Continued from page 1
Finally, there is one more important consideration in
maintenance of your skin – should you use natural skin care products or will any products do?
The answer is NATURAL, naturally. Think about it from this point of view: When you buy food, do you look for ‘no artificial colouring’, ‘no artificial flavours’, ‘contains not GMO’s’, etc., or don’t you care?
What about your drinks, do you not look for 100% natural, low in salt, no artificial this or that, no added sugar, etc. Of course you do. Well, your skin does absorb nutrients whether they are natural or not; it will absorb these chemicals into
tissue and it will then be able to use them, or not. Natural substances are much more easily assimilated in your body and are also more easily eliminated, once they’ve performed their functions.
As scientific research is becoming more sophisticated we are discovering more and more information on how our body works, how foods interact in our systems and how some foods contain substances which are not able to be made synthetically – well,
same of course stands true for plants. Phyto-estrogens are just one example of naturally occurring substances essential to
wellbeing of our bodies. Similarly, herbal extracts, essential oils, fruit extracts, etc. all contain naturally occurring chemicals, which science is not able to make synthetically due to their complexity.
This means, that
synthetic version of a plant extract (often in concentrated forms) is not
same as
natural version and can in fact have different and even side effects on your body. An old, but good example is Aspirin. We are all aware by now, that Aspirin can cause stomach irritation and even lead to stomach ulcers.
The active ingredient in Aspirin is salicylic acid. It naturally occurs in
bark of
White Willow tree. The big difference between taking Aspirin as opposed to
herbal extract of
White Willow bark, is that in
herbal extract there are many more substances contained which have secondary effects – one substance for example is a mucilaginous substance, which has
function of protecting your stomach lining! Guess what, there is nothing in Aspirin (from
chemist) that acts to protect your stomach – That’s
difference between using natural versus artificially manufactured substances.
So,
choice is yours, natural or not, it’s your asset and it is up to you to choose whether you will invest in your asset or withdraw from it.

Danny Siegenthaler is a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and together with his wife Susan, a medical herbalist and aromatherapist, they have created Natural Skin Care Products by Wildcrafted Herbal Products to share their 40 years of combined expertise.