EFR 768: The Best Things You Can Do to Improve Skin Health, Reverse Aging, and Navigating Holistic Plastic Surgery with Dr. Anthony Youn

00:00 - Speaker 1 Humans are meant to age. However, we are not meant to age the way most of us are currently aging. I think we've forgotten what natural aging even looks like. What does natural aging?

00:10 - Speaker 2 look like. So when I think of natural aging, I think of, and you look at, basically how the life expectancy has increased every decade, which is a huge success. But the problem is the quality of life Right, and unfortunately, really, traditional medicine is so focused on lifespan that I would argue that the vast majority of physicians, if you say, well, what do you think about health span, they'll have no idea what you're talking about.

00:37 - Speaker 1 The damage has been done right. I've already. I've gotten too much sun damage, too much scarring, too many years of not doing anything. Do you really believe that it's never too late to stop the aging process?

00:49 - Speaker 2 Oh, it totally is. Our body is meant to rejuvenate itself. Our body has natural regenerative abilities that if we call on it to do that, it will function in that manner. So the way I look at it, it's like you're building a house and some people come in to see me in my office and say, hey, dr, you know I want a facelift here's, you know, I've got money in hand. I want to face if I want to look 10 years younger. And it's like, oh, wait, a minute here. The way I look at like it's like building a house and like the facelift, the actual surgery is like the spire on top of your house. The food you eat is going to be the foundation. That's what's really going to be the foundation of your whole, of all of your aging.

01:23 My name is Dr Anthony Youn and I'm known as America's holistic plastic surgeon, and this is Ever Forward Radio.

01:39 - Speaker 1 Well, tony, welcome to the show Officially. We'll jump in here.

01:42 - Speaker 2 Thank you so much, chase, I appreciate it.

01:43 - Speaker 1 You know I love what you were work, what I, what I'm looking at your work as this amazing blend of real world being a human, what it's like to live and die. I'm playing an earth kind of thing with the medical model and this whole concept of holistic plastic surgery, which I really want to get into. But around your new book and just what I see so much of your content focusing on now, it is aging, but resilient aging.

02:08 And you have this great quote I want to start off with I think is a great primer for the reader as well as for the listener here today. Humans are meant to age. However, we are not meant to age the way most of us are currently aging. I think we've forgotten what natural aging even looks like. What does natural aging look like?

02:27 - Speaker 2 So when I think of natural aging, I think of where my ancestors came from in South Korea and I look at my grandparents and you know, when they aged they are active their whole lives and then at some point when they get to a point in their lives where they literally will unfortunately die fairly quickly, but they get to like 87, they get to 90, they get to 95 and they're active, they're walking, they're eating, they're having fun, they're enjoying their life, and then something happens where their life ends. That is very different than what we're seeing in the Western model of aging, when it's this kind of gradual decline to the point where our actual healthcare system is propping us up. You know, how many people do you know who are in their 60s, 70s and 80s and they're on so many medications you know they really are not active, They've got constant aches and pains.

03:21 - Speaker 1 30s- 40s, 50s I know people yeah.

03:24 - Speaker 2 And then they're undergoing interventions to essentially keep them alive. And the medical system. You know I did all my training. You know, traditionally I did three years of general surgery, I did two years of plastic surgery, I did a cosmetic surgery fellowship. So I'm fully trained in everything. I've worked in the ICUs and it works really well when you're really sick and it can really help prop us up and you look at basically how the life expectancy has increased every decade, which is a huge success.

03:54 But the problem is, the quality of life is a whole different story and that's that thing that you've talked about on the podcast before. You know, there's health span and there's lifespan and there are two very different things and unfortunately, really traditional medicine is so focused on lifespan that I would argue that the vast majority of physicians, if you say, well, what do you think about health span, They'll have no idea what you're talking about. And so for me, you know, coming from traditional medicine, I went through a period of time where that's what I practiced and that's what I preached actually to my patients, and then I came to a realization that this is not really the way to go.

04:30 - Speaker 1 I'm curious what would be your definitions of health, Span and lifespan?

04:35 - Speaker 2 So lifespan essentially is how long you can live and, once again, our traditional medical system is great at extending our lifespan, but at what cost and what quality of life are you having in those last 10 or 20 years? Health span is the amount of time that you're alive, that you are active, that you are healthy, that you are enjoying life, that you are truly living a life that's fulfilled and that, once again, is something that you can have for a very long time. But you cannot, unfortunately, do that if you're living in today's society, under today's rules, under today's diet. You know what people do for activities stress level so much of what we have in our lifestyle today is is a net negative when you look at overall health span.

05:21 - Speaker 1 True true, true, it kind of brings to mind for me blue zones. You're familiar. Oh, yeah, so Dan Butler's work, amazing book, the Blue Zones. I saw him speak at a conference, actually in my undergrad, my first semester in my undergrad program, 10, 11 years ago now, and I was blown away. I was like why are more people talking about this? Yeah, now there's a little bit of a resurgence, I think, thanks to a lot of people like you know your work Huberman, peter Atia, gabrielle Lyon of this longevity aspect and I see a resurgence in his work. There's a new Netflix documentary out around the blue zones.

05:54 And it was so powerful to me and so kind of such a positive reminder of what end of life can, if not even should, look like you know he had on a couple of keywords health span, lifespan but movement and and I think you said, happy people in these blue zones that are having higher and longer quality of life and living longer.

06:15 They're smiling, yeah, they're with other people and they're moving. Yeah, maybe not a particular blue zone, but do you think that? But do you, as an MD and a holistic plastic surgeon, do you look at a particular type of group of person, like in a particular region, ethnicity, culture, as like hey, this is a great example of what we're talking about, of where health span and lifespan kind of come together.

06:38 - Speaker 2 So yeah, I think if you look at the blue zones, the obvious choice for me, being Asian American, would be there. Okinawa is one of those Right Now. Being Korean, you know we grew up Japanese, were not necessarily kind of Koreans over the centuries, so for me I do look at South Korea, you know, because for me that's kind of and plastic surgery is a whole lot of story. We can talk about that later. But really I think when I look at it I look at the lifestyle of my parents and my grandparents and how even that has changed as they have brought their children or they have raised their children here in the United States. You know, I grew up in the middle of Michigan in a blue collar meat and potatoes fast food small town, michigan, and it was an interesting dichotomy because it's a little different in Korea.

07:24 Yeah, my parents, literally immigrated and came straight, essentially, to.

07:28 Michigan and they barely spoke English, you know, and it was this weird situation where we're the only Korean family, the only real, the only ethnic family, non-white family, essentially in town. And how do you get through that? As a kid, you kind of want to be everybody else, and so for me, like my diet, for example, consisted of either going out my friends and eating McDonald's or I would have Korean food at home, which would be rice, fish, kimchi, so fermented foods, lots of garlic, like all this great healthy foods, but some of my favorite foods.

08:04 But then on the other side, it's like you go out with your friends and our American small town society there was built off of essentially meat and potatoes and fried foods and all of that. So, yeah, so for me, when I look at it and I look at longevity, the first people I look at are my parents and my grandparents and the people who came, you know, from that part of the world, because there are so many practices that they employ that I think we could learn from.

08:30 - Speaker 1 And it's funny.

08:31 - Speaker 2 I've been making these videos lately so I've got a big following on TikTok and Instagram.

08:35 - Speaker 1 Big TikTok guy. Everybody Check him out. It's kind of funny. Great videos.

