in any location. Firstly, you need some background. All collagen is formed from the amino acids glycine and proline, which combine to create an initial procollagen base. Meanwhile, the amino acid lysine is transformed into hydroxylysine with the aid of vitamin C, and finally into structural compounds called allysine. After combining allysine with procollagen, collagen is born. Collagen is 3-4% lysine by weight, 17% proline and 32% glycine.

It is the proline which is particularly vulnerable. In fact, collagen is single the most vulnerable bodily protein to oxidation, and tellingly, other proteins contain just 5.6% proline.

Free radical assault can cleave proline molecules in half, creating smaller peptides like 4-hydroxyline and 2-pyrrolidone, which the body then recycles. They can also prevent proline from being incorporated into collagen in the first place.

Then there’s more indirect pathways. Free radicals can also increase matrix metallo protease-1 (MMP1) and MMP2, enzymes which recycle fraying skin proteins to replace them with new ones. It’s an important job, but elevated MMPs can seriously deplete your skin’s collagen. Some types of MMPs, like MMP12, are more closely connected to elastase, for example. Free radicals can even decrease collagen formation at the genetic level (study), decreasing the collagen type I alpha 1 (COT1A1) gene.

We’re only scratching the surface, but we know enough. By slowing the healing of your pimples, free radicals will increase the total amount of acne on your face.

 

Four – blueberries no longer lower inflammation

Perhaps the free radical’s most insidious, annoying danger.

It’s not enough to deplete your vitamin C levels. No, the free radical won’t be satisfied until it has drained almost every type of rarer plant antioxidant. Quercetin in onions, punicalagins in pomegranate, and gingerols in ginger – these too are conscripted into the great war against free radicals when you breathe in a little too much cigarette smoke in a train station one day.

Most importantly, these antioxidants have their own unique acne benefits. Take blueberries. According to numerous studies, they’re perhaps the strongest anti-inflammatory fruit around. We don’t have a precise explanation of why. It doesn’t contain more plant phytonutrients than raspberries (well, it does by a tiny amount), but its specific profile must be optimal for lowering inflammation.

One example is the oft-forgotten, structurally related cousin of red wine’s resveratrol, pterostilbene. This lowers the inflammatory master regulator COX-2 and is proven for smaller, acne-linked TNF-a and IL-1beta as well. It’s particularly promising because its absorption rate of 80% is far superior to resveratrol’s 20%.

During free radical mayhem, pterostilbene will instead be diverted to halting oxidative stress the moment it enters the bloodstream. So will the blueberry’s plentiful delphinidins and 5-Caffeoylquinic acid.

Free radicals can scupper a perfectly crafted acne-clearing diet. 

 

Five – dryer skin (hyaluronic acid)

The less famous flipside to the ageing accelerated phenomenon. Most people know that free radicals can destabilise your collagen and help their partners in crime wrinkles and looseness to take over.

However, there’s another staple of beauty remedies which is just as vulnerable – hyaluronic acid. Not the creams which people rub into their skin, but the natural hyaluronic acid which your body makes itself.

Hyaluronic acid is a human being’s chief moisture container, able to hold up to 1000 times its own weight in water. It’s a naturally fragile molecule anyway, with a half life of just 3-5 minutes in the bloodstream, and 2 days in the skin.

To replace old hyaluronic acid, your skin’s main mechanism is the enzyme hyaluronidase (“enzymatic degradation”). Tellingly though, the second method is neutrophils, immune system cells which unleash free radicals called superoxide anions.

Free radicals from pollution and chemicals are just as effective, cleaving the hyaluronic acid molecules into its two main ingredients: glucuronic acid and N-acetylglucosamine. These are broken down into their glucose base and reabsorbed into the bloodstream, draining your skin’s moisture.

Hyaluronic acid is particularly vulnerable to peroxynitrite, a type of free radical strongly linked to cigarette smoking. Free radicals are hated by pharmaceutical companies because they cause injectable hyaluronic acid fillers to degrade way too quickly.

