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Ep 331 – The Rogue Pharmacist: Nutritional Deficiencies and Their Impact on the Skin
00:20:08
The skin can reveal a lot about what’s happening inside the body, especially when it’s lacking essential nutrients. In this episode of The Rogue Pharmacist, we sit down with Ben Fuchs to discuss common nutritional deficiencies that manifest in the...
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- [00:00]
A
Calling all forward thinking estheticians, it's time to redefine the art of skincare and embrace a revolutionary approach that begins with your clients. Skin Cell Health. I'm pharmacist Benjamin Knife Fuchs WELcoming you to Truth Treatment Systems where beauty begins. At the cell, we believe you're not just a beauty professional, you are a healthcare professional. You want to make a positive difference and you want to make a good living and we will help you do both. We're here to support your out of the box thinking and empower you to question traditional products, outdated formulations and old school ingredients. Imagine a world where solutions to the skin's enigmatic conditions lie just beyond the horizon. At Truth, we're not just a skincare brand. We're a movement that encourages you to explore better solutions and find that aha moment that changes the game. You are an artist and a healer of the skin and we're here to provide the canvas and the tools for you to create tailored protocols leaving generic ones in the past. Sign up now at truthtreatmentspro.com and receive two complimentary mineral rich electrolyte sheet masks. That's truthtreatmentspro.com where healthy skin is beautiful skin.
- [01:12]
B
Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Knightfuchs. In each episode, we'll explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. Hi, Maggie Stasik, ASCP's program director. And joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hi, Ben.
- [01:27]
A
Hi, Maggie.
- [01:28]
B
Ben, this is what I want you to do.
- [01:30]
A
Yes.
- [01:30]
B
Walk us through common nutritional deficiencies that show up on the skin. And when should the esthetician refer out?
- [01:39]
A
Mm, that's a great question. Everybody's nutritionally deficient simply because of the way we grow our food. Vitamins, protein, fatty acids, all of these are found in plants, but they're a function of the nutrients that are in the soil. And because of poor farming techniques, over farming, our soils are deficient. Our soils are depleted. This is the problem's been going on for 100 plus years. And so our veggies and our, our produce, and then the animals that eat the veggies and produce are pretty much universally nutritionally deficient, which means by the time we get them, that doesn't even account for the storing and the processing and the cooking, which also deplete nutrients. By the time we get them, we're deficient. Most of us are subsiding on processed foods. In fact, 70% of this is kind of a crazy statistic. 70% of our calories come from ultra processed food. Not even processed food. Ultra processed food. That is food that's made from components that themselves are not even food. And this is where we're getting our calories. So it's almost impossible to be, to not be nutritionally deficient unless you're supplementing. And that's why I have been talking about supplements and supplementation and the science of supplementation for decades. And I personally have been supplementing for decades. And there are dramatic, dramatic changes you can make in the skin. I'll tell you why that isn't here in a second. And the body in general, by a correct, intelligent, strategic nutritional supplement program, you do not have to refer out unless you feel, you know, as an esthetician or skincare professionalist, you feel like you don't know enough about nutrition. You, you don't have to refer out to a doctor. In fact, I wouldn't recommend it because doctors are not in, that's not their thing, nutrition. Now they're starting to get a little bit more into nutrition. But I would go to a na, I would refer out to a naturopath or a nutritionist, somebody who studies nutrition. But there's really no reason why estheticians shouldn't be hip to the basics of nutrition. They really should because the skin, as I was sort of alluding to earlier, will demonstrate nutritional deficiencies rapidly, and the skin will change rapidly when nutritional nutrients are put into the body. Why do you think the skin is like, so receptive to nutrition for better or worse?
- [03:46]
B
I don't know. Because there's a gut skin connection.
- [03:49]
A
Well, that's true, but the skin turns over very fast. The skin cells are. It's almost like a canary in the coal mine. So deficiencies will show up in the skin quickly because the skin is moving so fast, it's burning through nutrients. In fact, the skin and the intestine, as you mentioned, are the two systems in the body that are moving the fastest. And the skin and the gut have a lot in common. And just like nutritional deficiencies will manifest in the skin quickly, they'll also manifest in the gut and intestine quickly. Of course, you see it in the skin faster than you see it in the intestine. But both systems will respond quickly to nutritional supplementation, just like they respond quickly to nutritional deficiencies. So estheticians, in my opinion, should become very, very familiar with nutrients in my topical formulations. They're essentially nutritional supplements. And this is what distinguishes my, my way of formulating And I discovered this in the pharmacy when I was dealing with people who had serious skin problems, burns or wounds or traumas. I discovered that if you can topically apply nutrients, you get the most incredible healing and then beautifying benefits. And this is why all my truth treatment formulations are about topical nutrition. And when you think about it, what is the most important ingredient you can put in your body in order to stay healthy?
