We’ll file this one under “life hacks” as we will address reducing them too!

First though, what are they? Also called liver spots, they’re yellow-brown (depending on intensity) marks in the skin that typically come with age.

You may be wondering: is it about liver health? And the answer is: no

In fact they have nothing to do with liver function, except insofar as a diseased liver will promote metabolic problems in general more rapid aging, but that is systemic, and is no more reasonably considerable a matter of liver function than graying hair or arthritis.

Liver health is very important for many things, though so do also check out: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

As for “liver spots”, however, the name comes from color, and that once upon a time it was popularly believed that they were connected, but there is no scientific basis to that.

What, then, does cause them?

As our cells age, they start bringing forward mistakes that accumulate over time, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

One common mistake is to bring forward senescent fibroblasts, whose non-senescent versions are supposed to be there, but whose senescent editions contain more melanin than average (as in, average for your normal skintone) which consequently also gets brought forward and with no reason to disappear, also accumulates over time.

You may be wondering: is this related to cancer? And the answer is: yes and no

More helpfully: it’s a somewhat similar process, but benign (in contrast to cancer cells that would be similar, but multiply rapidly as they divide without any programmed cell death).

However, since they can look a lot like skin cancer, that also means that they can mask skin cancer. For this reason, get it checked if what you have assumed to be an age spot…

• turns black
• turns multicolored
• gets bigger
• bleeds (for a reason other than: you just stabbed it with something)

Any one (or more) of those happening is cause for concern. Note, we say cause for concern, not cause for panic; it will quite possibly be fine, but it also might not be, so book yourself a doctor visit about it.

Learn more: We don’t all need regular skin cancer screening–but you can know your risk and check yourself

The other major factor besides simply “how many times your cells have been copied” is sun exposure, because UV radiation not only can cause cellular mutations in the long-run, but also cues our skin to speed up melanin production (it’s trying to save us by giving us darker skin*).

*Note: dark skin is moderately protective against sun damage (and resultant cancer risk) initially, but this is a double-edged sword, so please do still wear sunscreen even if you have naturally dark skin! Darker-skinned people who do get skin cancer have higher mortality rates than people with lighter skin (even if the same race/ethnicity and just lighter- or darker-skinned)—at least in part because it will then spread more aggressively. Simply put: dark skin will stop a lot of skin cancers from starting, but the cancers that do get past that initial hurdle are, on average, much worse.

How, then, to reduce them?

In advance:

• Wear sunscreen, and consider doing so even if it’s not very sunny; see: Do We Need Sunscreen In Winter, Really? ← the answer here isn’t a simple yes/no, so do read the article, as there is nuance that can help you decide when it’s worth it and when it’s not
• Kill your senescent cells at the earliest opportunity. That might sound drastic, but here be science: Fisetin: The Anti-Aging Assassin
• And as an encore: The Drug & Supplement Combo That Reverses Aging ← this is about dasatinib and quercetin, or else fisetin alone, and explores some very related science

After they show up:

• The same things as above; they will slow any exacerbation, and killing senescent cells does work retroactively too, per that (justified) “reverses aging” claim.
• Normal anti-aging skincare: here we’re talking things like: Undo The Sun’s Damage To Your Skin
• Laser treatment: or an at-home IPL device which is not technically laser but works on the same principles; it breaks up the pigment and allows your immune system to eat the resultant parts. However, this is only suitable for small, moderate pigmented spots, and only on skin that is notably lighter than it (or else it’ll superheat the natural pigmentation there, too, which means much more heat will be absorbed, creating a burn risk)

There are also harsher clinical options like cryotherapy (freezing it off) or chemical peels (corrosively removing the affected skin), and… Well, we’re not the boss of you, but we would encourage you to consider whether that’s really worth it for something that’s not harmful in itself, and will probably be a losing battle in the long run—since, if we be so fortunate as to live many more years, we’ll accumulate more as we go no matter how careful we are.

Want to tackle things the tastiest way?

Check out:

The Diet That Slows Skin Aging

Enjoy!

Intermittent fasting is mostly enjoyed for its metabolic benefits, such as How To Prevent And Reverse Type 2 Diabetes.

We also covered a very related topic, with intermittent fasting once again being on the suggestions list: Improve Your Insulin Sensitivity! ← this is actually more important even that blood sugar control itself, and, which will be relevant today, has a lot of impact on mood*, albeit by a different mechanism of action than the one we’ll be exploring all so soon. Which is great, because we love synergistic benefits!

^{*And to learn much more about this, check out: Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman ← this is about insulin resistance, and, importantly, the invisible insulin resistance that precedes blood sugar imbalances by many years (it goes unnoticed because the pancreas will dutifully keep cranking out more and more insulin to keep the blood sugars stable, until one day it just can’t keep up anymore, and then and only then does prediabetes get diagnosed).}

Back to intermittent fasting itself, we’ve written before about this quite specifically, too:

• Before You Eat Breakfast: 3 Surprising Facts About Intermittent Fasting
• Intermittent Fasting: What’s The Truth?
• 16/8 Intermittent Fasting For Beginners

…and you might have seen our guest article, Does intermittent fasting have benefits for our brain?, which detailed several ways it can help, and/but ultimately concluded with a commentary on the need for more research.

