Ep 307 – The Rogue Pharmacist: Vitamin E

0:00:00.3 Benjamin Knight Fuchs: Calling all forward-thinking estheticians, it's time to redefine the art of skincare and embrace a revolutionary approach that begins with your client's skin cell health. I'm pharmacist Benjamin Knight 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 We're here to support your out of the box thinking and empower you to question traditional products, outdated formulations and old school ingredients.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.

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0:01:12.3 Maggie Staszcuk: Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Knight Fuchs. In each episode, we'll explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. I'm Maggie Staszcuk, ASCP's program director, and joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hey, Ben.

0:01:29.5 BF: Hello, Maggie.

0:01:30.8 MS: As estheticians, we're constantly on the lookout for ingredients that nourish and protect the skin. And vitamin E is often at the top of that list. But beyond the buzzwords, do we really know why it's so effective in skincare?

0:01:44.4 BF: Yeah, absolutely, we do. So vitamin E, it's very unusual because it's not... There's no real vitamin E. There's eight different types of vitamin E. Vitamin E is a complex and what we call vitamin E is made up of eight different forms which come in two different varieties. They call them tocopherols and tocotrienols. Have you heard those terms?

0:02:02.3 MS: I have. Yeah.

0:02:02.8 BF: Tocopherols and tocotrienols. So there's four tocopherols and there's four tocotrienols and in nature they're all found together. By the way, you know there's a big vitamin E shortage.

0:02:10.3 MS: I did not know that.

0:02:11.9 BF: Yes. You know why?

0:02:12.2 MS: No, tell me.

0:02:13.1 BF: Because of the Ukraine war.

0:02:14.7 MS: Oh.

0:02:15.3 BF: It turns out that vitamin E is... One of the main exporters of vitamin E is the Ukraine.

0:02:20.9 MS: Interesting.

0:02:22.2 BF: Because vitamin E is found in sunflower, and a lot of sunflowers are grown in the Ukraine. So because last three years, three or four years that they've been fighting over there, vegetable oil in general, because a lot of vegetable oil comes from the Ukraine too, and vitamin E has been in much shorter supply and expensive for formulators like myself. So vitamin E, there's eight different forms of vitamin E. Four tocopherols, four tocotrienols, and they pretty much in nature they're found together. As we tend to do in our modern day world, as we separate things out, we isolate them. And most of the vitamin E that you'll see in skincare products is alpha tocopherol. But there's also beta tocopherol, delta tocopherol and gamma tocopherol. And there's alpha tocotrienol and beta tocotrienol and delta and gamma tocotrienol. And there's eight altogether. And in food, in nature, you really want to get all eight. In the skincare, we don't do that. It's much more expensive to try to get all eight. It's much cheaper and easier to just have the alpha tocopherol.

0:03:18.7 BF: So that's the one you tend to see. It's not that big a deal, but if you really want to do it right, you want what's called mixed tocopherols and mixed tocotrienols. Very rarely will you see that in topical skincare. More frequently you'll see it in nutritional supplements. And if you're going to supplement with vitamin E, it is definitely a good idea to supplement with vitamin E. You want to look for the mixed forms, mixed tocopherols and mixed tocotrienols. And really the best way to get vitamin E in your system is to supplement with it. It's hard to find in food. The most abundant sources of vitamin E are sunflower, sunflower oil or sunflower seeds actually. But you got to eat like a bathtub full of sunflower seeds to get a really good dose of vitamin E supplement. And it's pretty cheap as supplements. So that's really the best way to do it.

0:04:00.7 BF: Vitamin E stands out when it comes to vitamins because it's not really incorporated into biochemistry. Vitamins tend to be incorporated into biochemistry and they assist chemical reactions, they make things happen. But with vitamin E, it's not in chemical reactions really, it's a guardian. And that's why vitamin E is found in fats, seeds, particularly in grains. Those are the main sources of vitamin E, seeds, nuts and grains. Because vitamin E is used by nature to protect oils, that's its real role, is to protect fats. And that's why it has such important relevance for the skin, which I'll talk about here in a second. So vitamin E's main role is not to be involved in chemistry as much as it's to be a guardian, to be a protector. And nature uses the protective properties, which are really antioxidant properties of vitamin E to protect fats. And wherever you have high concentrations of fats, you'll find vitamin E. And that's why vitamin E is found in seeds, because seeds have high concentrations of fats. So nature uses vitamin E to protect the fats.