Laboratories are working hard to find more resistant fillers, perfecting the molecular structure to the last nanometer, but the easier solution? Dodge free radicals in the first place and preserve your natural hyaluronic acid supply.

 

Six – gut problems

Another sneaky danger of free radicals. You can’t tell that you have “leaky gut syndrome” by looking in a mirror and until 50 years ago, scientists barely knew that the condition existed.

It’s essentially when the semi-permeable membrane starts to malfunction, the small intestine barrier which absorbs nutrients into the bloodstream. Importantly for acne, this barrier ruthlessly keeps out inflammatory substances, like toxins from yeasts, heavy metals, and allergy chemicals like histamine.

There’s two mechanisms: either 1) direct absorption into cell membranes and out the other side, or 2) through tiny, closely regulated gaps, called tight junctions, in between the intricately arranged wall of epithelial cells. Tight junctions are like the gate to some rich guy’s mansion, opening with extreme prejudice and when they do, only by a tiny crack which you have to shuffle sideways through.

The evidence is now overwhelming that oxidative stress can weaken this iron barrier. The exact mechanisms are mysterious, but as one example, free radicals seem to particularly interfere with occludins.

These intestinal proteins are vital for the opening and closing of the tight junctions, or “gates”. Another called protein ZO-1 is believed to anchor occludin in place, but it’s confirmed that their interaction is extremely important. Another protein family called claudins are more like the bricks, the basic structure of the semi-permeable membrane, and therefore less active.

Why does this matter? Because free radicals are known to halt the ZO-1/claudin interaction (study).

This is only one theorised role of free radicals. The research to date would take a whole article to cover. But this is a great example of a more subtle acne danger. We know that free radicals rampage through the bloodstream destroying any molecules they collide with, whether it’s vitamin C or pterostilbene, but this is something we might not have guessed.

 

Seven – heavy metal havoc

Finally, a free radical bonanza can exaggerate the acne dangers of common heavy metals. 

Like stress and nullifying blueberries, this is indirect but extremely simple. The world of antioxidants is split into antioxidants which you get from food, like vitamin C and turmeric, and those you make yourself, including catalase and superoxide dismutase. For acne, glutathione is the most important homemade antioxidant, because acne-prone skin samples commonly contain less. Glutathione is manufactured in every cell of your body, and deep reserves are found in every major organ. As expected, puffing on a cigarette can drain your glutathione away like pulling a plug on a bathtub…

…and here’s the key. As we covered here, glutathione has a dual function as a detoxification agent. Enzymes like cytochrome p450 are its sidekicks, but glutathione may detoxify around 60-70% of common chemical contaminants, and heavy metals are classics. For example, glutathione-s-transferase binds with mercury to form a complex which can no longer enter cells and destabilise them. From there, the mercury is degraded further until it harmlessly leaves the body, never fulfilling its destiny of attacking the brain.

Heavy metals have numerous unique dangers for acne. Mercury and cadmium increase inflammation, while arsenic may be the deadliest, as it somehow increases production of the pore blogging protein keratin.

If our glutathione is tirelessly waging a war on free radicals swarming the body, then our stocks will be depleted. Less will be available to detoxify these acne-causing villains.  

 

Conclusion

There you go. Free radicals remain the public enemy number one of acne, alongside chronic inflammation.

None of this changes your acne strategy. It’s still to restore the fateful antioxidant balance, to eat plenty of herbs, spices, vegetables and fruits while ruthless eliminating toxins from your life.

Instead, let this article be a reminder of the insidious dangers of free radicals. They’re still around; they haven’t packed up and returned to their home planet. It’s also true that free radicals are needed in the body. Just see the recycling of hyaluronic acid discussed above; you have to make fresh supplies. Before a wound heals, neutrophils torpedo the old flesh with free radicals. That said, there isn’t an acne patient alive who needs more free radicals in their body.

Just as free radical overload can bring your entire health down a notch, so too can clearing them improve it. Feast on fruits, herbs and spices and you may feel more energetic and mentally stable than ever before, particularly if your city is polluted or your lungs are full of cigarette smoke.

 

Thanks for reading!