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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Knight Fuchs. In each episode, we will explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. I'm Maggie Stasik, ASAP's program director, and joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hey, Ben.
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Hey, Maggie. Good to see you.
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B
Good to see you, Ben. One of the things many clients notice as they get older is, is that cuts, irritation, even post treatment, recovery seems to take longer. What's happening in the skin that causes healing to slow with age?
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A
Oh, one, just one thing. Aging sucks. That's basically it. That's. Aging is just everything slowing down. You know, it's like any machine. Eventually it slows down. It's subject to the forces of entropy, not to mention toxicity, not to mention mutation, genetic mutations. Everything just starts to break down. One of the most important things is desiccation. My mom's 93 years old and I'm always saying to my mom, mom, do you want to be a raisin or do you want to be a prune or a grape? You know, do you want to be a plum or do you want to be a prune? We desiccate. We dry out. And not only do we dry out, like symptomatically, like your skin starts to get crepey and itchy and that kind of thing. But our biochemistry depends on hydration. So you have to have enough water inside your body, you have to be hydrated effectively for your biochemistry to be facilitated, biochemical reactions to happen, for synthesis to occur and for cleanup and autophagy and those kinds of things, and we. We dry out. So on top of entropy and. And as Sir Isaac Newton said the second third law of thermodynamics, everything just breaks down. That's part of life. On top of all that, we have this toxic environment, toxic food, toxic air, stress. Everywhere you look, there's fear, right? And fear shuts down healing and shuts down growth and repair and encourages catabolism or breakdown. So there's a whole bunch of forces that are arrayed against our continuous youth. And on top of all that, nature doesn't really want us reproducing after a certain point, right? And it's really young when nature wants you to stop reproducing, like in your 30s or 40s, basically. So by the time you're in your 30s and 40s, the body's, believe it or not, starting to shut down. And the shutdown process may take four or five decades, but it's Gradual. And you start to notice it. And then as far as the hydration goes, it's not so much drinking water that counts. You know how they say your body's 70% water?
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Yeah.
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Does that even make sense to anybody? We say it all the time. How could you possibly be 70% water and not be a puddle sloshing around on the sidewalk every time you take a step? Well, you're not 70% water. You're 70% or 65 or 70% structured water, organized water, coherent water. And in many ways, aging is the. What we perceive as aging, or what we call aging, is really decoherence. Coherence is like when everything's aligned, everything's structured. You ever go to the symphony?
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B
No.
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It's really awesome. You should go. It's like the best concert. Do you go to music concerts?
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Yeah.
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This is like the best concert you've ever been to?
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Yeah.
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You've got like 80 instruments.
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Totally.
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It's amazing, right? But when you first walk into the symphony, it doesn't sound amazing. It's cacophonous. It's noisy. Everybody's tuning up, right? And then all of a sudden, a minute later, the most beautiful Tchaikovsky or Rachmanov or Beethoven or whatever. What's the difference? The difference is coherence. Coherence is when all the music, all the parts, all the musicians are playing in a organized fashion. And it sounds gorgeous when they're tuning up. It's cacophonous and noisy. It's incoherent or decoherent. That's aging. Aging is like the beginning of the symphony. When you walk in and they're playing, all that noise and youth and vigor and health is kind of coherence when they're playing beautiful music. Well, one of the most important ways we decohere, we break down. Our coherence breaks down is at the level of the water. And so when they say our body is 70% water, it's 70% coherent water. It's water where all the water molecules are aligned in a specific fashion. Just like all the music is playing in an aligned fashion. All the water molecules are aligned in a certain fashion. And that's what accounts for youth, and that's what accounts for effective biochemistry and effective cell division and effective cell chemistry. Because that coherence is not only outside the cell, it's also inside the cell. The hydration of the body is not just extracellular, it's intracellular. But all that starts to break down as we age, largely because of two reasons. Number one, malnutrition which is endemic. Almost everybody is malnourished or undernourished or. I shouldn't say that. Undernutriated. And ironically, we're overnourished and. And