Women, We Deserve So Much More Than We Allow Ourselves

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March is Women’s History Month, National Nutrition Month, and Autoimmune Awareness Month.  It’s a month dedicated to celebrating the contributions of women to society, highlighting the importance of making informed food choices, and enhancing the understanding and recognition of autoimmune diseases.   

Food is the foundation upon which your health, and therefore your life, is built.  

Thanks to nutrition, the scientific study of how food impacts human health, we know that when food provides the building blocks your body needs to function properly, repair, and grow, it is medicine, it can prevent and treat disease.  

The regular use of nutrient-dense whole foods in and on your body imparts life and vigor back to it by slowly, steadily, and sustainably providing it with the building blocks it needs in the forms and concentrations most recognizable by your body.  

How your food is grown, stored, and prepared, impacts your health.  

That’s why meal preparation is historically one of the most important, yet under-recognized, contributions to society that women have made and continue to make.

(To the men who prepare meals, your contribution is no less significant.) 

Cooking is chemistry.  You’re conducting science every time you boil an egg.  Cooking is also cognitively-demanding, labor-intensive, and frequently thankless.  Preparing 2-3 meals a day for multiple people takes time, energy, creativity, planning, and organization.  And it seldom comes with appropriate compensation or appreciation for the effort required.  

If you live with an autoimmune disease and you prepare the meals for your family, your contribution to society is even more impressive.  Meal preparation is much more difficult when you’re burdened by fatigue, cognitive impairment, pain, and/or disability. 

Did you know that women are 4 times more likely than men to develop an autoimmune disease? 

While women are more biologically prone to autoimmune disease, the messages, products, and practices women are fed by the beauty and skincare industries likely contribute to the perfect storm that initiates autoimmunity. 

Autoimmune disease occurs when your immune system, which is supposed to protect you, attacks you, instead. 

The main question asked when studying autoimmune diseases is,“What causes the body to stop tolerating itself?”, which insinuates that the immune system is defective.  But what if it’s not?  What if it’s simply responding to what you’re exposed to, e.g., constant negative messages about your looks that trigger self-hatred?  And what if that self-hatred, coupled with the frequent use of products containing untested ingredients, such as peptides, further disrupts your metabolism and causes immune and other organ system dysfunction? 

Remember, what you put in, on, and around your body matters. 

Your gut and skin are connected.  They’re both selectively permeable barriers that interact with the environment.  They’re both populated with living ecosystems of microbes that influence your health and they both interact closely with your cardiovascular, nervous, and immune systems.  

The beauty “ideal” of looking young and flawless harms women. 

It asks us to spend our precious time, money, and energy disconnecting from ourselves and competing with each other.  (Why aren’t there beauty pageants for men?) 

If we don’t acquiesce to the endless cycles of dieting, exercising, filling, removing, waxing, shaving, dyeing, sloughing, straightening, curling, painting, laminating, and gluing, basically shrinking and editing our bodies in pursuit of the unattainable “ideal” of looking young and flawless, we’re punished.  We don’t get the job, we don’t get the promotion, we don’t get the raise. 

Looking young and flawless buys power.  But at what cost?

Dieting, fasting, starving and working out too hard, too frequently, or at the wrong time of the month causes metabolic chaos. 

Decades of yoyo dieting and fad diets, cleanses, binge eating, and undernourishment also leave you physically and psychologically depleted, weak, and vulnerable to manipulation, predation, and control. 

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drugs, when used appropriately under close supervision of a knowledgeable physician and with the development of healthy eating and exercise habits, can correct some of the metabolic chaos.  

Once metabolic order is restored, a change in mindset and habits is necessary to maintain order: slow living, slow eating, and reconnecting with nature.

That requires the presence of systems that are actively being destroyed right now, repair of broken systems, and creation of new ones.  It also requires voting with your dollar, buying from businesses that promote and support sustainability, connection, and life over extraction, depletion, and death. 

Peptides are part of human biology and they’re commonly used as signaling and messenger molecules between various parts of your body. 

For example, insulin is a peptide that signals the uptake of glucose from your bloodstream into your cells.  Glucagon is a peptide that signals the release of glucose from your cells into your bloodstream.  Insulin and glucagon are also hormones.

Peptides change the structure and function of your body, impacting your biology.  Therefore, you’d assume that peptides would have to undergo safety testing before being sold to consumers.  You’d be wrong.

In the US, language and the intended use of an ingredient, not its impact on your biology, determine whether it’s a drug or a cosmetic. 

Drug manufacturers have to conduct safety testing before selling.  Cosmetics manufacturers don’t.  They can and frequently do sell their products without any safety testing.  Why?  Profit over people.  As cosmetic scientist, Robert Sasse-Jappie, explained on LinkedIn, “When actives truly work as theorized, they get those pesky two words added to them: pharmaceutical ingredients.  Much cheaper to say helps reverse the signs of aging, then you can sell to anyone without any expensive regulatory compliance requiring safety and efficacy studies!”  Testing on consumers saves corporate time and money, releases manufacturers of any responsibility for adverse effects caused by their products and, ironically, allows them to advertise their products as cruelty-free.  Johnson and Johnson’s Talcum Baby Powder causing cancer is a good example.

Since I founded my skincare business 10 years ago, I’ve been writing about the use of untested peptides in cosmetics and the dangers of using peptides in cosmetics (“Anti-aging, Peptides, and Health”, April 9, 2023). 

A recent article by NPR on the safety of peptides echoes my concerns of metabolic dysregulation and its longterm consequences: “Knoepfler warned that using an untested peptide could cause serious harm. For example, some animal studies suggest BPC-157 helps with tissue repair because it accelerates the growth of new blood vessels. Knoepfler cautioned that this peptide could theoretically also encourage the growth of precancerous cells.”  Knoepfler, is Dr. Paul Knoepfler, a cell and molecular biologist at UC Davis.  I worked with his lab while conducting my dissertation research on epigenetic regulation in breast cancer.  

Striving to look young and flawless is toxic and a waste of time, energy, and money.  

Different approaches to skin care exist that revitalise instead of drain.  We owe it to ourselves and future generations of women to spend our time, energy, and money on pursuing true beauty: nurturing and supporting ourselves and each other and protecting the freedoms that previous generations of women fought so hard for us to have.  

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

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