#504 How to Keep Your Skin Young Without Expensive Treatments - Dr. Alexis Ortega

Alexis Ortega (0:00)

You can be using 3 or 4 peptides for your skin. You can be using a vitamin C serum. You can be using beef tallow or any popular moisturizers nowadays. And you can be using a retinoid, but it's not gonna be enough. It's not gonna compensate the damage caused by. Even if there's no data to support that supplementing or keeping youthful levels of NAD, it's gonna be helpful at all to slow down aging. I prefer youthful NAD levels rather than low NAD levels.

Siim Land (0:30)

Alexis, welcome back to the show.

Alexis Ortega (0:32)

Thanks for inviting me, Siim.

Siim Land (0:34)

Yeah, I've had you twice on before last year. And yeah, it's been over a year since our last podcast. So I decided to put together like a Q&A session based on some of the previous podcasts that we did. So people asked some questions from you. And yeah, we're gonna go through some of those questions.

Alexis Ortega (0:54)

Let's do it.

Siim Land (0:55)

Sounds good. The first question is apart from the usual stuff like wrinkles, sound damage, facial fat loss, et cetera, what other factors influence aging? Looking back at my pictures from my youth, I can see that my face has become less harmonious and more ogre-ish. How do you prevent that?

Alexis Ortega (1:14)

Okay. Okay. So when first thing to clarify, when people think about facial aging, they usually think about loss of skin collagen.

That's correct. We start losing collagen pretty early on in our lives. We have many ways to mitigate that, but that does not stop facial aging at all.

Just one facet, one area of it. But we must think about facial aging in layers. So when people say their face looks less harmonious with age, it is because the face also loses its architecture. So the ligaments and the muscles also lose collagen and become looser. So in some areas like the mid-face, we lose a lot of fat from the mid-face deep fat paths, which makes us look more bony as well. And then there's the bone mineral density, which is lost over time.

So we tend to lose it selectively in some areas more than others, like the orbital rim or the maxilla. And there's plenty of diagrams on the Internet that our viewers can look at to see what clearly happens to an aging face. The mandibles well get smaller, the chin gets smaller, and that causes a lost of tissue support in the lower face, which makes us look more collapsed, maybe more ogre-ish, if you like. So prevention requires a multi-factorial approach. It's not just a retinol. Okay, so what I want to make clear to our viewers is that everything is interrelated when it comes to maintaining good looks and slowing down aging. Not just, I mean, not keeping an optimal bone mineral density takes a toll in your face as well, as well as chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, poor sleep. If you don't have those issues under control, your face is gonna resent as well. Big weight fluctuations are a main contributing factor to aging. Stress as well, which, I mean, we can all be guilty of not controlling it well.

It's a subject that I myself don't think I can scrape a pass sometimes. So, yeah, keeping stress under control, good sleep are essential to slow down the loss of muscle tone, loss of ligament, connective tissue strength, and the loss of bone mineral density, especially with physical exercise and with good dieting. And all of these aspects change tissue quality over time. So, prevention, as I said, is not just use retinol, it's maintain muscle and bone, it's avoid major way cycling, it's keep excellent dental, periodontal health as well. And if you have bruxism or apnea, make sure they are well managed. And why not complement all that with aesthetic treatments, whether it be fillers, lasers, biostimulators, or whatever thing you need, targeted to your specific needs, where the goal is to preserve proportion, not to tackle every line or every fold.

Siim Land (4:45)

Yeah. Yeah, there is many things beyond just wrinkles when it comes to facial aging. And someone who could have zero wrinkles in terms of fine lines, et cetera, because of protecting the skin from excess UV damage and hydrating properly and taking like collagen or something like that, you can target the wrinkles with those kind of basics.

But yeah, even then, you can see a difference in like a 50-year-old and like a 20-year-old in terms of structure of the face, as you alluded to, yeah, that bone.

Alexis Ortega (5:21)

Your face is going to change nonetheless. And there's lots of things that we can do to mitigate that and to preserve structure and preserve nice proportions. But we need to bear in mind that some degree of medical aesthetic interventions is going to be necessary, and a holistic approach is going to be necessary.