08:38 - Speaker 2 But I started making these videos on how to age like an Asian and I thought it was kind of funny because a lot of people are like, well, a lot of it's true and a lot of it's just kind of silly over the top stuff, but it is a lot of it is really true of a lot of things that they do, and they did it not necessarily that they knew. You know, I'm eating kimchi as like a staple of the diet, being essentially what that is fermented cabbage with hot sauce. Right, you know, I ate it growing up every day almost, and I never thought, oh, I'm adding probiotics to my microbiome.

09:07 - Speaker 1 It was just a regular staple of your food, of your family, not necessarily doing this for my skin health, anti-aging.

09:13 - Speaker 2 And as you get older, you start realizing like, oh my gosh, there's a lot of these things that we were doing that were really good for us, and we didn't even realize it. And you know why is that the case? You know it's. That's a whole other story.

09:24 - Speaker 1 That is. That is you guys got to check out the blue zones? We want to learn more about that. You talk about how it's never too late to reverse the aging process. I think that's a statement that caught me off guard and catches a lot of people off guard. The damage has been done, right. I've already. I've gotten too much sun damage, too much scarring, too many years of not doing anything. Do you really believe that it's never too late to stop the aging process?

09:49 - Speaker 2 Oh, it totally is, and there's so many examples that. So our body is meant to rejuvenate itself. Our body has natural regenerative abilities that if we call on it to do that, it will function in that manner. So, just for example, you know, as a surgeon I still operate two, three days a week and if I get a patient who comes in who's a smoker, they've been smoking for 20 years.

10:10 Okay, now, the main reason why we don't operate on smokers is because smoking will constrict blood vessels. If your blood vessels are so constricted that you do not have enough blood supply to a part of the body to heal it after surgery, it can become necrotic, it can literally turn black and it can die. As a plastic surgeon, I do a lot of, let's say, breast lift surgeries. I do a lot of faith slips, I do a lot of tummy tucks where we elevate the skin for these parts of the body and we cut off a lot of that blood supply. And if there's not enough blood supply to heal that, to supply that body part, literally it dies, it gets infected and everything essentially falls apart. Now, the reason why I'm saying this is that when you have somebody who's a lifetime smoker, if you take them off smoking for about four to six weeks. That's enough time. As long as you're off, they're not cheating or anything. That's enough time for those blood vessels to reopen up, even if they've been smoking for 20 to 40 years.

11:02 - Speaker 1 So a month or two of not smoking can get someone ready to be in a better recovery place To the essentially the same place recovery wise, the tissue recovery wise, is somebody who was a non-smoker all their life.

11:15 - Speaker 2 Our body does have these regenerative abilities. It's just we have to call upon it to do that. And so, yes, I do believe that it's never too late to reverse aging. There are so many things that you can do with, and the way I look at my book, it's kind of four pronged attack, technically. Five it's what to eat, when to eat, it's supplements, skincare, and then it's kind of alternative treatments, if desired. That if you call on your body, you do that. You call on your body to use its own regenerative abilities, you can see some really profound impacts, and so you don't have to go under the knife, you don't have to go under the needle. It's just using your body's own regenerative abilities. That's what I call autojuvenation Is using your body's own regenerative abilities to literally rejuvenate itself, and it will. That's the crazy thing.

12:00 - Speaker 1 It's like I'm sure you'll hear this soon when you when you talk with them. But it's like my man, sean Stevenson, always says if we just stack the conditions in our favor, the body will not only just survive but thrive. It wants so much more than just homeostasis, and it actually undo a lot of the damage that we choose to do to it.

12:16 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just. The problem is is that our society is so filled with these negative influences that I mean it's tough. I mean now, you know, I've got high school age kids and it's like you know what? I don't see hardly anybody that smokes anymore, but everybody is vaping, everybody is vaping, and so they actually was a study that looked at the effects of wound healing, comparing smoking to vaping, even if you didn't vape nicotine, and you had similar negative impacts in wound healing with smoking versus vaping, and, once again, even if the vaping wasn't even nicotine. Like what is it with that?

12:49 - Speaker 1 We don't even know the inhalation process.

12:51 - Speaker 2 We don't know if it's the chemicals that are in those liquids that you are heating up to these high temperatures Interesting, you know, is it some people there? There's a lot of hypotheses. Some people say it's even some of the plastics that are in these devices that may even start to break down micro plastics, that's.

13:05 - Speaker 1 that's a whole, nother episode.

13:06 - Speaker 2 We don't know. But even even if you don't have actually nicotine in your vape, it still impacts wound healing the same way. And so you add that with some of the other things that we haven't even studied. You know, with marijuana smoking so many people now smoking marijuana we don't know. We do know the impacts of cigarette smoking being such a huge net negative for our health span and even our lifespan. We're learning what the effects of marijuana might be. But even with my patients I tell them look, marijuana was illegal for so long. We don't have any studies on it. So we don't know. If it's going to constrict your blood vessels, we don't know. Is it going to prematurely age you five, 10 years from now? You know, I see patients who come in to see my, to see my office, and literally within a few seconds of looking at them I can tell you that they're, if they're a smoker or not.

13:48 - Speaker 1 I bet I can tell you their diet.

13:49 - Speaker 2 I can tell you that kind of you know how active they are. I mean it's it all shows up in the skin, wow.

13:54 - Speaker 1 So you kind of already hit on it. Talking about, you know, kimchi and your upbringing, let's focus on diet for anti-aging.

14:00 - Speaker 2 Yeah.

14:01 - Speaker 1 What is so crucial about our diet Not meaning not necessarily I abide by this particular diet, but the food that I eat on a regular basis what type of influences that really have on our skin in terms of aging or anti-aging?

14:16 - Speaker 2 So the way I look at it, it's like you're building a house and some people come in to see me in my office and say, hey, dr, you know I want a facelift here's, you know, I've got money in hand I want to face if I want to look 10 years younger. And it's like, oh, wait a minute here. The way I look at like it's like building a house and like the facelift, the actual surgery is like the spire on top of your house. The food you eat is going to be the foundation. That's what's really going to be the foundation of your whole, of all of your aging, and so the way that I look at it is everything really is based upon that.

14:44 Now, when I look at overall aging of the skin you know longevity is a little bit different versus actual aging of the skin and premature aging I look at really five main issues that can occur causing our skin to age more quickly. The first thing is nutrient depletion. Second thing is inflammation. Third thing is oxidation or free radicals. The fourth thing is collagen degradation and the fifth thing is buildup of cellular waste. When you look at all of these things, what you have to eat impacts pretty much all of that, right, yeah, diabetes influences everything you just said.

15:16 Exactly so now you may talk to. So if you say, hey, I want to look younger, and you talk to, let's say, an alternative health practitioner and say, hey, what should I do for a younger, better looking skin, and they'll be like, oh, you got to heal your gut. Heal your gut and your skin's going to be better. And you talk to dermatologist, you go, hey, what should I do for a younger, better looking skin? They go where's sunscreen and use a retinoid. And then you talk to a plastic surgeon and they'll go get laser treatments and a facelift. And really, the truth is, ideally, like in so many things in life, it's combining the best of all worlds that's going to get you the best result. And so food, being really the basis of all of this, and eating the right types of foods, can impact all those five main causes of aging of the skin and, at the same time, not eating the right foods can impact all five of those as well and cause you to age more prematurely.

16:01 - Speaker 1 Let's go there and you give us maybe a couple of foods that you think most people, or a lot of people, are under consuming or not eating at all, that are actually a disservice to their skin health.

16:11 - Speaker 2 Yeah. So, for example, if you look at these aging, aging causes inflammation. Okay, so what is inflammation? Interestingly enough, inflammation can be good and bad. So some people think, oh, inflammation is bad. You want to reduce inflammation, period, and that's not necessarily always a case. Acute inflammation can be a very good thing. So if you get cut a cut on your arm, you get inflammation around that wound and your body heals it. It has to create inflammation.