undernutriated in the sense that we're all getting lots of calories and lots of food and lots of energy, but we're not getting the molecules that allow the body to use that energy as we age. So because of this malnutrition issue, our bodies break down at the level of coherence. The water is supposed to be tied into the connective tissue. And it's the connective tissue, I. E. The collagen and the hyaluronic acid, that organize the water. So when the body. When you hear the body 70% water. It's 70% organized water or coherent water. And that organization and coherence is facilitated by the connective tissue as well as electrolytes and minerals. Well, most people aren't getting anywhere near the minerals and the electrolytes they need. So that's step number one. And as we age, what happens to our connective tissue? It breaks down. Then you throw in the impact of sugar and smoke and toxicity, and that further accelerates the breakdown of the connective tissue, the collagen and the high hyaluronic acid. And all of a sudden, the water just blobs. I call blobification. And that's exactly what happens. As we age, instead of having these long, these lean lines and angles that youth, youthful people have, we start to. And that's largely the sign of blobification or which is the end result of incoherence of water, decoherence of water following breakdown of collagen breakdown, high connective tissue, high hyaluronic acid, and nutritional deficiencies. And that's why I always say the single most important thing you could do to slow down the aging process. If you want to do one thing, and there's a lot of things you have to do, but if you want to do one thing, build your connective tissue, focus on the connective tissue. And that means inside and out. When I'm formulating skincare products, almost everything I do is to design, to build connective tissue. Retin. This is how retinol works. This is how vitamin C works. This is how peels work. This is how lasers work and ablative procedures work. It's all designed to drive the production of connection connective tissue. And it's not necessarily, although partially, you know, so you have wrinkles. That's what everybody thinks of with connective tissue. But it's really the main reason is so you have something for the water to stick to so the water can become organized without the connective tissue. The water becomes disorganized and coherent law of occation occurs. And then on top of that, most people aren't even getting enough water. They're not even getting enough hydration. Yeah, it's not just hydration. You have to have the coherence and the organization. But mostly you don't even get enough moisture, don't even get enough water. And so between lack of hydration, lack of nutrition, gravity, mutations, toxicity, it's inevitable. And on top of all that, nature wants us to age because it wants you out of the gene pool. It doesn't want you reproducing after a certain age. So everything is a raid against us when it comes to the aging process, which means you have to take affirmative action to slow down the aging process. And let me tell you something, it's as you get older, it is harder and harder and harder to do because everything slows down. Like weight. For example, people who are lean their whole lives, all of a sudden they reach their 50s and 60s and everything they put in their mouth, they gain weight. And they can't lose the weight because everything is slowing down. So you have to take affirmative action. You always have to take affirmative action, even when you're young. But it becomes extra critical to take affirmative action to slow down the aging process. As you age, you're never gonna stop it. But as you age, there are things you can do to slow it down. One of the most important things you could do is move. Use it or lose it. The body has this piezoelectric nature. Particularly the connective tissue has a piezoelectrical nature. That means pressure, piezo means pressure. And piezoelectric means electricity that's generated by pressure. You know, when, when astronauts go to space, when they used to, you know, you probably don't remember, but in the 60s they had the Apollo landing, you know, the Apollo space mission. But they noticed with the Apollo astronauts, when they would come back down, they would have osteoporosis. Even if they were only in space for a short period of time, their bones would start to get weak. So now what do they do? They give them a bike, an exercise bike, or a trampoline, a rebounder, so they can generate electrical charges in their connective tissue so they don't have osteoporosis. Well, we all have to do that. You don't have to be an astronaut to have the to have that urgency to generate electrical charges. Exercise is super important. Cortisol, stress hormone. As we age, you know, cortisol goes up. One of the biggest problems, one of the most notorious problems that older people have is sleeping. Because their cortisol is high. They have chronically high levels of cortisol from chronic inflammation, from chronic toxicity, from chronic malnutrition. All of which is to say two things. Number one, it's inevitable if you don't pay attention. It's inevitable anyway, but it's extra inevitable if you don't pay attention. And number two, you can do something about it. Exercise is key. And when I say exercise, I'm not necessarily talking about going to the gym. I'm talking about stress. You know, we have this idea in our culture that stresses this enemy, right? Oh, you're stressing too much. Stop stressing. When do you have the least amount of stress?
