The New Nails: Welcome Matte

The fall collections were all about texture—be it a pair of satin sari trousers at Balenciaga, a grosgrain puff sleeve at Louis Vuitton, or a bright silk-velvet dévoré dress at Proenza Schouler. So it’s little surprise that nails are also following suit, turning up in cool matte polish shades that offer a refreshing new alternative to the usual high-gloss finish.

“It’s a stripped-down kind of perfection,” says backstage manicurist Nonie Crème, who painted models’ fingertips in Butter London’s Yummy Mummy—the most universally flattering shade of opaque “mushroomy” taupe—before taking down their luster with a coat of sheer matte Nail Foundation (butterlondon.com) at the recent Alexander Wang show.

With their punk-chic overtones, shine-free nails are also a favorite of Manhattan makeup artist Mike Potter, who has been painting the statement-making fingertips of Yeah Yeah Yeahs front woman Karen O with matte ebony nail lacquer for years. Having failed to find a particular polish line that lived up to his exacting standards, Potter recently created his own: The appropriately named Knockout Cosmetics (koknockout.com) features seven chip-resistant, shineproof nail colors—like Karen (the saucy fire-engine red is a nod to the singer’s trademark lip color) and Calamine (a milky pink that recalls the beloved childhood anti-itch lotion of the same name).

In the hopes of luring shine-loyalists to the “flatte” side, OPI artistic director Suzi Weiss-Fischmann has even whipped up six of the beauty brand’s best selling lacquers—from Russian Navy (the inkiest shade of indigo blue) to Alpine Snow (a crisp, Twiggy-worthy 1960s white)—in resolutely matte finishes, due out in July. Take note: Their punchy hot-pink (and utterly gloss-free) La Paz-itively Hot polish may be the summer’s most intriguing new pedicure shade.

PHOTO GALLERY

OPI Matte polishes in Alpine Snow, La Paz-itively Hot, and Lincoln Park After Dark.

Referrence Vogue Magazine

Eat Your Broccoli!

Eat your broccoli! That’s the advice from a new UCLA study that showed a chemical in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables may hold a key to restoring immunity that declines as we age.

Published in this week’s online edition of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, researchers found that a chemical in broccoli switches on a set of antioxidant genes and enzymes in specific immune cells that are then able to combat the injurious effects of free radicals that can damage cells and lead to disease.

Free radicals are byproducts of normal processes, such as the metabolic conversion of food into energy and can also enter the body through small particles present in polluted air. Free radicals, which are a supercharged form of oxygen, can cause oxidative tissue damage leading to disease - such as triggering the inflammation process that causes clogged arteries. Oxidative damage of body tissues and organs probably constitutes one of the major reasons why we age.

“The mysteries of aging have always intrigued man,” said Dr. Andre Nel, principal investigator and chief of nanomedicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “While we have known for some time that free radicals are important in aging, most of the past attention has focused on the mechanisms that produce free radicals rather than addressing the pathways used by the body to suppress their production.”

A dynamic equilibrium exists in the body between the mechanisms that lead to increased radical production versus those antioxidant pathways that help to combat free radicals.

“Our study contributes to the growing understanding of the importance of these antioxidant defense pathways that the body uses to fight free radicals. Insight into these processes point to ways in which we may be able to alleviate the effects of aging,” said Nel, a practicing clinical allergist and immunologist at the Geffen School of Medicine.

The delicate balance between pro-oxidant and antioxidant forces in the body could determine the outcome of many disease processes that are associated with aging including cardiovascular disease, degenerative joint diseases, and diabetes, as well as an efficiency decline of the immune system in offering protection against infectious agents.

“As we age, the ability of the immune system to fight disease, infections and protect against cancer wears down as a result of the impact of oxygen radicals on the immune system,” said Nel.

According to the UCLA study, the ability of aged tissues to reinvigorate their antioxidant defense can play an important role to reverse much of the negative impact of free radicals on the immune system. However, until this study, the extent to which the antioxidant defense can impact the aging process in the immune system was not properly understood.

“Our defense against oxidative stress damage may determine at what rate we age, how it will manifest and how to interfere in those processes,” said Nel. “In particular, our study shows that a chemical present in broccoli is capable of stimulating a wide range of antioxidant defense pathways and may be able to interfere with the age-related decline in immune function.”

The UCLA team found that not only did the direct administration of a chemical in broccoli reverse the decline in cellular immune function in old mice but researchers had similar results when they took individual immune cells from old mice, treated those cells with the chemical outside of the body and then placed the treated cells back into a recipient animal.

In particular, the UCLA scientists discovered that dendritic cells, which introduce infectious agents and foreign substances to the immune system, were particularly effective in restoring immune function in aged animals when treated with the chemical in broccoli called sulforaphane.