16:35 - Speaker 1 It's a healthy reaction we're not going to heal right, Exactly.

16:38 - Speaker 2 So that's a healthy reaction that will be beneficial when you get a laser treatment of your skin that creates inflammation, acute inflammation. Acute inflammation can cause the collagen of the skin to become tighter. It can make your skin actually look younger and act younger and be younger in some ways afterwards. So acute inflammation can be a great thing. We even see now you know, it's kind of the same idea of people who are doing cold water plunges and really putting their body under short-term periods of stress.

17:05 - Speaker 1 I'm in that club now, that annoying club where we just post about it on social media there, you go.

17:10 - Speaker 2 So, yeah, I mean, putting your body under short periods of stress can be a very good thing. It's that chronic inflammation that can be negative. And so, when you look at chronic inflammation for the body, what is the number one cause of chronic inflammation, especially when you look at the skin? It's sugar. Okay, so sugar.

17:26 - Speaker 1 I'm not going to be a surprise to anybody, at least not listening to this show, but please unpack that more for us and let's get a good reminder.

17:31 - Speaker 2 So a lot of people think of sugar and they go oh, you eat a lot of sugar, you eat a lot of carbs, you're going to gain weight, you're going to, you know it's metabolically it makes you unhealthy. But what a lot of people don't realize is that sugar is a great age of our skin as well. So the sugar can impact our skin by causing chronic inflammation, in two different ways. The first way is glycation, so sugar can bond to the collagen and the elastin in your skin, causing it to become deformed. When we look at the structure of our skin, our skin is composed 70 to 80% of collagen. Collagen is that part of the skin that cause it to feel tight and strong and you know, when you're young it's you've got a lot of collagen and you've got nice, smooth, tight skin. As we get older, we lose about 1% of the thickness of our collagen, of our skin every year, starting around in our mid twenties or so.

18:17 That soon really yeah, so you start losing about 1% a year.

18:21 Women after menopause lose upwards of 2% a year after they go through menopause, and that's why you may see women who are in their seventies and eighties and their skin is like tissue paper thin and if you even just like scratch it against a door or something like that, it tears. And so the first thing we look at is um with is is you want to make sure that you build up your collagen and you don't continue to lose it? So when you have collagen as youthful it's it's the way I describe it it's like the logs of a log cabin and those colleges is in these tightly packed logs. It's nice and tight, it's solid, but as we get older, those laws become a bit frayed. They start to fall apart. What sugar does is sugar can then bind to those collagen proteins and it can bind to them, causing what's called a creating, what's called an advanced glycation end product or an AGE. And essentially what it does is it kinks that collagen and cause it permanently to become deformed.

19:12 - Speaker 1 So it kind of creeps into the mortar of our internal of our skin, our skin and instead of the collagen kind of coming in and resetting the sugar is patch in those holes and deforming the structure.

19:26 - Speaker 2 Exactly, and that's why one reason why, as we get older, our skin feels rougher, it's not as smooth it's because that collagen itself has, essentially, is falling apart, and so what sugar does is sugar causes that process to go more quickly, because it will actually bond to them, creating these sugar protein hybrids called advanced glycation and products, and so sugar will then cause you to prematurely age and to look older the more that you eat it. The second way that sugar causes our skin to age more quickly is chronic inflammation. This is something that you've covered before on your podcast. Well, I realized, though, is that that inflammation can be seen on the skin as premature aging, so chronic sugar spikes equal chronic insulin spikes. Chronic insulin spikes can create chronic inflammation. You get insulin resistance, where, essentially, you've got so many sugar spikes that your tissues are not reacting to that insulin anymore. Sugar goes up. You get pre diabetes, you get diabetes, type two diabetes and all that stuff that you've covered here before.

20:21 - Speaker 1 Somewhere in the palace stage right now, dr Casey means is jumping for joy. Your ears are ringing and you know the funny thing is.

20:27 - Speaker 2 So some people say well, you know that metabolically that's unhealthy and stuff, but what a lot of people don't realize is that will make you look older. And so I get people that come into my office and you know it's interesting because we all have our own, our own what's the word for it? The things that drive us, that cause us to change our lives like intrusive motivations.

20:46 Yes, exactly, and for some people, like for me, a huge motivator is I want to be alive when my daughter gets married, like I want to walk her down the aisle. Other people's motivations may be that they, you know, want to feel strong, or they want to live to a certain age, or whatever Some people's motivations are. They just want to look good, they want to look in the mirror and feel good about themselves, or they want to turn heads or something to that extent. And so there's so many people that come into my office where they're not motivated by some of these other things. You may say well, you know, if you keep being this way, you're going to die an early death or you're going to have a heart attack, or you're not going to, you're going to get COPD in your lungs if you keep smoking, and they don't care. But if you say you're going to get more wrinkles, they'll go wait a minute here.

21:28 - Speaker 1 So you just got to find that leverage.

21:30 - Speaker 2 And hey, if that's what it takes to change a lifestyle, then hey, I'm all for it.

21:35 - Speaker 1 You were talking about collagen quite a bit and in your book and so much of your work you talk about collagen. You drive that into the ground in a good way. So I'm curious because I think over the years collagen has kind of surfaced a lot in the supplement world, but also, hey, get more of it in your diet. I'm curious what matters more if we put it on externally or consumer internally. So if I put on like a collagen cream or moisturizer or something like that, externally, am I getting as much bank for my book as, like my coffee here, strong coffee company? I'm drinking 15 grams of collagen, I'm ingesting it, metabolizing it and then it's getting into my body from the inside out. Yes, is there a preferred method internal versus external collagen?

22:13 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so collagen is a huge protein. It's a large protein and if you put collagen, a collagen cream, on your skin, it will do nothing because it's too big, because our skin is a barrier and the skin is made. It's made basically to keep out things we don't want in our body. But we want collagen in our body. But collagen is a large protein and it's going to sit on the surface because there's no way for it to actually penetrate through the areas of the skin where maybe, if you put, let's say, a topical medication, you know hormone, let's say hormone patch, where it will go through, that Collagen's too big to okay, so it will not.

22:48 - Speaker 1 The reason why so we're just rubbing our money away.

22:50 - Speaker 2 You are so collagen creams. All they do is they moisturize your skin. That's it. So I do not recommend spending excess money on a collagen cream. Okay, that's.

22:57 - Speaker 1 BS. So you can get moisturized skin but you're not really getting collagen benefits in your skin.

23:03 - Speaker 2 It won't add anything to you. It's literally like hey, let's put protein on your skin, that's not going to do anything Now, versus going internally Injusting. It's a whole other story. Okay, so collagen once again, it's a big protein and it's fascinating because this is a big controversy online where you know I Is there, collagen in there. No, there's not. I have actually posted on collagen and saying you know, I'm a believer in collagen supplements and I've had doctors and other fitness people say oh, that's BS, it doesn't do anything.

23:36 - Speaker 1 A lot of people, especially in the fitness industry, will say collagen is one of the most useless supplements.

23:40 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and the interesting thing is that they're totally wrong. So let me explain. So collagen is a large protein, and the reason why people say that it doesn't work is because it's such a large protein. You ingest it, it gets broken down in your stomach. You go. How do you even know what's going to get to your skin? So the fact is, if you're going to get a collagen supplement, you should get hydrolyzed collagen peptides. So what is that? Well, essentially, you take that collagen, large protein, and you break it down into individual peptides and amino acids. Amino acids are the individuals. Peptides are a group of amino acids, usually a small number of them. The reason why they call them hydrolyzed, the reason why they break it down in that, is so that you can actually absorb it, and so your intestine can actually, your gut can actually absorb that.

