Ep 310 – The Rogue Pharmacist: Inflammation and its Role in Skin Aging

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 clients' skin cell health. I'm pharmacist Benjamin Knight Fuchs welcoming you to Truth Treatments 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 We're here to support your out of the box thinking and empower you to question traditional products, outdated formulations and old school ingredients.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 Stasik: Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Knight Fuchs. In each episode, we will explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. I'm Maggie Stasik, ASCP's program director and joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hi, Ben.

0:01:28.1 BF: Hi, Maggie.

0:01:28.9 MS: Inflammation is clearly a crucial factor in aging process, but the science behind it can get pretty complex. Ben, can you help us understand exactly how inflammation impacts the skin and what we should be focusing on to protect our clients?

0:01:43.2 BF: Well, that's a very interesting topic, inflammation. By the way, have you heard the term inflammaging?

0:01:48.2 MS: I have, yeah.

0:01:48.8 BF: Yes, that's what they're calling it now is inflammaging. Well, unfortunately, like with a lot of things when it comes to health is there's a lot of misunderstandings. First of all, let's be very clear. Inflammation is your best friend. Without inflammation, you can't survive. What we call inflammation is very confusing because there's really two types of inflammation. The type of inflammation that most people think about is the kind of inflammation that happens when you get a black eye or a sprained ankle or broken leg or, you know, you get a nod on your head. We see that inflammation and it looks like swelling. Right? And that's one of the cardinal features. In fact, if you go to medical school, they'll tell you that inflammation is marked by four cardinal features. And because doctors love Latin, for whatever reason, the four cardinal features are in Latin, dolor, calor, rubor, and tumor. Dolor means pain. That's the first cardinal sign of inflammation. Rubor means redness. That's the second cardinal sign of inflammation. Tumor means swelling. And that's the third cardinal sign of inflammation. And calor means heat. And that's the fourth cardinal sign of inflammation.

0:02:55.1 BF: So you got pain, you got heat, you got swelling, and you got redness. Those are the four cardinal signs of inflammation. And everybody knows those. You know, you see inflammation, you say, oh, I've got inflammation here. But what we don't realize is there's another type of inflammation that's called micro inflammation, as opposed to macro inflammation. It's a microscopic version of macro inflammation. It's microscopic. Dolor, calor, rubor and tumor. You don't see it, you don't notice it because it's happening at a very small scale. And this is the kind of inflammation that's so problematic. The other kind of inflammation is very important because it acts like a shock absorber. Inflammation is like a beaver's dam. It protects tissue. So you sprain your ankle, it will inflame with fluid and with fibers to keep that ankle, that wounded area in your ankle safe and protected. It's like an airbag going off in your car. Very important. But an airbag can also kill you. The micro inflammation that is really the problem occurs at the level of the cell. And this micro inflammation is indeed the cause of aging, the major cause of aging. There's probably other causes too, but it's...

0:04:07.9 BF: Pretty much all aging, whether it's caused by toxins or whether it's caused by sugar, whether it's caused by nutritional deficiencies is really mediated by inflammation. Inflammation is the calling card of anything we do that causes us to age faster, or I shouldn't say inflammation, excessive inflammation. And that's really the key. See, inflammation is very important. You can't survive without it. But inflammation is supposed to trigger anti inflammation. And what's supposed to happen under healthy circumstances, if there's damage to a cell, we'll say, an inflammatory cascade will be initiated, very fascinatingly, by the very destruction of the cell. The cell membrane contains inflammatory signals, and as soon as that cell membrane is distorted or disturbed, those inflammatory signals will be released. And think about how cool that is. It's so brilliant that nature does that. When there's a wound and a cell is destroyed, that wound itself and that destroyed cell itself has the raw materials that will signal the inflammatory process. So the inflammatory process is signaled by virtue of the destruction itself. Destruction leads to inflammation, which is kind of a pretty brilliant mechanism when you think about it. But here's the thing. The inflammation is supposed to initiate anti inflammation.