- [05:05]
B
Nutrients.
- [05:06]
A
Nutrients, that is the active ingredients in food is nutrients. Yeah, there's some ingredients in food that are non, non nutritional, like fiber, for example. But the active ingredient in all the good foods is the vitamins and the minerals and the aminos and the fatty acids. And in nutrition we have a term we call essential. Right. Essential means you have to have it in your diet, you can't make it. And so vitamins, minerals, aminos and fatty acids. There's about 90 different nutrients that are essential, meaning you will have a disease or you will have some kind of biochemical defect. Something will not proceed as effectively if you're missing the essential nutrients. So as a formulator, I'm thinking skincare, topical formulator. That's what topical skincare should be. It should be essential nutrients. Likewise, internally, the single most effective from a physical perspective, move you can make, strategic move you can make to keep your body healthy, to restore it back to health, to slow down the aging process, to keep yourself strong and vital all the years of your life, is to use nutritional supplementation intelligently. Not just taking it willy nilly because you heard something on TV or you read something on the Internet, but doing it in a strategic fashion. One of the biggest problems we have today vis a vis nutritional supplementation is with something called the RDAs, right? Yeah. You've heard of the RDA, right? What does the RDA stand for?
- [06:31]
B
Recommending Dietary Allowance.
- [06:32]
A
Right. I call it the Ridiculous Deficiency Allowance because it keeps us ridiculously deprived, because it makes people think all you need is these tiny doses of vitamin C and vitamin E and the B complex, et cetera, when in reality, yes, you need 60 or 100 milligrams, that's the RDA of vitamin C. I think it's 100 milligrams to stop yourself from having a full blown disease. But if you want to be healthy and strong and vital, if you're satisfied with just not having a disease, yeah, 100 milligrams, great. But if you want to be super strong and vital, you need large doses of these nutrients and nobody is getting them unless they're really paying attention to and Understanding how nutritional supplementation works because the skin moves so rapidly, as we talked about earlier, it's going to show up nutritional supplement. Nutritional deficiencies are going to show up in the skin quickly. So what are some of the big ones? Probably, you know, I don't say the biggest, but arguably the biggest is essential fatty acids. In fact, if you take essential fatty acids out of the diet of a laboratory animal, guess what happens first thing, Dry skin, itchy skin, scaly skin, dandruff skin sensitivities. How many people do you know have these problems? Everybody. I think in my humble opinion, essential fatty acid deficiency is the single most important nutritional deficiency when it comes to skin health problems. The problem with supplementing with essential fatty acids is they're very unstable. Now, a lot of people will say, well, I don't want to use supplements. I want to get my nutrients from food. That's all well and good, but they're not in the food. And it's very difficult to get enough food in order to get these high doses that you need to really leverage what the human body is capable of doing. So I say supplement with EFAs. And one of the first things that happens is you'll notice that your skin health improves. And that's Omega 6 and Omega 3. I know there's some people out there who think that. Omega 6, you may have heard this. Omega 6 essential fatty acids. No, you don't want those. No, not true. You want both. Omega 6 essential fatty acid, which is called technically linoleic acid, or omega 3 essential fatty acid, which is called alpha linolenic acid. There's only two. Fish oil does not have essential fatty acids. Olive oil does not have very much essential fatty acids. There might be a little linoleic acid in there. The best way to get your essential fatty acids is to supplement with them. There's capsules. They're all over the place. I like liquids because they're a little bit more cost effective. Udo's blend. Have you ever heard, have we talked about it? Best essential fatty acid liquid you could ever use. Some people don't like the taste of essential fatty acids. Put it in with a smoothie. You can mix it in with apple cider vinegar and make a salad dressing with your Udo's blend liquid. The difference you'll make on your skin and for women on the female, menstrual. Female hormone system, the menstrual cycle are unbelievable. Unbelievable. In fact, one of the first things you'll notice is you don't crave fats as Much our craving for fatty foods is a disguised craving. At least a case could be made for it being a disguised craving for essential fatty acids. And I know when I start supplementing with EFAs and when I started supplementing with EFAs, and when my patients do, they don't craft crave fatty foods as much. So I would think that's the first. If I had to sell you the most important deficiency, it would be essential fatty acids, both omega 6 and omega 3. Fish oil, by the way, has some valuable nutrients in it, but they're not essential. Keeping in mind the word essential means you have to have it in the diet. Along the same lines, fatty vitamins are also commonly deficient, particularly vitamin A, which arguably is the most important vitamin