24:20 - Speaker 1 So that's a key word. We should be looking for hydrolyzed collagen.

24:24 - Speaker 2 Yes, so that's the idea behind hydrolyzing collagen as you break that collagen, that big protein, down into individual amino acids or into small peptides so that you can absorb it Amazing. So then, what does the science show? There are many, many studies that actually have looked at hydrolyzed collagen supplements and have found a beneficial effect, especially on the skin. So, for me, that's what I look at. I look at skin. I haven't looked at, let's say, muscle or even joints, although there are a lot of anecdotal stories there but when you actually look at the skin, there was a meta analysis published in 2021 of 1400 people. They took 90 days of a hydrolyzed collagen supplement and found a statistically significant improvement in wrinkles, in skin hydration and skin elasticity.

25:08 - Speaker 1 Meaning like reduction of wrinkles, increase in elasticity.

25:12 - Speaker 2 Yes, so statistically significant. There are studies that look at people who take hydrolyzed collagen supplements and they look at them for, let's say, two months and they actually will biopsy their skin and find an increase in the amount of collagen or the thickness of the skin. You can't deny that. There's so many studies out there. Interesting thing okay, there's a doctor who's on TikTok.

25:31 He's an older guy, he is a cardiologist who has got some nutrition training and stuff and he looks kind of like Santa Claus. He's got a huge beard and he speaks very matter of factly. You know it's all about nutrition and he's one to debunk claims by everybody. And so he did do a video about a year and a half ago basically saying that collagen supplements are worthless, just by some Jell-O and have gelatin, and it's the same thing. Interestingly, about two or three months ago I came across that video. I'm like why is this video playing again? All of a sudden his image shows up and he swats the video aside and he says I was wrong. Really, I re-looked at all the studies and collagen supplements do work. And he said I was wrong about this and all the claims I made don't listen to. Collagen supplements do work. And I was like oh my gosh, this is a traditionally trained cardiologist.

26:25 When you hear that in medicine, yeah, yeah who went public saying that he didn't believe in collagen supplements and about a year and a half, two years later, whatever? Came back around and said you know what? The data's there and it shows that it works. Now, full disclosure. I do have a collagen supplement that we have in my Youn Beauty line.

26:44 - Speaker 1 Amazing. Okay, so you not?

26:45 - Speaker 2 only promoted, but you actually have a product, yeah, and so it's our top selling supplement. And I cannot tell you how many people who've come in that said my skin looks better, my hair looks better, my hair's thicker, my nails are stronger. I have people say my joints feel better. The stories are endless. I mean, in fact, I was visiting my parents a few weeks ago and my mom was making something for breakfast and she goes Tony, my hair's gotten a lot thicker, do you think?

27:11 - Speaker 1 it's that collagen you keep sending me.

27:13 - Speaker 2 Mom, I've been telling you, come on. So I mean the data's there, the anecdotal stories are all there. I'm not sure why so many people just don't. I think that they're just. In general, in traditional medicine there is a prejudice against any type of supplement period.

27:31 - Speaker 1 Usually and I mean look at all the information and misinformation that has, you know, exponentially grown over the years people, when they're looking to make a choice to improve their life, they go to the internet, they go to social media and there's so much combating evidence. You know this person says absolutely yes, absolutely no, so I think something with collagen. They're probably like either 100% a believer or you think it's BS.

27:52 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think too that there's. There are traditional physicians who they just believe you know the science from so long ago and they are not willing to listen to people who may disagree with them. You know, I've for me, you know I'm open to information, health information, from anybody, whatever the source is. You know whether it's a chiropractor or a naturopath, an MD, a DO, but being it trained traditionally, that's not the case with most physicians. If I were to, let's say, go to my doctor's lounge in my local hospital, where the doctors will sit and have lunch and say, oh, I was talking to a chiropractor about nutrition the other day, they would be met with Snickers and Gafas, if they even are brave enough to say that out loud, I'm sure, yeah, I mean if you can't even.

28:35 And it's just. There's this prejudice and traditional medicine against anything that is not what they consider their evidence-based. And now what they'll say is is that evidence-based? That's gonna be the argument Is that evidence-based? So what do you mean? And then you show them studies like look, there are all these studies. Well, I don't believe that evidence. I need better evidence.

28:53 - Speaker 1 I need evidence that supports my bias. One other question on collagen, and then I want to get into something that you kind of just prompted. Is there a recommended dosage for collagen?

29:03 - Speaker 2 Is there a sweet spot of grams for male, female, daily, every other day, not necessarily because they're all different, yeah, and some collagen supplements actually are thicker than others density-wise, and so what I usually recommend is pick the one that you like the best. So for us, our Yuen Beauty collagen. It has no taste to it, and that's one reason why I like it. There are some collagen out there that do have a little bit of a beefy taste.

29:27 - Speaker 1 Yeah, Some people like that. There's grass-fed.

29:30 - Speaker 2 I can tell there you go, but no, I don't know if there is an actual specific guideline of what you need to have. I think that the thing that's important with collagen, though, is it's not necessarily a substitute for protein Right supplement. Exactly because it doesn't contain enough of the different amino acids that you need as a macro, as a protein macronutrient for you in general. Correct me if I'm wrong, do you?

29:52 - Speaker 1 know, is it a complete protein? Does it have every amino acid?

29:56 - Speaker 2 I don't think so. All the essential amino acids? I don't think so either. I don't think so.

29:59 - Speaker 1 Yeah, that's why it's good for what we're talking about, for skin health as a pure supplement.

30:03 - Speaker 2 Akspane joints things like that yes but I would not necessarily use that as a quote unquote. Protein powder that's a good point and so, like if I have. One of the big things with younger for life is we have a 21-day jumpstart and part of it is a shake every morning and that shake contains a protein powder and a scoop of collagen, because I think that really you need both.

30:21 - Speaker 1 Technically, that's a really good point. I hope the listener picks up on that that if you are consuming collagen in any which way in your diet, it's great, for whatever reason you're choosing. But I would even go as far as say me personally don't count that towards your total grams of protein consumption per day.

30:38 - Speaker 2 Thinking that you're hitting your numbers. I totally agree, yeah, and I think most doctors who are really in the know would agree with you that that doesn't quite count it really. It truly is what you call a supplement Like it's hey, throw it in, it's a nice little thing to add in, but it's not something that's going to take the place of you eating sufficient amounts of protein every day.

30:55 - Speaker 1 So what you prompted in me was, I think, something that I always come back to with a lot of guests and when I look at you know I kind of have one foot in the scientific, traditional medical world and one foot in alternative, holistic healing and what different modalities. I have been in this business, this industry, for about close to 15 years now and I think that is a good enough time to really look at, you know, what was really trending or what the evidence to your point supported eight, 10 years ago, and it kind of seems to kind of go in circles a little bit One year, one decade Absolutely yes, the next absolutely no, or there's too much combating evidence. Do you think, when it comes to keeping on topic here with aging, skin health, resilient aging, lifespan, health span, is it really just a matter of the science catching up to what people are doing in terms of nutrition, in terms of topical, internal, external, college and things like that, to really get the supporting evidence, or are we just constantly trying to retest things to get a different answer?

31:56 - Speaker 2 No, I think it's the first you know, because when you look at it, I mean, who are the people who are on the cutting edge of a lot of these really anti-aging or pro, you know, increasing your health span? Those are the biohackers out there, and they're just trying anything. The fact is is that if you're going to do an actual study, an IRB approved study, okay and you're going to have a placebo controlled clinical trial and you're going to eventually publish it, it takes years to get there, you know I publish.