0:05:28.1 BF: And so when cells get destroyed and inflammatory signals are sent out, a threshold will be reached and all of a sudden the anti inflammatory aspects of the process will occur. So inflammation itself is a balance of inflammation and anti inflammation. Today however, we have way more inflammatory factors than anti inflammatory. In other words, all the mechanisms for anti inflammation that depend on, say, nutrition for example are way overwhelmed by inflammatory signals. That's number one. And number two, the kind of inflammation that cells are subject to and really the body in general is subject to is a drip, drip, drip inflammation that is just under the threshold for anti inflammation. So we end up with this chronic low level of inflammation that never reaches a threshold or critical mass point that will allow anti inflammation to kick in. And so it's this steady state low level of inflammation that really is the problem in conjunction with excessive inflammatory factors. Now, by the way, there's a really cool book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. I don't know if you've ever heard it. It's by evolutionary biologist named Robert Sapolsky. And he says that in nature when a zebra sees a lion, one of two things is going to happen.

0:06:45.2 BF: Either the lion will eat the zebra or the zebra will survive the attack. Either way, the zebra is not going to get an ulcer. It's either going to survive and be fine or it's going to be dead and not be fine. But it's not going to be in this little limbo area which is where we find ourselves in because of this low level, constant steady state low level of inflammatory assaults that aren't big enough to trigger in anti inflammation. To compound the problem, many of us when we have inflammatory issues, the first thing we do is we use anti inflammatories like Motrin or like aspirin. And these anti inflammatories do not allow the inflammatory process to ensue long enough for natural anti inflammation to kick in. And this is one of the reasons why long term use of these anti inflammatories is associated with things like gastric bleeding and kidney disease and other toxicities. It's because you're artificially clamping down inflammation not allowing the body to initiate anti inflammatory chemistry that will actually heal you. So the real thing you want to do, unless you're in serious pain, obviously you need to have the anti inflammatory, is let the body do its thing and provide the raw materials that the body needs for anti inflammation.

0:08:00.9 BF: Now, the inflammatory biochemistry in the body is controlled by fats. We talked about vitamin E earlier. Vitamin E is a classic example of a fat that plays a role in the inflammatory process as an anti inflammatory. The cell membrane that I talked about that is distorted or disturbed when the cell is damaged, I said it releases these chemicals that start inflammation. Those are all fatty chemicals and they're actually fatty chemicals that are derivatives of a parent fat that is found in membranes called arachidonic acid. You may have heard of that, right? There was a guy named Barry Sears who wrote a book maybe 30 years ago now called The Zone and the Zone Diet. And his whole take was that we get too much arachidonic acid in our diet. Consequently we're all prone towards inflammation. Now, he was not a really sophisticated biochemist. He knew some stuff but he missed the fact that you need inflammation to get anti inflammation. So you need arachidonic acid in order to initiate anti inflammation. Nonetheless, it was an interesting point that most of the foods we get today, most of the foods we eat today, fatty foods, are foods that are rich in these inflammatory fats.

0:09:11.4 BF: The inflammatory fats are the Omega 6 fats. Omega 6 fats tend to be inflammatory. You may have heard how we have to reduce our intake of Omega 6 fats. Have you heard this? And we should be getting more Omega 3 fats. Again, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and that's not 100% accurate because you do need inflammation in order to have anti inflammation, but our out of balance Omega 6 intake compared to Omega 3 is probably a problem of sorts. Also Omega 6 fats are the fats that are stored in the membrane that initiate this whole inflammatory cascade. So using Omega 3 containing fats through supplementation or through foods is a strategy you can use to help balance out the excessive ingestion of Omega 6 inflammatory fats. The reason Omega 6 inflammatory fats are so common in the diet is because Omega 6 fats are everywhere. They're ubiquitous. In fact in the body you have way more Omega 6 fats than you have Omega 3 fats. It's very difficult to get Omega 3 fats relative to Omega 6 fats. So you have to kind of go out of your way to get Omega 3s and the best sources are going to be seeds, again, and also fish and seafood in general.

0:10:20.6 BF: So it's a good idea to make sure you're getting enough of these Omega 3s to balance out the Omega 6s. But you want to be careful about demonizing Omega 6s because as I've said, you need inflammation to have anti inflammation. Now inflammation, when I say you need inflammation to get anti inflammation, inflammation is also important for another reason, and this is really cool and very misunderstood. Inflammation triggers growth. That's why we go to the gym, that's why we do peels, that's why we do lasers, that's why we use retinol. Is so this idea of inflammation being bad, it's kind of simplistic. It's not that it's bad, it's that you have to balance it out with Omega 3s, you have to balance it out with rest. And you got to make sure that you don't have too much inflammation compared to anti inflammation. But to say that inflammation is bad really misunderstands the power or it prevents us from being able to leverage the power of inflammation or of the inflammatory process. And so when I hear people say, oh, this is inflammatory, sometimes you hear, you know, there's one doctor here and you probably know who he is, and he goes around talking about how certain things are inflammatory, you want to stay away from them, completely missing the point that inflammation is a precursor to growth.