for the skin. Vitamin A. There's so many, so many roles that vitamin A plays in keeping the skin healthy. One of the most important is in keeping skin cells dividing just at the right rate. The skin cells divide too rapidly. They can form plaques on the surface like in psoriasis or they can clog pores as an acne. And we know vitamin A is a treatment for psoriasis and acne. In fact, vitamin A is so well handled by the skin that you can get benefits topically. And that's why I love retinol so much, because it's a topical form of vitamin A. And you can actually get some cellular vitamin A benefits that will make up for deficiencies in oral vitamin A if you use retinol topically. So vitamin A deficiency is very important. Use it topically for sure, but also use it internally. You don't want to take too much vitamin A, but you want to take enough. So 10,000 to 20,000 IU. Vitamin A is a good place to be, but you don't want to take vitamin A or really any vitamins without taking a full spectrum. Vitamin A in particular is important but or relevant when it comes to this idea of a full spectrum of vitamins, because it's not really a vitamin, it's a hormone. And that makes it unique with the exception of one other vitamin, which is vitamin D. And vitamin A and D are hormones and they're both very, very important. And like vitamin A is deficient, vitamin D deficiencies are very common and you'll notice or you probably know that vitamin A and D are used together in topical products like vitamin A and D ointment. They kind of synergize with each other. So vitamin A is important as it is. You don't want to take it by itself. You want to take it with other vitamins, particularly with vitamin D. Best way to get your vitamin D is the sun. You gotta love the sun. Sun's so important. And I, I know, I always go on, you know, I always make people angry. You know, I tell people, get out in the sun, make sure you're getting sun. They're like, oh, no, you're gonna burn and get cancer. No, if you're healthy, you're not gonna burn and get cancer, but you will get vitamin D and you'll get a lot of other benefits from the sun as well. So get it. Make sure you're getting out in the sun. You can supplement with vitamin D, but that's not the best way to hit your vitamin D. So vitamin A and D are two important fatty vitamins. Vitamin E is really interesting because vitamin E, while it's not used in side cells the way other vitamins are, it protects cells. It particularly protects cells from the sun and from other oxidative products. So anytime you have either toxicity that's getting into the bloodstream, or we talked earlier about advanced glycosylated end products, anytime you have a higher amount of oxidation, vitamin E can be protective. Vitamin E deficiency is also very common. So you want to be supplementing with vitamin E. What I found with vitamin E is high doses of vitamin E can speed healing. And so that's really cool. Post peel or post surgery or even if you just pop a zit and you want a, to heal it fast, Using vitamin E internally, not so much topically, but internally, can be very helpful. Vitamin C is really fascinating. And you know, that was the first thing you thought of, right? Because vitamin C is so darn amazing. In fact, I sometimes don't even think of vitamin C as a vitamin in the sense that you need vitamins in very small amounts. Vitamin C you need in large amounts. In fact, vitamin C deficiency causes the deterioration of connective tissue now, not just in the skin for wrinkles. And everybody knows these days about vitamin C for wrinkles. Topically, it should be fat soluble, by the way, for topical penetration. But also, vitamin C is important for your bones. You know, women taking estrogen for their bones or bisphosphonates, even worse, would be much better off taking high doses of vitamin C. Why? The bones are connective tissue. The blood vessels are connective tissue. The fascia that holds all your organs in place is connective tissue. Your heart sits on a skeleton of connective tissue. Connective tissue is the most important substance in the body for keeping it intact, for feeding all the cells and for slowing down the aging process. In fact, many of the signs of aging that we hate, from the wrinkles to the vascular issues to the ruptures and the hernias and the prolapses and the osteoporosis and the gum disease, these are signs of vitamin C deficiency. And why are we deficient? Because we're dosing our cells on vitamin c by the RDAs, the ridiculous deprivation allowance. You know, vitamin C is made by animals only. Humans and gorillas and guinea pigs don't make vitamin C. But squirrels and cats and dogs and cows and goats, they make their own vitamin C. In fact, a goat will make 13 grams of vitamin C a day. He'll make it 13 grams and they're telling you that's 13,000 milligrams. They're telling you you only need 100 milligrams. You see how absurd that is? And when the goat is under stress, it'll make 10 times that amount. And vitamin C is made by animals when they're under stress. It's a stress management vitamin. Of course, on the skin, vitamin C deficiency will show up as hyperpigmentation and wrinkles and barrier disruption and accelerated aging and thinning. And in fact, almost all of the things we hate about our skin as we get older, as well as our bodies as we get older are manifestations of, of vitamin C deficiency. When you're dosing yourself with vitamin C, do it in