32:25 - Speaker 1 What about like a decade for a good one?

32:27 - Speaker 2 I mean, it depends on how long you do the study for.

32:28 - Speaker 1 Like clinical human trials.

32:29 - Speaker 2 But for example yeah, so for example, I have published many scientific papers and articles in our literature. I would say, if you're doing, let's say, a three or six month trial, it's going to take you a good six to 12 months just to get that IRB approved. So have it approved by the ethics boards and all of that. You cannot conduct a human trial without getting it approved by ethics boards first, and typically those are associated with different universities. So that's the first step you have to do is you have to create the, the study, then you have to get it approved by an IRB so that it is ethically approved, so that you can actually experiment.

33:07 - Speaker 1 Essentially, and IRB is for us.

33:09 - Speaker 2 It's the inter, it's like the international review board or something like that, but essentially it's a governing body. It's a governing body, typically either at universities or based usually at hospitals or universities, where they will look at your study and make sure that it's safe to perform on a human.

33:23 - Speaker 1 Okay, because there is a good thing.

33:25 - Speaker 2 Yeah, because there could be ethical issues there where? So, for example, let's say you have a life saving medication and there are people dying from this disease all over the place and your trial is going to go too long and you're going to lose too many lives, then they may say, hey, this is not the right thing. Or let's say you're going to conduct a study and you're doing something that is not good for somebody you know that can be harmed by your study. Then they may not allow that to happen. So it's a very important part of doing any type of clinical trial on humans. So you got that that you have to do, and then you conduct the study and then you have to then submit the study for publication. And even when you get it accepted for publication, it can take a couple years sometimes for it to actually be published because of the backlog.

34:09 Now what's happening now that's interesting is that there are these open forums now online where, in order to get around this whole time constraint, there are online journals now that are publishing. Sometimes the articles are not quite as powerful, they're not quite as groundbreaking, but it's a way to get things out more quickly. It's a long answer to your question of you know. Really, I think what's going on is that people are kind of trying to push the limits. People are changing things, but it does take time for that to actually get published and then for people to read it. By then You're on to the next thing.

34:41 Like biohackers are way advanced after that. I mean people are just, you know. I mean I'll turn to medicine. They've been talking about the microbiome for decades and now physicians are finally talking about over the last just like five years.

34:54 - Speaker 1 It's a right, so it takes a while to take a little later the party. But you know, hey, I'm glad we're finally here, kind of thing.

35:00 - Speaker 2 Yeah, but you know, as a plastic surgeon somebody who does a lot of interventions there is importance to some of that because, you know, for me I see people who are experimenting with cosmetic treatments on things that I know it's just not going to work, and so they're definitely. You know it's important to have that scientific method there, absolutely, but it does slow the process down, right.

35:20 - Speaker 1 And I want to get into what you do, you know under the blade, so to speak, in a second. But maybe think of something else Biohackers, people that are using wearables. You know I've got an Apple Watch, a Woop, here. I went years, probably eight years, of logging 80, 90 percent of my meals. So I have a lot of data of how I'm moving, how I'm sleeping, what I'm eating, both quantitative and qualitative, and I'm curious, in your medical opinion, if we had enough of us. You know people who have years of self-collected data, let's say quantitative and qualitative, through a wearable fitness activity tracker, smart device, whatever, or your manually inputting information. Could that get to a point in the scientific community of gathering that data and kind of like reverse engineering or going about a clinical study in a different way?

36:13 I know it's hard to say clinical, in the same sentence there, because there's so many other various variables.

36:18 - Speaker 2 I think what you have to look at when you look at studies is the power of the study, and so, technically, there's a pyramid and you ideally want to get to the top of the pyramid. That's going to be the highest quality of a study. And the highest quality of study is going to be a prospective randomized control trial where you've got a placebo.

36:36 - Speaker 1 You've got control, and then it's blinded.

36:40 - Speaker 2 So nobody knows what they're getting, and then those numbers are very high and, unfortunately, with what you're saying like, you know, yes, you can get data and you can get information that can be helpful, but that's going to be on that lower end of that pyramid, so and there are a lot of articles that are published like that they're definitely really helpful, but that's where you really do want to keep track. The problem with some of the really powerful studies, though and I think where medicine can go wrong, is bioindividuality, is not taking into account bioindividuality and the fact that there's some people who may react in a certain way that's different than the vast majority of the population. Traditional medicine cannot deal with that. You know it's like oh, if your lab result is in this, you know this range, then you're normal period.

37:23 - Speaker 1 If biomarker says this, then you are that.

37:26 - Speaker 2 Yes, and that's, I think a big problem with medicine nowadays is that there is no that taking the individual person's symptoms and then bringing that into account, like maybe they're a high normal, but you know, on your scale that has been tested on 10,000 people but for them that high normal is actually really high because they have certain sensitivities that they're not accounting for. So it's interesting that I think that the tide is slowly shifting towards combining alternative with traditional medicine and that's really the way to go and that's kind of the direction for me, that I'm going with my practice and that I went with the book and stuff.

38:01 - Speaker 1 It makes me curious. Thank you for your input on that. I'm wondering you know biohackers unite? You know if we all have X amount of years or X amount of months of this type of data you know, hey, let's pull the here's. Here's a new sample size, here's a unique population with enough data points to at least kind of maybe extrapolate a few things, and maybe then that group would be grounds for, you know, an actual clinical study. That'd be really interesting.

38:24 - Speaker 2 It could be. I mean, all you need really is Dave Asprey's numbers and then that counts for every.

38:30 - Speaker 1 I mean that's like 5000 people just didn't probably his numbers alone.

38:33 - Speaker 2 I bet, I bet yeah.

38:34 - Speaker 1 But you know, even these devices, they give us so much information. You know, like, I've been using WOOP for about four years. It's a physical activity tracker that tracks, you know, during day, during sleep, when I'm training, recovery, and I mean what it can provide, like I might even fully tapping into. I just use it for, you know, a daily nudge in the right direction, you know, I think that's great gas, gas down or gas off, kind of thing.

38:56 But it makes me wonder, you know, hey, if we kind of pulled all our data together, what, what could we do?

39:01 - Speaker 2 It's a good thought, we do, yeah, at some point, I think these companies who are I mean, I'm assuming your data is aggregated, is being aggregated as we speak by a company and at some point they're going to do something with that data.

39:12 - Speaker 1 Big brother, if you're out there, be kind, be kind.

39:15 - Speaker 2 And they'll create something to sell, I'm sure and make a lot of money off of it.

39:19 - Speaker 1 Well, I do want to kind of shift into the latter part of the interview here now and talk about, I think, what a lot of people are interested in. Maybe they have experimented with or are really curious about, and that's okay. I'm looking at my diet, I'm looking at these kind of holistic methods, but for my own personal reason, maybe even a medical reason, I want to spend more money and go under the blade, go under the laser, get a treatment of some kind of variety. What do you think is the? What is the number one treatment you would recommend?

39:51 - Speaker 2 Like it's statement where do you start?

39:53 - Speaker 1 Where do you start?

39:53 - Speaker 2 Okay, so I mean, I think the first thing is you start by focusing on the other stuff, so you focus on the diet and you really take the recommendations. The interesting thing is, the recommendations I give are going to be very similar to what you give for other types of reasons. Yet that is going to be, in general, great for your skin.

40:09 - Speaker 1 Let me guess get good sleep, good quality water yes.

40:14 - Speaker 2 Daily physical activity yes sunlight, yeah, although not too much sunlight.

