Black History Month, Dietary Guidelines, Beauty, and Skin Care

February is Black History Month. 

I just finished reading “How Black History Can Save Your Life” by Ernest Crim III, and I highly recommend it.  It’s an easy, important read, particularly given current events.  

The book opens with an African proverb, “If you don’t know who you are, anyone can name you, and if anyone can name you, you will answer to anything.”, which resonates strongly with me because I was born in Kenya and especially because of what I know about the skincare industry and how they market their products.

February also marks 12 years since I earned my PhD from the Graduate Group in Nutritional Biology (GGNB) at UC Davis. 

Although I studied nutrition at the molecular level and not at the population level, as a graduate of the GGNB I feel compelled to say something about the new dietary guidelines published last month.  They're not substantially different than previous sets of guidelines.  However, they’re presented in an overly simplistic, sensationalist, and misleading way that makes it sound like the substance of these guidelines has changed radically.  For example, the new guidelines show a picture of a food pyramid from 1992 and declare, “For decades we've been misled by guidance that prioritized highly processed food, and are now facing rates of unprecedented chronic disease. For the first time, we're calling out the dangers of highly processed foods and rebuilding a broken system from the ground up with gold-standard science and common sense. Introducing The New Pyramid”.  Fine, except we’ve known about the dangers of highly-processed food for several decades, the “New Pyramid” is not a pyramid, it’s an upside down triangle, and the food pyramid that they’re referring to hasn’t been used in 21 years.  Moreover, the new graphic does not accurately depict what’s described in the text of the guidelines.  Unsurprisingly, the new guidelines also fail to account for the diversity of the US population or the broken systems within which most of us are forced to operate.  For more, please read Dr. Jessica Knurick’s Substack article, "The New Dietary Guidelines and the ‘Flipped Pyramid’” and Adam Cohen’s Substack article, “A Healthy Meal Is Only $3?”. 

This month also marks 10 years since I translated what I learned at UC Davis into providing an innovative and sustainable alternative to conventional skincare through my business, Bexi’s Bespoke Revitalisation. 

My dissertation research focused on how components of food, specifically glucose, folic acid, and folate, influence breast cancer progression via the epigenetic regulation of gene expression.  I grew cancer cells from humans and mice in petri dishes and used these 2D cell culture models to study how their ability to transform from benign tumor cells to malignant cells which could migrate and metastasize was affected by folic acid, folate, glucose and the activity of specific enzymes involved in the epigenetic process of DNA methylation (DNMT1, DHFR, MTHFR, AHCY).  

I left research and academia for many reasons, some of which I described in my September 10, 2023 article, “I Have Sjogren’s”. 

But my passion and love for science and research remain, and I’ve translated what I learned at UC Davis into personally formulated, practical, and sustainable solutions for skin care to provide your skin with the building blocks required for it to function properly, repair, and grow.  

Conventional skincare asks you to conform to a narrow beauty “ideal” that glorifies unattainable, unsustainable, and superficial flawless, glowing skin. 

Conventional skincare does not recognize skin as an organ that’s essential to human health.  Instead, skin is treated as a superficial, static, and passive surface which can be manipulated without consequence, merely something to exfoliate, hydrate, protect, and paint.  Conventional skincare fails to address the underlying systemic issues that produce skin symptoms, such as redness, rashes, pimples, and wrinkles.  This model intentionally creates consumer dependency and massive profits for skincare manufacturers by only temporarily alleviating symptoms.  For example, hyaluronic acid is used to increase skin hydration, temporarily, and peptides are used to boost collagen synthesis, also only temporarily.  For lasting results, you’re forced to continually use products with “high-performance active ingredients" and, even if you do, at some point the underlying mechanism of how they produce “results” will plateau and stop working, leaving you no closer to attaining the unattainable, the beauty “ideal” of flawless, glowing skin. 

Bexi’s Bespoke Revitalisation invites you to buck the beauty “ideal”, defy convention, and embrace and celebrate your reality and the differences that make you you by using whole foods to feed your skin from the outside in. 

In doing so, you impart life and vigor, and revitalise your skin and yourself.  

Your skin is a dynamic interface between the environment and your biology.

It senses and integrates signals from the environment, communicates with your cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, and immune systems, influences your metabolism, and adapts over time.  So, what you put on your skin affects way more than just the topical surface of your body that you see and feel.  Your skin reflects what’s happening internally by producing visible symptoms, such as rashes, pimples, wrinkles, and blemishes.  These signs are not as benign and superficial as skincare manufacturers would like you to believe.  In my case, they were just the most visible indication of a common, serious, systemic autoimmune disease called Sjogren’s disease.

Until I started Bexi’s, I’d unquestioningly allowed skincare manufacturers to tell me their story of who I was because of my skin. 

I believed that my dry, painfully sensitive, patchy, red, swollen skin needed correcting, lightening, darkening, and covering up.  I didn’t have flawless, glowing skin, and I naively thought that I couldn’t possibly be beautiful until I’d achieved that.  Except, one day, tired of the constant pain, I chose comfort and joy in my skin over flawless and glowing skin.  I stopped ignoring and hiding my skin symptoms and started addressing them using what I knew about whole foods, microbes, and epigenetics. 

My different approach to skin care honors diversity and the interconnectedness of everything: species, organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and metabolic pathways. 

When you use whole foods to feed your skin from the outside in, you’re tending to more than just the superficial, and you’re learning about and nourishing your body and the microbes that live on it.  It’s loosely analogous to regenerative farming for your skin.

I’m so grateful to be celebrating 10 years of redefining beauty and providing you with an alternative to conventional skincare, Bexi’s Bespoke Revitalisation. 

Your trust, loyalty, and support mean so much to me.  Thank you.

A version of this blog post is published in my local newspaper, The Davis Enterprise.

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