0:04:55.3 BF: Now, I don't know if you've been hearing about this, but over the last year or so, couple years maybe people have been starting to notice or starting to at least talk about seed oils as being problematic. Have you been hearing about that?

0:05:07.3 MS: I haven't. No.

0:05:08.1 BF: So I've always said that. And I never use seed oils, I never use vegetable oils in my products for that reason, because vegetable oils and oils in general are very unstable. That's why we use oils for fuel. The instability of oils lends them, makes them, makes the energy within the oil more available. Instability is kind of interesting in nature because when something's unstable, breaks down quickly, but that very breakdown quickly, instability allows energy to be released. And this is why we can run our cars and our machinery, heavy machinery on oil, because oil is very unstable. The problem with instability is dual edged sword. And while it does release energy, it can also cause damage. That damage is what we call oxidation. And so nature protects its oils with antioxidants. Vitamin E being, if not the most important, one of the most important antioxidants for fats. And that's its real role.

0:05:56.1 BF: The thing about seed oils is because they're unstable when they're cooked into a cream or into a lotion, they're actually turned into pro-aging compounds. In fact, even before the cosmetic company buys the oil, they're buying a degraded form of oil. Cosmetic grade oil is not a food grade oil, it's a degraded form of oil. So you should never put seed oils on your skin, any kind of oil. And which is kind of interesting because the second or third ingredient deck on most moisturizers, I'm doing little air quotes here, on most moisturizers is oil, vegetable oil. And I as a formulator and hopefully estheticians out there can tell about the sophistication of a formulation or the skin friendliness of a skincare company that's selling formulations by the appearance of vegetable oils. If you see a vegetable on a skincare product, that's a bad thing. That's a bad sign, in my opinion.

0:06:51.8 BF: Now, vitamin E, as it turns out, can be used to protect oils in skincare products. And that's its main role. And you will see vitamin E in skincare products. That's not there as an ingredient in order to help the skin, but is there as a protective molecule, in essence a preservative to protect the oil in the skincare product. Now, if you don't use oil, you don't have to worry about it. But if you do have oil, there are other antioxidants. You sometimes see BHT or BHA. But vitamin E is like a natural antioxidant for protecting the oils in skincare products.

0:07:23.4 BF: Vitamin E applied topically, however, can give you some protective benefits. And in fact, it's one of the best sun protective ingredients you can use. And smart sun protective formulations will take advantage of vitamin E because of its sun protective properties. Vitamin E can also help because of its ability to kind of dampen solar energy, can help prevent hyperpigmentation that's related to the sun. Now, hyperpigmentation has other causes. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But for hyperpigmentation, that's related directly to solar exposure in hormonally unstable skin, vitamin E can protect the skin. Vitamin E can also accelerate the healing process by virtue of its antioxidant and protective properties. So if you have a burn or you have a wound, putting vitamin E directly on the skin, either by breaking open a capsule, stick a pin in it and put it right on your skin.

0:08:14.5 BF: What it won't do is it won't get rid of a scar. And that's a myth. And scar removal in general is a myth because... So when people say what can I do for this scar? It's kind of a misunderstanding of what a scar is because by definition you're not getting rid of a scar. By definition, a scar is literally something that's permanent or semi-permanent at least. So vitamin E is not going to help you with a scar, but it may help prevent the formation of scarring. And that's really what the goal should be when you have a wound, is to prevent the formation. And so using vitamin E as you're healing topically can help prevent the formation of scars, but you can't put vitamin E on a scar and then expect it to go away.

0:08:55.4 BF: But that's also very interesting. What I found is one of the best things you could do if you have a burn or traumatized skin is take super high doses of vitamin E ____. And by super high doses, I'm talking like 1200 international units a day for like two weeks or so. It's pretty much non-toxic vitamin. You're not gonna really have any side effects or anything like that. And that's a big dose. But you'll find that your wounds heal very, very quickly when you use high doses, 1200 IU of Vitamin E a day. Now when I say high doses, I mean compared to standard dose. The standard dose of vitamin E is about 400IU. The RDA is like maybe a 20th of that. I think it's like 20IU or something like that. So by taking three or four times the standard 400IU dose, 1,200 to 1,600IU a day for maybe a couple weeks or 10 days or so, you can get some dramatic healing. And I highly recommend that people do that if they have a burn or they have some kind of wound that they don't want to have scar.