a divided fashion or in a sustained fashion. So the best way to do your vitamin C is multiple times a day, three or four times a day. Now if that's inconvenient, you can always do it once a day. But it's much better to do your vitamin C throughout the day because you'll urinate out what you don't use, what your body doesn't use, if you try to do a big dose of it in the morning, for example. So doing your vitamin C in, in, in divided doses, the B complex, again, unspeakably valuable, particularly for the skin. We urinate out the B complex. It's water soluble and if you're not supplementing consistently with the B complex, you're going to be deficient. It's unfortunately processed out of foods because the B complex are very susceptible to a destruction or evaporation or by heat. So if you're cooking your vegetables or if your vegetables are processed or your fruits are processed, you're not going to get the kind of B complex that you need. B1 is extremely important as an anti glycating vitamin. B3 niacin may be the most important of all the B vitamins for the skin. They're all really important and you want them all as a complex. One of the most underappreciated of all the nutrients, particularly for the skin, is vitamin B5, pantothenic acid and all food. Pan. The word pan means everywhere and pantothenic acid is found everywhere. And so people don't often think they have panothenic acid deficiencies. And they may not have full blown panothenic acid deficiencies, but they may not be getting enough for maximum health. In fact, one of the cool things about panothenic acid is it helps you deal with acne and sebaceous secretions. And I've been using pantothenic acid in my formulations, my truth blemish repair complex, for example, for anti acne for years. But you do need high doses of pantothenic acid. High doses of pantothenic acid can also help with the steroid hormone system, help you make steroid hormones. And that's another important B vitamin. They're all really important, but the ones that stand out are for the skin are B1, B3 and B12. And then there's the minerals selenium, very, very important for the immune system, for the skin as well. For acne, patients tend to be deficient in selenium. Sulfur is very important for helping build collagen. Zinc, arguably the most important mineral of all for the skin. Zinc deficiencies will cause acne, literally. If you take zinc out of the diet, acne, you, you can cause acne. Zinc is important for the healing process, for collagen production. And this is one of the reasons why I like Zinc oxide is a, is a sun protection ingredient because not only does it protect you from the sun, but it also speeds healing. Magnesium deficiency is important not specifically for the skin, but deficiencies are very common. Iron deficiency is also common. And iron deficiency can show up as skin, can show up on the skin. Iron is particularly important for the blood. But iron deficiency can show up on the skin as kind of a pallor or skin dryness also can cause brittle nails. I forgot to mention we're talking about vitamins. Vitamin K is very important for wound healing and vitamin K also can help for blood leakage under the eyes. It shows up as, as baggy skin. Copper is extremely important for collagen production. And zinc and copper go together in the sense that the more zinc you're taking, the more your body will excrete copper and the more copper you're taking. And we don't really take a lot of copper, but copper's found in water, especially in cities because of copper pipes. So a lot of people are getting copper through copper pipes. And if they're not supplementing with zinc, they can be deficient in zinc and that can cause problems. So supplementing with both copper and zinc is something you might want to think about. And then there's protein, which isn't an essential nutrient. Well, I guess you could say it's an essential nutrient. It's a macronutrient. But protein deficiency is very common because proteins the most expensive of all nutrients and hard for the body to harder for the body to digest. And then amino acids, of course, that make proteins are also important. One of the coolest amino acids for the skin is something called histidine and that's found in high protein foods. And histidine is part of a molecule in the skin called filagrin. Filagrin is a really interesting protein that strengthens the barrier and also gets converted into natural moisturizers in the skin. So for people who are dealing with eczema or people who are dealing with intractably dry skin, histidine supplementation or eating high protein foods that contain histidine can be helpful as well. And then the there's two amino acids, proline and valine and lysine. Three amino acids, proline and valine and lysine that are involved with connective tissue production. The best way to get your aminos, though, is with high protein foods. Keep in mind, if you're trying to get your your nutrition from food, you got to work on digestive health to make sure that you're processing the foods correctly to get the nutrients. But I am a big believer in nutritional supplementation.
- [19:48]
B
That concludes our show for today and we thank you for listening. But if you just can't get enough of Ben Fuchs, the ASCP's rogue pharmacist, you can find him@truthtreatments.com for more information on this episode or for ways to connect with Ben Fuchs or to learn more about ascp, check out the show notes.