40:19 - Speaker 1 Not too much sunlight.

40:19 - Speaker 2 Okay, we'll talk about we can talk about that In a certain window. Yeah, and I think, with diet, really, it's going to be eating the rainbow fruits and vegetables, because then you're going to target oxidation you know the free radicals with that. It's going to be eating healthy sources of protein, because you need protein, because, once again, collagen 78% of your skin that's a protein. You got to fuel it with protein. It's not enough just to take a collagen supplement. It's going to also be eating anti-inflammatory foods okay, inflammation, chronic inflammation being an issue.

40:46 So anti-inflammatory foods, I look at two main categories for that. The first category I look at are going to be the healthy fats, so omega three fatty acids. So you're looking at cold water fish, tuna, trout, salmon, mackerel, sardines, that type of thing. Also the monounsaturated fatty acids. So that's going to be like olives, olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds. So really focusing on those anti-inflammatory fats can help reduce that chronic inflammation, as you're also reducing the amount of sugar that you eat.

41:14 But the other group I think that can help and we mentioned a little bit the microbiome earlier is really supporting the microbiome and so eating foods that are fermented, that you can then help to support the microbiome. A lot of people know that there's a microbiome, that there's like a gut brain axis, that the health of the gut will impact the health of the brain, but there's actually a gut skin axis too, and so the health of the gut will impact the health of the skin. And so, once again, eating microbiome boosting foods like fermented foods and I always recommend a daily probiotic as well I think is very helpful. So those are two ways to really help reduce inflammation and then reducing inflammation by reducing inflammation and reducing foods too. And so those are some things as far as food that I definitely encourage people to do.

41:59 - Speaker 1 Like foundational focus on that and then kind of come back to what you want, to what maybe you see working or not.

42:05 - Speaker 2 Yes, yeah, and so if you do that, then I always look at supplements too. That's the next step. So the first thing, if you know, I always say look, start with the food first. Once you're feeling good with that, look into the supplements. We talked about collagen being huge as far as if you're looking at antigen in the skin, and then I recommend some basic supplements. We mentioned probiotics earlier. I think omega three fatty acids supplements are great. I also recommend an antioxidant, like a combination antioxidant supplement too, just because you can't really get too many antioxidants and we know we're not getting as much in our food as we used to. Right?

42:35 - Speaker 1 yeah, so nutrient density in food is that's a whole another episode as well. Yeah, yeah.

42:39 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and then we look at skincare. Okay, so before you start looking at interventions, I always encourage skincare because you can get profound. If you combine those first three things what to eat we can talk about Wendy and a little bit, if you want and then supplements, and you combine that with skincare, the vast majority of people can get such a nice change in their skin that they don't need to get laser treatments, they don't need to get Botox or any of that type of nice thing, what they look youthful, you can get.

43:03 You can look five to 10 years younger potentially. You give it a good you know, three to six months by focusing on those four things and you can make some huge changes. We actually have in my book it's a 21 day jumpstart where we cleaned up the diet. Okay, so literally 21 days okay, where we clean up the diet. We focus on those foods we just talked about. We had them intermittent fast for weeks two and three, just two days a week. We had them take those basic supplements we just mentioned and then a very basic skincare plan. We put them on it for three weeks and the amount of changes that we would see in literally three weeks was fascinating as astounding.

43:37 - Speaker 1 What do you mean by very basic skincare routine?

43:39 - Speaker 2 So basic skincare routine. If this is something that anybody can do, it literally takes two minutes, okay, a day and it will cover pretty much whatever you need. Okay, so the first thing is you cleanse your skin in the morning. You want to use a cleanser appropriate for your skin type. So if you've got oily skin, then you want to use like a foaming type of a cleanser. If you've got really dry or sensitive skin, then you want to go with a more milky or hydrating cleanser. Interesting. After that you want to use a vitamin C or an antioxidant serum. Usually vitamin C is the most common one. Okay, antioxidant serum. You know antioxidants fight free radicals. Oxidation is one of the ages of our skin. Ideally, you want to eat the rainbow of fruits and vegetables so that you can tackle that, that oxidation, from the inside out. But you can apply that to the surface of your skin to tackle it from the outside.

44:27 - Speaker 1 Unlike collagen, we can actually use topical treatments here and focus internally through nutrition.

44:31 - Speaker 2 Yes. So now the vitamin C serum is not necessarily going to change the internal you know architecture of your skin. But what's going to do is it's going to fight off free radicals so that the pollution in the air, the foods that you eat you know eating fried foods that those contain free radicals, those will attack your skin. So it will help protect your skin by the antioxidants do Okay. So you apply an antioxidant serum. Vitamin C is the most common one and most skincare lines have it. Here's a little tip, like a bio hack tip If you add vitamin E to it, then it's synergistic with vitamin C.

45:04 - Speaker 1 So what kind of enhances the bio availability?

45:07 - Speaker 2 It actually enhances their antioxidant activities. Oh wow, logistically so it's more than just applying to it. It's even better, so it kind of enhances both.

45:15 - Speaker 1 Yes, wow.

45:15 - Speaker 2 So vitamin C and E, and there's some that are made with both. That's what you want to look at, vitamin C and E, and then I do recommend a sunscreen. Okay, now there's a big question. If you ask a dermatologist, they'll say even if you're sitting in a basement in the dark watching movies, all day.

45:30 - Speaker 1 Come on, you should put sunscreen on and then you'll.

45:33 - Speaker 2 Then there are biohackers will say you know, Don't put any sunscreen on and expose your perineum to the sun.

45:37 - Speaker 1 You're actually blocking a lot of the potential benefits you know getting from yeah types of UV light.

45:41 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think, like, like most things in life, somewhere in the middle is probably what makes the most sense. I think that you can, definitely. I mean, I live in Michigan. It is so therapeutic in the winter time when the sun comes out and you have it on your face. There is a lot of benefits to getting some sunlight and exposure, especially every morning. You know that will help your circadian rhythms and all that type of stuff. But as a plastic surgeon I have seen so many people come to my office with skin cancers on their face. They are horribly disfiguring. You know where people come in, they go. I have a little dot here. I think it might be skin cancer. They go see a dermatologist, they get Mohs surgery. Then they come back to see me and half their nostril is gone. Oh, and it's like wow, you know so it could.

46:24 It could have been avoidable just through sunscreen my, my idol, musical idol, jimmy Buffett, just died of Merkel cell cancer. I mean, of course it's a skin cancer and that guy loved being out in the sun, damn. So you know, I think that there's a happy medium there somewhere. If you're gonna go out in the sun for a prolonged period of time, then I definitely recommend wearing a sunscreen. However, there are keys that there are little tricks of how to do that.

46:47 Okay, so there are two types of sun, of sun protection. They're chemical sunscreens and physical sun blocks. Okay, physical sun blocks are made with zinc oxide and titanium dioxide. Those are the ones that you know I grew up and you'd see like a lifeguard with this white paste on their nose plastered on. Yeah, and so physical sun blocks literally will block the sun's rays from hitting your skin, and most holistic health practitioners are fans of physical sun blocks because it's not absorbed into your skin. But the problem with physical sun blocks is that they can create kind of a whitish hue to the skin, and you know, yeah, if you're Irish and you've got real light colored skin, that it may not bother you, but if you're Latin X African-American, if you're Asian, then it could really change the color your skin and look kind of pasty.

47:33 Chemical sunscreens basically are chemicals that absorb into your skin and when you get hit by sunlight they will react with that sunlight to essentially Prevent, if prevent, those UV rays from damaging the DNA of your skin. But they are literally absorbed into your skin and they can be absorbed into your bloodstream. There are some of them, two of them specifically, oxybenzone and octanoxate, that are considered potential hormone disruptors and so they can mimic the hormones in the body potentially, and so they're not something that I would recommend. Okay especially for children.