0:09:49.0 BF: Vitamin E is hard to find in food. You're not going to really get vitamin E in food. And by the way, the word tocopherol means to bear children. And that's because sperm and egg are especially protected by fats. And vitamin E's ability to protect the fats in all cells, in all membranes, but particularly sperm and egg makes it a fertility vitamin. And it's one of the nutrients that women who are dealing with elevated cortisol might want to consider taking, elevated cortisol being one of the causes of infertility. And along the same lines, vitamin A and vitamin E have estrogen balancing effects and cortisol balancing effects. They're anti stress, both vitamin A and E both being fat soluble vitamins.

0:10:32.9 MS: You had said in your ingredient deck, if you're seeing vegetable oil listed, I mean you won't read an ingredient deck that says "vegetable oil"

0:10:40.9 BF: Sometimes. Sometimes it will.

0:10:41.8 MS: But are you referring to like safflower or sunflower, things of that ____.

0:10:46.0 BF: Exactly, exactly. Sometimes you'll actually see the words vegetable oil. But yeah, you're right, most of the time you'll see corn, safflowers, almond oil, sometimes it'll be fancy macadamia nut oil or hazelnut oil or something like that, grapeseed oil. As it turns out the more exotic oils tend to be the most unstable oils. It's really, there's no benefit to an oil on the skin that's not fresh. Now if you take the safflower, the sunflower, you squeeze it and you get fresh oil, cold pressed oil, you're going to get some nutritional value. But that's not how oils are used in skincare products. So you get very little nutritional value. They're occlusive.

0:11:21.8 BF: It's kind of a, that's why I do the air quotes when I say moisturizer because we have this kind of feeling, the sense that when we put something on our skin and we feel softness, that somehow we're doing something to our skin. When in reality, when you rub something on your skin, you feel softness. All you're really feeling is the interaction between the oil and the keratin on the surface of the skin. You haven't really done anything. You're feeling product essentially. But for some reason that feel gets interpreted as moisturization, when in fact it's anti-moisturization. It's the opposite of moisturization because we know oil and water don't mix. So when you're feeling oil on the skin, you're feeling anti-moisture.

0:12:00.0 BF: Now you could say, oh, well, you're trapping moisture in with your oils. But in reality what you're doing is you're occluding and you're keeping the skin from being able to do really its role, which is, number one, emitting gases, number two, sucking in oxygen. The skin is actually breathing, it's actually sucking in oxygen and emitting out waste. And you're keeping the skin from being able to do that. But even more importantly and functionally, you're shutting down the skin's ability to trap moisture from the air. One of the ways the skin stays soft and pliable is by trapping ambient humidity. And when you occlude, when you cover it up with waxes and with oils or so called moisturizers, you actually suppress that function. So this accounts for the fact that everybody uses a moisturizer and everybody has dry skin.

0:12:54.9 BF: I mean, think about it. We sell $10 billion a year moisturizing products and everybody has dry skin. How can that possibly be? Well, the mechanism is your moisturizer is shutting down your skin's ability to moisturize, to moisturize itself. And so a moisturizer is really an anti-moisturizer. The best way to really moisturize the skin is to do the opposite of occlusion, which is exfoliation and stimulation, turning everything on. And as the cells are rising from the bottom to the top, they're actually dumping out their contents to become moisture factors. They're shape shifting within themselves to create moisture factors. And on top of everything else, they're strengthening the barrier so that your skin can actually trap water inside and suck more water up from the outside via ambient humidity. So moisturizers are really anti-moisturizers.

0:13:44.1 BF: I love using nutrients in my skincare products. And I look at skin care, topical skin care, as an opportunity to dose the skin, to give the skin the essential nutrients that any other organ needs. I mean, we all know that if you want to have a healthy heart or a healthy spleen or healthy intestine, you use nutrients. You got to have nutrition. The skin should be the same way. To me, topical skincare is an opportunity to dose your skin with nutrients. And vitamin E is one of the most important of skin nutrients.

0:14:14.7 MS: Does vitamin E have the ability to enhance the effects of other skin vitamins or skin ingredients?

0:14:21.5 BF: Well, you are a clever esthetician. That's absolutely the case. Yes. Vitamin E and really all antioxidants work together. So vitamin E makes vitamin C better. Vitamin E makes selenium better. Vitamin C makes vitamin E better. Selenium makes vitamin C better. And they all kind of work hand in hand. And yes, indeed, it's a good idea to have a whole spectrum of nutrients and antioxidants in a formulation because they all help each other work.

0:14:45.5 MS: 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 at 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.