0:11:32.9 BF: And that's why we go to the gym. The key is that you want to not have over inflammation. You want to have balancing molecules for anti inflammation, you want to have rest because the repair and the recovery phase, that is really where the benefits accrue after inflammation, they take time off. It requires time off. That's why you go to the gym, you lift upper body on Mondays and lower body on Tuesdays, et cetera. And also you want to avoid inflammatory load. And inflammatory load is like a straw that breaks the camel's back phenomena. So your body can handle a certain amount of inflammatory triggers, but too much of it breaks the camel's back. And many of the things we do in our culture, from eating sugar, to eating fried oils, fried fats, to having surgical procedures where our fatty structures are removed, our female organs or our gallbladder are removed, to toxins in food, to nutritional deficiencies, all conspire to assure that we're going to have a burdened inflammatory system.

0:12:35.0 BF: So if you want to use inflammation and leverage inflammation by working out or by doing peels, or by using retinol or laser, et cetera, it's important that you take rest, you take time off to rest, that you use anti inflammatory nutrients, particularly Omega 3 fats, or as we talked about earlier, vitamin E and other antioxidants, and that you reduce inflammatory load by laying off of sugar, laying off of cigarette smoke. And by the way, I forgot to mention this, we were talking about vitamin E. Vitamin E is very protective against cigarette smoke and other toxins too. And it's important that you lay off other inflammatory factors that will contribute to inflammatory load. If you're going to use retinol, if you're going to use peels or, you know, inflammatory stimuli, or even if you're going to go to the gym and work out, which is another pro inflammatory stimuli that can have benefits, but it can also cause problems if you do too much. One of the most important places where inflammatory load appears and one of the most important causes of inflammation as a source or as a cause of aging or inflammaging, as they say, is inflammation that occurs in a part of the body that nobody ever thinks about. You have a part of the body that is an organ, it's tissue and it's very complex.

0:13:50.0 BF: And inflammation in this part of the body is not only the cause of inflammaging, it's really the cause of all disease. All chronic degenerative disease is caused by inflammation in this part of the body that nobody ever thinks about. Inflammation in the blood. When we see the blood, we think of it as a fluid. It looks like a liquid, right? Fluid. No, the blood is a very complex organ tissue and it's packed with chemistry. If you zoom into it with like a microscope or they have these things called dark field microscopy where they can actually look in the blood and see the blood cells, it is so complicated. And everything in the blood has to be maintained. All the parameters of chemistry, the chemistry parameters in the blood have to be maintained just so the heat level, the pH level, the fluid level, the fluidity, the movement, the enzyme level, all of these markers or parameters have to be kept just so. And when they're distorted even slightly, too much heat, not enough heat, too much fluidity, not enough fluidity, too much particles or proteins, not enough particles or proteins, too much toxins in the blood, sugar being a very important blood toxin, the blood itself will inflame.

0:15:09.0 BF: Also along the same lines, inflammation at the level of the dermis can cause problems with the fibroblast, leading to either not enough collagen, which is one of the reasons why we get wrinkles and lax skin, or too much collagen. Too much collagen or inflammatory triggers at the level of the fibroblasts that cost too much collagen will lead to things like keloids, which is a huge problem. And nobody knows how to address keloids. I'm going to tell you right now how to address keloids. You address keloids by working with the fat system, particularly anti inflammatory fats like vitamin E and vitamin A, and keeping inflammatory fats from entering into the bloodstream through the intestine. People who have keloids tend to have issues with inflammatory fats and that can also lead to issues with hormones, which we'll talk about later. And so keloids tend to appear in people who either have digestive health issues or excess inflammation due to nutritional deficiencies or malabsorption at the level of the digestive system, or issues with growth hormones, particularly testosterone. And this is one of the reasons why keloids appear in men more than they appear in women, and they appear in testosterone producers more than in low testosterone producers.

0:16:24.7 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.

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