We covered one such study a few weeks ago, talking about how gut microbes produce neurotransmitters and other compounds that affect the nervous system, while the brain influences eating behavior and food choices, creating the two-way communication system known as the gut-brain axis (per: The Brain-Gut Highway: A Two-Way Street), and today we’ll talk about another, and this time, it’s…

De-stressing from the gut up!

Researchers (Dr. Jian-Jun Yang et al.) did a mouse study that found that in cases of lab-induced chronic stress, chronic stress damaged myelin (the fatty insulating layer around nerve fibers—see: How To Rebuild Your Neurons’ Myelin Sheaths) in the corpus callosum, medial prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus, but intermittent fasting substantially reversed these changes.

The reason this matters as much as it does for mood is because myelin helps electrical signals travel efficiently between nerve cells, which is why disruption of myelin has been linked to depression, anxiety, and other adverse brain conditions.

As for how it works, analyses suggested that intermittent fasting partially reversed stress-related changes in microbial metabolic pathways, indicating that changes in bacterial activity, not just bacterial species, might be contributing to the benefits.

That said, there were some special superstars, namely that higher levels of Prevotellamassilia timonensis and Muricoprocola aceti were associated with better myelin integrity and improved behavior, while Anaeroplasma abactoclasticum was associated with poorer outcomes.

You can read the paper in full, here: Intermittent fasting protects against stress-induced depression and demyelination via the gut microbiota–brain axis

Want to learn more?

As well as the intermittent fasting articles we linked above (which are a great starting point if you want to try out intermittent fasting), you might like this book that we reviewed; we recommend it:

Complete Guide To Fasting – By Dr. Jason Fung

Enjoy!

We’ve written before about supplements that can boost cognitive performance and often physical performance too, for example:

• Bacopa Monnieri: Bacopa Monnieri: A Well-Evidenced Cognitive Enhancer
• Citicoline: Citicoline: Better Than Dietary Choline?
• Creatine: Creatine: Very Different For Young & Old People
• Lemon Balm: Lemon Balm For Stressful Times And More
• Lion’s Mane: What Does Lion’s Mane Mushroom Actually Do, Anyway?
• L-Theanine: L-Theanine: What’s The Tea?
• Phosphatidylserine: How To Rebuild Your Neurons’ Myelin Sheaths

And those are all great, but today we’ll be looking at something in quite a different category, insofar as it has only one mechanism of action (which should be enough for you to guess what it is):

The pill that’ll please

Researchers (Dr. Diletta Barbiani et al.) researchers tested whether a placebo—either deceptive or openly acknowledged—could improve cognitive, physical, and psychological function in older adults over 3 weeks.

Placebo (which word is Latin for “I will please”) is popularly misunderstood, and understandably so, as it was never conceived with this sort of purpose in mind. Its original purpose was to placate patients who wanted medical attention but for whom the doctor felt sure nothing was really wrong.

Nowadays, people think of the placebo effect as “imagining things”, but it’s not, it’s about the real measurable effect that placebo has on our body and its systems. Of course, placebo will work better for some things than others. It’s typically much better at reducing pain than it is at regrowing limbs, for example. But its effects can go far beyond the subjective—it can cause skin conditions to clear up, and cancers to shrink away. Not by magic, but because of how our own physiology adapted to deliver the expected result.

That said, it can fail too, so please don’t rely on placebo alone, especially if it’s something critical/existential!

Back to Dr. Barbiani’s study: 90 healthy adults aged 65–90 were randomized into three groups (no treatment, deceptive placebo, and open-label placebo) and completed both self-reports and objective tests before and after the intervention.

Those groups were necessary because of otherwise running into a similar problem to: How Does One Test Acupuncture Against Placebo Anyway?

In this case (Dr. Barbiani’s study), for clarity:

• Deceptive placebo = the participants taking this were told it did contain an active ingredient that will improve various metrics of their health
• Open-label placebo = the participants taking this were told that it was placebo, and/but that as such, it can still be beneficial to the health in various ways

And the results?

• Cognitive gains: memory and attention improved by 14.6% in the deceptive placebo group and 21.5% in the open-label placebo group
• Physical gains: physical performance increased by 7% in the deceptive placebo group and 9.2% in the open-label placebo group
• Stress reduction: the open-label placebo group showed a clear reduction in perceived stress compared with both other groups

You can read the paper in full, here: Placebo mechanisms in aging: A randomized controlled trial comparing deceptive and open-label placebos on psychological, cognitive, and physical functioning in older adults

Want to learn more?

For our own main feature on the placebo effect, see:

How To Leverage Placebo Effect For Yourself

Enjoy!