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When you're dead.
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Bingo. You've heard me say that before. All right, when you're dead. Because stress activates the life force within parameters. Obviously you can overstress within certain parameters. You have to leverage stress, exploit stress. And that doesn't just mean exercise, although that is an important part of stress. Stress the skin. I always get a little annoyed when I hear skincare professionals say, oh, don't stress the skin, or oh, don't exfoliate or oh, it's too much. Too much on the skin. No, you want to stress the skin within parameters because it's this balance of stress and rest. So stressing your skin, stressing your body, stressing your mind, doing crossword puzzles, challenging yourself, doing new ideas, brushing your teeth with your left hand instead of your right hand, or writing a letter or writing a note with your left hand instead of your right hand. It's really important to put some kind of burden on the body to slow down the aging process. Nutrition is key. Critical food. The less you eat, the longer you live. One of the most important stresses is starvation. And when I say starvation, I'm not talking about, you know, really starving, but fasting. Intermittent fasting is an amazing longevity inducing strategy. When you intermittently fast, or when you fast or you don't put calories in your body, your body cleans itself out. It's like a self cleaning dishwasher. When there's nothing in it, it actually will clean itself out. They call it autophagy. I don't know if you heard that term where the autophagy means auto eating, automatic eating, the body eats toxicity. When you fast keeping your bowels moving so toxicity doesn't accumulate, especially for women. We were talking earlier about how aging is much harder for women than it is for men. And one of the biggest reasons is estrogen. Well, if you're not clearing estrogen out of your bowels, estrogen recirculates more potent super estrogen. And so making sure your bowels are running cleanly. Do you know one of the best ways to make sure that you're having healthy bowel movements, that your bowels are moving is fasting. When you fast, you activate a neuromuscular setup in the digestive tract called a migrating motor complex. Have you heard of this, the MMR or mmc? The migrating motor complex is this neuromuscular movement activity that propels food out your body, and it's activated when you don't eat, and it's deactivated by eating, which is one of the reasons why that advice, they don't say anymore as much, but they used to say, oh, eat all day and graze and have five meals a day. No, it's the worst thing you could do because you're shutting down this migrating motor complex and inducing constipation, which itself induces recirculation of estrogen and toxicity. It's just kind of ironic because the migrating motor complex, this neuromuscular setup in the digestive system, it is audible. You can hear it, and we know when it's kicking in. Have you ever heard this rumble in your tummy?
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Yeah.
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What do you think? What do we think of when we think hear a rumble in our tummy? We think, oh, time to eat. No, it's not. That's the activation of the migrating motor complex, cleaning out your body. And that's one of the best ways to induce longevity. Another great way, breathing. Slow, deep, rhythmic breathing. In Indian or Ayurvedic medicine, they call it pranayama. Make sure you're breathing correctly. Make sure you're oxygenating correctly. There are so many things we can do, but we have to do them affirmatively all the time. But we especially have to do them affirmatively as we get older. Otherwise, not only is aging inevitable, but even worse, decrepitude, breaking down. And that's what you do not want to have happen, aging. Okay? But the breakdown process, particularly of the connective tissue, not only is it unappealing and unattractive to look at, it can be agonizingly painful. And that's the last thing anybody wants to have happen. You know, we all want to live a long time, but you want to have quality of life. So we all want longevity, but you want quality of life associated with longevity. Unless you take affirmative action to do all the things we know we have to do anyway, but with extra vigilance and with extra attention as we get older, it ain't pretty. And that's just the way nature intended it.
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That concludes our show for today, and we thank you for listening. But if you just can't get enough of Ben Foods, 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.