Natural Botox

Ah, Botox.  What a wonder drug!  Miracle of modern science, a triumph of chemical engineering and finely honed procedures, brought to perfection by the best scientists in the world, the ultimate solution to the problem of aging!


Well, not quite.  Far from being a miracle of modern science, Botox (or Botulinum Toxin) is a naturally occurring substance, produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and its close relatives.  The most toxic substance known, Botulinum Toxin has an LD50 of 1 nanogram/kilogram, meaning that 90 nanograms would be enough to kill 50% of people weighing 90 kilograms.  For another way of looking at it, 500 grams (roughly a pound) of botulinum toxin would be enough to kill half the human population of earth.  This toxin and its associated bacteria were (and still occasionally are) found in canned foods, where the gaseous byproducts of the bacteria would cause the can to bulge.

Scientists did do their part in making Botox the drug it is today, purifying the toxin and testing it as a cure for various muscular-related diseases.


So, people today use the drug as a cosmetic enhancement - removing face wrinkles and the like.  The famed toxicity is still there, however, and apart from the myriad technical ways the procedure can go wrong, like too much paralysis or paralyzing the wrong spot, you can still get a good old poisoning.  Besides, the fact that it required qualified medical staff meant that the alternative and natural medicine crowd naturally came to see it as yet another hated  'chemical' to be avoided.

Cue natural Botox!  My first encounter with such an amazing thing came just a few weeks ago - a sign in a health food store shopfront, extolling the virtues of natural botox (no side effects!).  They were closed, so I couldn't go in and point out that botox was already a naturally occurring substance, but it did prompt me to look up what such an alternative could be.


Acupuncture:
"Acupuncture is an excellent all natural alternative to Botox injections", or so the internet would have me believe.  No qualified specialist inserting pointy things into your skin here, no sir!  And none of that disgusting man made stuff, like steel!  No, this is all natural.  Completely effective, and so much cheaper, too!


Cucumber:
Yum!  Well, cucumbers certainly have a lot of water in them (96%), but I'm at a loss as to what other constituents could reduce wrinkles more than temporarily.  I'm often heard of them being used as facial masks, seen slices placed over the eyes, and the like, but it seems more like tradition than anything else - no one wants to cite their sources for the effects of cucumber.  One site suggests that it's all that Vitamin E (that cucumber lacks) that does it, or the natural oils (negligible).  Others say it's all that silica (silicon dioxide), which is good for your skin (which is naturally dehydrating and otherwise inert), as well as the mysterious chemical pH.  Otherwise, it's vitamin C and caffeic acid doing all the work - which can, quite frankly, be found in much higher amounts than in cucumber.

Antioxidants and otherwise:
Practically every other natural anti-wrinkle treament I can find relies on either rubbing foods rich in vitamins all over your skin, or else rubbing foods rich in antioxidants  all over your skin.  Well, I wouldn't object, save that eating these foods would be a lot less wasteful and you'd certainly absorb more of the vitamins and antioxidants than you would through skin.  Be careful, though, because the adverse effects of overly high levels of vitamins and vitamin toxicity are still not fully understood.