Skin is the largest organ of your body.  It covers about 16 square feet and weighs approximately 8 pounds.  With unceasing collaboration, skin cells perform lifesaving functions such as protection from toxic chemicals, heat, and cold.  Most important, they collaborate to keep us healthy by shielding our insides from the invasion of foreign bacteria and viruses.  If a malignant (life threatening) cancer cell develops, this collaboration ceases.  A biological fiasco can set in. 

Malignant cancer cells are born from oxygen.  Skin cells, like all healthy cells, are rich in this essential molecule.  When exposed to sun, high energy sun rays collide with your skin.  The collision, akin to a bowling ball hitting pins, causes oxygen molecules to lose an energy stabilizing electron.  As a result, oxygen becomes unstable and highly reactive within the skin cell.  The end result is the oxygen free radical.

This is where many researchers or “science detectives” stop searching for the cause of cancer.  By stopping here, they attribute skin cancer to the high energy sun rays and the subsequent formation of the oxygen free radical.  This is not entirely true.  There is one more - often overlooked - ingredient at play.

Free radicals are completely normal.  In fact, they are an essential component to the immune system.  They help to eradicate foreign bacteria and viruses that may pass through the skin. 

Once free radicals do their job within a cell, they are quenched or rather controlled by free radical scavengers known as antioxidants.  Unlike other cellular content, antioxidants are electron rich and can therefore donate their electrons to electron-deficient free radicals. 

An antioxidant is simply a healing molecule that is on guard to stop oxygen free radicals once they have served their purpose.  If antioxidants are not plentiful, the free radical attaches to other cellular sources – vital sources.  The cell undergoes “oxidative stress.”  Oxidative stress - or lack of cellular antioxidants - is the most prominent cause of skin cancer, not free radicals. 

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To quickly understand oxidative stress, consider its everyday occurrence.  Such examples include the browning of an apple after it is sliced, a nail rusting in the open air, and the formation of rancid food.  These processes are all mediated by oxygen free radicals that go unregulated due to lack of antioxidants.  The same type of damage occurs among nutrient deficient skin when free radical production exceeds the amount of health-preserving antioxidants. 

Oxidative stress is involved in the formation of wrinkles as well as the initiation of cancer.  If a free radical is not quenched by a healing antioxidant, it can attack the main structural component of skin known as collagen.  A phenomenon known as cross-linking occurs – a fancy name for wrinkling.  Collagen cross-linking causes certain areas of skin to become stiff and immobile.  Supple hydrated skin is converted into a cracked, desert floor.  As time passes, skin cancer may result.

As oxidative stress continues, free radicals attack more than just collagen.  Vital cellular components (DNA - deoxyribonucleic acid) that guarantee proper skin function are attacked and cancer is initiated.  

The take-home message here is that free radicals themselves are not dangerous.  They are an everyday part of life - the inescapable byproducts of living in an oxygen-rich world.  Free radicals only become dangerous when their production exceeds the amount of “health-preserving” antioxidants.  The oxidative stress that ensues initiates a biological fiasco that gives rise to a malignancy.  The newly formed malignancy harnesses a plethora of super powers.  Such powers are used to gain control over the human body (spreading or progression of cancer) and ultimately kill it.  Hence, if you learn how to minimize oxidative stress, you can stop lugging around the fear of cancer.

There are five main contributors to the oxidative stress within the skin: lack of sunshine, lack of vitamin D, lack of melanin production, synthetic sunscreens, lotions and skin potions, excess sugar consumption, and lack of antioxidants.

Cancer progression occurs with a lack of cell suicide (apoptosis), excess estrogen, poor immune response and the eventual formation of "trophoblast" cells, which shield the cancer from the immune system…This is where it can start getting really bad. 

The entire cascade of cancer initiation and progression can be stopped with natural medicine and select lifestyle changes.  But, the first step is FAT LOSS, period.  No amount of intervention can save the obese from the ravishes of skin cancer - or any other cancer for that matter, as recently shown by the medical journal Lancet.  Learn about Hormone Intelligence Therapy to lose fat fast.