48:06 Okay, those are in sun blocks. Those are sunscreen. Those are chemical sunscreens. Some blocks, typically, are considered safe. Okay, but there are other chemical sunscreens it appeared to be safe that aren't endocrine disruptors. So that would be avo, benzone and mxoral XL. So there are different chemical sunscreens that you want to avoid, others that you want that that, in general, are safe. What I usually recommend is you know, if you are a person of color and you really don't feel comfortable wearing a sunblock, then by all means wear the sunscreen. Just try to stay away from oxybenzone or octanoxate.

48:37 - Speaker 1 My wife and I are in such polar opposite. She's Middle Eastern and she says the word sun and she gets dark. Yeah, she doesn't need hardly any sunscreen, any sunblock to. Really I think she needs some. Yes, she's like she's out there in the sun way longer than I am and I'm like reapplying reapplying and she's like thinking about her first dose.

48:53 - Speaker 2 So the the issue is is the melon in your skin will absorb the sun's rays? Okay, and she may not get burned, but there's a you and those are UVB rays.

49:01 She's a very damaged, but you, she can still get UVA rays which can cause premature aging and skin cancer, and so even people who are African-American with dark skin can get skin cancer, and so I do recommend it. But for her she may want to stick with more of that chemical sunscreen. For your children we usually recommend this the the sun blocks, the physical blockers. Right, you know, we don't want anything messing with their, their hormones and stuff.

49:26 - Speaker 1 So may you hear me correctly that, depending on your ethnicity, probably you should be looking at a different sunblock or sun lotion. So my, for example, my wife and I probably Should not be using the same product.

49:41 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean you could technically use her product if you want you. So you could use a chemical sunscreen, it's just in general. A more physical one is gonna potentially be less harmful, gotcha okay. But for her to use a physical sunblock, you know, it could cause her skin to look pasty and weird, and so she may not want that in which case? Then if she wants to use a chemical sunscreen, then use one without Oxi-benzone and octanoxate and then for the kids your kids are gonna be a prior combination then when they're young her.

50:14 When they're young. I would definitely use them the mineral based on sun blocks, because they don't care. They kids are on the beach and they've, you know they got a little pasty, they don't care. But as they get older, then that's something that's gonna be a discussion. And the worst thing are the sprays that have chemical sunscreen in them and you could see these people at the beaches are spraying their.

50:31 I don't know that it's so easy and they're breathing it into their lungs, and these are potential hormone disruptors like so if you've got no sprays put it sprayed into your hand and then rub it on them. Okay, okay, yeah, I mean you could try telling them to hold their breath, but I know when my kids were young they're like hold your breath. They basically just close your mouth and breathe through their nose.

50:49 - Speaker 1 Damn. Okay, All right, so let me go back to kind of some of the other. You thank you for that. Oh, so that's just the morning.

50:54 - Speaker 2 That's a morning thing. There's also a night routine too, okay, perfect, yeah, okay. So morning routine, just to summarize, that's it. So cleanse antioxidant serum and then sunscreen, okay, at night, cleansing super important. Okay, you need to get rid of the days worth of grime, dust, dirt more important than the morning makeup.

51:12 - Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, you had a big, just one, let's say the person you had to be one wash at night.

51:15 - Speaker 2 Okay, some people will double cleanse. If you want to use an oil-based cleanser first, that can help, especially if you got makeup, and then you want to apply an anti-aging cream, and the one that most doctors recommend is retinol. Retinol is a derivative of vitamin a. The prescription strength is retin a and that's the most studied anti-aging cream period which we can get over the counter. Now, right, retinol is over the counter. Yeah, so retin a is prescription strength. You can only get through a doctor very strong, you know, and unless you've got real thick, thick, oily skin, probably don't really need it.

51:48 - Speaker 1 I would go over the counter retinol it does the same thing essentially as prescription strength.

51:53 - Speaker 2 It just isn't as strong and really that's all you need. If you want to apply moisturizer on top of that, feel free, but you don't really need anything else. Oh really. So it's very simple at night you cleanse, then you apply the retinol, and if you want to throw a moisturizer on top of it Especially if you live like here in LA where it's real dry you want to get more moisture, by all means do that, and then the final thing is, two or three times a week at the most, exfoliate your skin. So some people use like a scrub exfoliating scrub.

52:17 Other people use kind of like a light chemical peel.

52:19 - Speaker 1 We're like some of those hand-held, hand-held devices kind of.

52:22 - Speaker 2 Those are not as recommended anymore, because they're a bit aggressive.

52:26 - Speaker 1 Maybe that's why the one I used to use went out of business.

52:29 - Speaker 2 I used to have a sonic hair years ago. They felt great.

52:32 - Speaker 1 It felt great, but yeah, they're gone now.

52:33 - Speaker 2 I think those are things that to use, that you could use once or twice a week and that would be fine, but people are using it every day and it was too aggressive. Yeah, that's the problem, but that's it really. That's two minutes skincare routine and we know we actually tested that skincare routine on people for two months and we put their photos and we actually surveyed people to see how much younger these people look after literally just doing that for two months.

52:54 - Speaker 1 As in they didn't have a skincare routine before, and now this is when they did okay.

52:57 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and we've finally looked about five years older after our younger. I'm sorry, younger afterwards. Wow yeah, two months of just doing that, that's really impressive.

53:04 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so it's impressive.

53:06 - Speaker 2 So that's kind of the whole idea is like you know, if you change your diet, if you add a little bit intermittent fasting to it, we can talk about that if you'd like the supplements in the skincare Most people. If you do that, you're allowing your body's own auto-juvenative abilities to Turn back the clock on its own. You're feeling healthier, you're looking better, you've got more energy, which is what we want, and that's all you really need. And yeah, if you want to add some other stuff, we can talk about that too. If you want to take the next step, but most people don't even need to take that step.

53:32 - Speaker 1 I would love to get in there. Let me ask real quick hey, joseph, I'm real over on how we on time. Yeah, a few more minutes. Okay, cool, let's say I want to take it a step further. Yeah, I'm doing all these things. I'm seeing results. Or maybe I just feel like I want to kind of jump to a little bit more aggressive modality. I want to go get red light therapy. I want to get microdummer brazen. I want to go to the local spa and, just you know, have a day. Yeah, what would you say for that? The average person, average level skin, not like major damage here, what would be the best bang for our buck in terms of actually doing something beneficial for our skin and anti-aging?

54:08 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so the first thing that I would look at would be red light therapy. That'd be the easiest thing. So red light therapy, the idea. Now it's interesting because holistic health practitioners are all about red light therapy and traditional dermatologist Plastic surgeons don't know anything about it. It's not part of our armamentarium at all, so red light therapy can come in a lot of different forms. There are handheld devices which are kind of a pain because you got to put it up to your face and then move it every couple minutes.

54:31 - Speaker 1 You gotta pop it up and kind of hold it.

54:32 - Speaker 2 Yeah, there are tabletop devices I think work pretty well where you just have your face in it, and then there are masks that you can wear around that look real creepy, very creepy. It's like very handable.

54:43 - Speaker 1 And then there's even beds.

54:45 - Speaker 2 So really the science behind it is still a little bit murky. We think that that red light therapy essentially helps to power mitochondria and mitochondrial function in ATP production Simulate more blood flow.