“We found that treating older mice with sulforaphane increased the immune response to the level of younger mice,” said Hyon-Jeen Kim, first author and research scientist with the Geffen School of Medicine.

To investigate how the chemical in broccoli increased the immune system’s response, the UCLA group confirmed that sulforaphane interacts with a protein called Nrf2, that serves as a master regulator of the overall antioxidant response and that is capable of switching on hundreds of antioxidant and rejuvenating genes and enzymes.

Nel notes that the chemistry leading to activation of this gene regulation pathway could be a platform for drug discovery and vaccine development to boost decline of the immune function in elderly people.

“This is a radical new way of thinking in how to increase the immune function of elderly people to possibly protect against viral infections and cancer,” said Nel. “We may have uncovered a new mechanism by which to boost vaccine responses by using a nutrient chemical to impact oxidant stress pathways in the immune system.”

Kim adds that although there is a decline in Nrf2 activity with aging, this pathway remains accessible to chemicals like sulforaphane that are capable of restoring some of the ravages of aging by boosting antioxidant pathways.

The next step is further study to see how these findings would translate to humans.

“Dietary antioxidants have been shown to have important effects on immune function and with further study we may be adding broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables to that list,” said Nel.

For now, Nel suggests including these vegetables as part of a healthy diet.

Nel adds that these findings offer a window into how the immune system ages.

“We may find that combating free radicals is only part of the answer. It may prove to be a more multi-faceted process and interplay between pro and antioxidant forces,” Nel said.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Aging, the UCLA Claude D. Pepper Older Adults Independence Center and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Other authors include Berenice Barajas, and Dr. Meiying Wang.

From magazine.ucla.edu

Coffee Is A Healthy Choice

(AP) When the Ink Spots sang “I love the java jive and it loves me” in 1940, they could not have known how right they were.

Coffee not only helps clear the mind and perk up the energy, it also provides more healthful antioxidants than any other food or beverage in the American diet, according to a study released Sunday.

Of course, too much coffee can make people jittery and even raise cholesterol levels, so food experts stress moderation.

The findings by Joe A. Vinson, a chemistry professor at the University of Scranton, in Pennsylvania, give a healthy boost to the warming beverage.

“The point is, people are getting the most antioxidants from beverages, as opposed to what you might think,” Vinson said in a telephone interview.

Antioxidants, which are thought to help battle cancer and provide other health benefits, are abundant in grains, tomatoes and many other fruits and vegetables.

Vinson said he was researching tea and cocoa and other foods and decided to study coffee, too.

His team analyzed the antioxidant content of more than 100 different food items, including vegetables, fruits, nuts, spices, oils and common beverages. They then used Agriculture Department data on typical food consumption patterns to calculate how much antioxidant each food contributes to a person’s diet.

They concluded that the average adult consumes 1,299 milligrams of antioxidants daily from coffee. The closest competitor was tea at 294 milligrams. Rounding out the top five sources were bananas, 76 milligrams; dry beans, 72 milligrams; and corn, 48 milligrams. According to the Agriculture Department, the typical adult American drinks 1.64 cups of coffee daily.

That does not mean coffee is a substitute for fruit and vegetables.

“Unfortunately, consumers are still not eating enough fruits and vegetables, which are better for you from an overall nutritional point of view due to their higher content of vitamins, minerals and fiber,” Vinson said.

Dates, cranberries and red grapes are among the leading fruit sources of antioxidants, he said.

The antioxidants in coffee are known as polyphenols. Sometimes they are bound to a sugar molecule, which covers up the antioxidant group, Vinson said.

The first step in measuring them was to break that sugar link. He noted that chemicals in the stomach do the same thing, freeing the polyphenols.

“We think that antioxidants can be good for you in a number of ways,” including affecting enzymes and genes, though more research is needed, Vinson said.

“If I say more coffee is better, then I would have to tell you to spread it out to keep the levels of antioxidants up,” Vinson said. “We always talk about moderation in anything.”

His findings were released in conjunction with the annual convention of the American Chemical Society in Washington.

In February, a team of Japanese researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that people who drank coffee daily, or nearly every day, had half the liver cancer risk of those who never drank it. The protective effect occurred in people who drank one to two cups a day and increased at three to four cups.

Last year, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found that drinking coffee cut the risk of developing the most common form of diabetes.

Men who drank more than six 8-ounce cups of caffeinated coffee per day lowered their risk of type 2 diabetes by about half, and women reduced their risk by nearly 30 percent, compared with people who did not drink coffee, according to the study in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Bonnie Liebman, nutrition director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said she was not surprised by Vinson’s finding, because tea has been known to contain antioxidants.

But Liebman, who was not part of Vinson’s research team, cautioned that while many people have faith that antioxidants will reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and more, the evidence has not always panned out. Most experts are looking beyond antioxidants to the combination of vitamins, minerals other nutrition in specific foods, she said.

Referrence: cbsnews.com