54:57 Yeah, so the idea and the same thing when you're looking at thinning hair, and with low light laser therapy for thinning hair, the idea is that the energy of those lasers that don't create heat, they just create energy, they just have energy without heat essentially can get transferred into that body part. And so for red light therapy for aging of the skin, the idea is that that energy can help to power the mitochondria, mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells. That's a good thing making them work better Very good the.

55:21 ATP production improved. We use that for the hair as well, and the idea is that that can help the hair to go into a growth phase and so can stimulate growth of the many of your hair is thinning or you're in a hair loss situation, red light therapy might Stimulate hair growth again.

55:35 - Speaker 1 for you Exactly.

55:36 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and there are devices now that are actually helmets that you can put on. I do that myself every other day. No way really.

55:41 - Speaker 1 Yeah, it looks great.

55:43 - Speaker 2 Well, that's one reason why, but that's another way. It's the same kind of idea. Okay, now, when you look at red light therapy, though specifically for aging, there have been some studies that have looked at it. There was a study that looked at I think it was like 1,100 people. It was 90 days, and they found that 90% of people had an improvement in the skin tone and 80% of the people had an improvement in the skin smoothness the smoothest of the skin after 90 days, to pretty big wins, yeah, yeah, there was another one where you did it this is even better a split face study where you have half the face treated, the other half not treated, twice a day for 90 days and they found a significant improvement in wrinkles, in hydration and elasticity of the skin. Same person Just down the line.

56:25 Yeah, you treat half the face.

56:27 - Speaker 1 I hope they're paying the other half. You don't do well any do the other half later, after you find out results. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a wild 90 days. That's crazy.

56:34 - Speaker 2 Yeah, twice a week, 90 days. Improvement in wrinkles, in Skin elasticity and hydration of the skin. So red light therapy does work. But the interesting thing is, placerans and dermatologists don't talk about it, and I'm not sure why. It's just not something that we've ever talked about, or we do, well probably losing some clients.

56:52 Maybe I mean, I don't know, it's something that you could easily do at home, and so if you're, if you're on a budget and you're, let's say, living in an area where you don't have access to a med spa or anything Like that, then getting a red light device Ideally I recommend a tabletop one. That's, I think, a great place to start now. If you have access, though, to a med spa or a doctor or something and you want good bang for your buck, the thing I would look at would be IPL. Ipl stands for intense pulse light. It's similar to a laser, but it's much less expensive, and it's really, really good at getting rid of dark spots or age spots, and so if you've got a lot of excess pigmentation which we see a lot of times people get in their 40s, 50s and 60s a lot of the sun damage that occurs when they're younger starts to really that's what it's in.

57:33 Yeah, and it shows up as uneven pigmentation and blemishes and spots. Okay, ipl is a great way to take care of it. It's no downtime, it's literally just light energy. So some people who are like, look I'm, I really want to be natural, I don't want to put a bunch of chemicals on my skin. This is literally light energy, that's it, and it basically tackles the dark it. It heats up those dark spots, causes them to be destroyed and within a week, they start falling off and it's just like it can't be more natural than it just being light amazing.

58:02 - Speaker 1 Yeah, it's so funny. We're talking about this literally today as we're recording. My episode went live is all about red light therapy. Oh, there's it, oh, there's a red light therapy, photo by modulation, particularly for applications of recovery, injury prevention, injury recovery inflammation, kind of more sports performance stuff, but a lot of unique points in that for mental health, for brain health, gut health, great timing.

58:25 - Speaker 2 And what you'll see is a lot of these things that are great for one part of your physiology can be really helpful for others, and so that's one of the things I wanted to put out in the book.

58:35 Was, you know, that a lot of these things that you may look at and go, well, geez, I don't really care about that for increasing my energy, but then you're like, well, actually you're gonna look young, I'm gonna go well, in that case, let's do it, you know, and it's trying to find once again what drives you, what motivates you, our skin is just one system of many systems.

58:52 - Speaker 1 So by focusing on one thing, we can, you know, work on that thing that we're after for our own personal goals, but it serves a myriad of other benefits and systems in the body.

59:00 - Speaker 2 And it really is a sign of what's going on inside your body Exactly.

59:03 - Speaker 1 And it really does show it, and that's something that we're learning more and more about. Well, I feel like I could just go for another hour with you. I have so many questions. I think a lot of questions come to mind that I'm sure a lot of people are screaming at their device right now Like, oh, what about this, what about that? But maybe we'll have to get you back again.

59:19 - Speaker 2 But if they want to learn more?

59:20 - Speaker 1 where can they go to connect with you? They got the book coming out as well.

59:23 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so my book is younger for life. And if you go to autojuvenationcom, we do have a lot of free gifts that we give you, including an extra recipe book and discounts and all this stuff. So autojuvenationcom will be the place to go, and I'm all over social media. You just need to put Dr you and you'll find me.

59:37 - Speaker 1 He's there, some of my stuff's a little goofy.

59:40 - Speaker 2 I like to have fun with it.

59:42 - Speaker 1 And so my last question, to bring it home to the theme of the show, is this been a great kind of light on a unique area of our life, of our wellness, and I want to know how we can keep moving forward in that area, how you say you keep moving ever forward in life. When you hear those two words, what does that mean to you?

59:57 - Speaker 2 Yeah, for me, I think the big thing I look at is what fulfills you, and fulfillment for me is gratitude. And what am I, what am I thankful for? And I think it's finding those things that drive your life. So for me, one of the big things that I am thankful for and that I really enjoy, that I find fulfillment with, is dog rescue, and so I put a story in my book about it. But my wife and I are committed to rescuing senior dogs and so we find, we try to find those dogs, and we only like small dogs, because I the big dogs get me afraid sometimes. But we get little dogs that maybe you're anywhere from 12 to 14 years old, that are in rescues and that just can't find a home, and so we kind of watch them for a while and if nobody, nobody picks them up, then we look at it no way Well, and so in the last six, seven years we've adopted five dogs and the hard thing is that you know they they're not with us that long.

01:00:53 But the great part of it is is that you are there for them, for the end of their life and you make sure that that part of their life is as perfect as can be. So, we got a little guy right now. His name is Tiny, he's 14, I think, and he's got a lot of mobility issues and stuff like that and we're just spoiling him.

01:01:12 So right now, as you should, as you should, so, but it's so great, you know and it's and it's a blessing to be there at the end of their lives, where it's really painful for us. But we know that you know that's the right thing, and so I think that's the way I look at it. Is is what motivates you in life. What do you get fulfillment by, and and try to to go by that, and for us, that's one of our big things.

01:01:37 - Speaker 1 And here I was thinking you were going to say more collagen. Take a collagen supplement every morning too. That's not bad as well. We recently started giving my dog some collagen and bone broth supplement in her food. She's like 12. She's like a 10 pound little terrier mix thing. We adopted it as well and you know we're finding great benefits by supplementing with bone broth, collagen, things like that. Yeah, I think her skin's better as well. That's great yeah.

01:02:02 - Speaker 2 I mean bone broth, I think you know. Interesting. Just as an aside, I have friends of mine, dr Kelly and Petrucci's big bone broth doc. There are no studies that show that bone broth helps improve your skin, but they're just starting to. Study is done, so that's when it needs to be done. Oh, come on. And I believe if you do the study I'm sure it's going to come out with positive results.

01:02:20 - Speaker 1 They're just not there because it hasn't been done. Yeah, yeah.

01:02:22 - Speaker 2 So now you'll get traditional doctors to be like oh that's hogwash, don't do bone broth, but it's just because the studies have been done and when they are, I'm sure they're going to be positive.

01:02:29 - Speaker 1 Well, tony, this has been great, so educational, so helpful. Thank you so much, thank you Chase. Appreciate it.