Plastic Surgeon: The Secret to Holistic Anti-Aging and Youthful Skin - with Dr. Anthony Youn | EP171

the moment they walk into my office I can tell whether they're a smoker the type of diet they have I mean in some ways you can tell how much stress they have all of this really impact you can tell somebody's Lifestyle by just looking at the quality of their [Music] skin well hi everyone I'm Dr David pretter welcome again to the program the empowering neurologist we've talked aled about virtually every body part body system you can imagine on this program and then some but we really have not focused a lot on what you look like on your skin on your face Etc and I thought wouldn't it be great to uh get a leader in plastic surgery to come on the program and talk to us about how can we take care of ourselves in terms of our appearances and interestingly what we learned is that the very same mechanisms that are involved in uh brain degeneration heart issues ETC are involved in the face and involved in the skin as well I'm getting at this new book called younger for Life uh by Dr Anthony Yun I've known Dr Yun for well I guess since 2016 and we wanted to bring him on the program because of this incredible book uh that really allows us tools to to change our appearance to remain youthful uh in how we look and you know that has a huge play in ter terms of how we feel about ourselves let me tell you a little bit more about Dr Yun known as America's holistic plastic surgeon Anthony Yun MD is a nationally recognized board certified plastic surgeon he's recognized as a leader in his field an author of other bestselling books including the age fix and in stitches as well as playing God his public television special the age fix with Dr Anthony Yun has been viewed by millions Dr Yun also hosts the popular podcast the holistic plastic surgery show he is the most followed plastic surgeon on social media with over 4.5 million subscribers on his YouTube channel and eight million followers on Tik Tok his new book that we're talking about today is younger for life and it is a complete holistic guide to turning back the clock using the process of what he calls Auto juvenation so let's jump right into our interview well Dr Yun it's so nice to connect with you again I think uh it might be 2016 was the last time we actually had a chance to chat yeah you have a wonderful new book coming out thank you younger for life and uh as we were talking before we went to the recording you were mentioning how you know this is kind of a a kind of a functional medicine approach to cosmesis and looking good and and preserving skin so uh why you and not other people what is it that attracted you to this you know understanding this approach as opposed to just kind of mainstream plastic surgery yeah well many years ago uh after my book the AG fix came out which was when we had chatted back in 2016 I thought that I'd hit the Pinnacle of success I you know in plastic surgery and as you know in medicine and surgery especially surgeons we look at the bigger the operation the more accomplished you are or the more you operate the more accomplished you are in a lot of ways we look at it as the goal as a surgeon was always to bring people to the operating room and so I found myself hitting what I thought was the peak of my practice where I had people flying in all across the country to have facelifts with me you know and general surgery the big operation that you long to do when you're a resident is the Whipple and in plastic surgery it's the facelift because you know other you know people will trust almost anybody maybe to do their lipos suction but to do their facelift they are going to be very very choosy and so I thought I'd hit the Pinnacle of success and I had patient flying in from all around the country to have faist with me and I had one patient that completely changed how I look at medicine I did a facelift on a woman she was in her mid-60s and the surgery went perfectly we kept her overnight in the hospital just for routine monitoring and then she went home on a Friday I came back to the office on the following Monday and I had a message on my desk and it was from her daughter and she asked me Dr Yun why did my mom die she she died over the weekend several days just a few days after I did a facelift on her and it I mean I got this message I was actually on the phone and she asked me on the phone and I just was speechless because I'd never ever had anything like that happen before uh and so like any good physician I looked back and I said is there anything I could have done to prevent this you know was it a medication error was it you did she have some underlying illness we had her actually cleared by a cardiologist everything really checked out and really it came down down to is she ended up having a heart attack a couple of days after surgery after she had a completely negative stress test and cleared by a cardiologist the only thing I could have done to prevent her from dying would have been not to operate on her and so this sent me into a tail spin as understandably any physician it would and for many many months I questioned am I doing the right thing for my patients am I in the wrong field should I quit medicine Al together and it really came down to reassess ing the goal that I had for my patients and it was it went from being the goal of surgeon being to bring people to the operating room to the exact opposite and I realized that the goal should be to keep people out of the operating room and so I basically focused the rest of my time for years and how do I then um change the focus of my practice to trying to figure out how to get how to get people happy with how they look and how they feel about their appearance uh with using actual plastic surgery as an absolute Last Resort interesting you know I I turned the tables on you because I'm asked that question all the time you know what what was the moment or what made you change and you know why did I really sort of aband in wanting to uh think about treating people with things like Alzheimer's versus how to keep them healthy in the first place so uh a very similar so you then uh began exploring uh other ideas about uh what makes the skin age uh and you know began I think to look at lifestyle issues which I to be fair uh is certainly unusual in my field and I would say in in plastic surgery pretty darn unusual as well why would you know why' you be looking at lifestyle and but you made some really important discoveries I mean many of the things that you talk about in your book we've talked about on this podcast in the context of heart disease of diabetes of Alzheimer's and and you there's a lot of similarities between what goes on in the skin and a person's appearance and the very same mechanism so why don't we first look at uh at the beginning of the book you talk about five accelerants or uh issues that seem to be related to increased rates of skin aging so let's go through those if we can sure so the first one is going to be nutrient depletion and this something that you have talked a lot about on your podcast you've written about in your books and uh and this is something where essentially the food that we eat is not as nutritious as it used to be uh and we know that there was a study actually it looked between 1950 to 1999 and they actually looked at the nutrient densities of the produce that we were eating and they found that there was a reduction in six of these pretty much every year and this ended literally 23 years ago and of these six nutrients that we were deficient in or that has that that our produce has reduced in its amount of nutrients includes protein it includes iron and vitamin C and so nutrient depletion one of the big causes of the Aging of our skin number two is degradation of collagen now our skin is composed of 70 to 80% collagen and that's what makes our skin feel tight and strong you know when we're younger and we've got tight skin that's because the collagen of our skin is nice and healthy and it's youthful but we know that after the age of about 25 we we lose about 1% of the thickness of our collagen every year and women after menopause it increases to about 2% of the thickness of our skin and that's one reason why when you see older people especially you see older women and their skin is almost like tissue paper because that collagen has gotten so thin with age and so replenishing that collagen is a huge huge part of kind of this whole anti-aging of the skin that I'm recommending in uh younger for Life the third thing is oxidation and free radicals which something that your audience knows a lot about uh the fourth thing is inflammation and not acute inflammation which can be a very good thing for our bodies you know acute inflammation being let's say you get a cut and your body reacts to it by creating inflammation that's a healthy response even a lot of the treatments that we do in our offices laser treatments chemical peels even using certain skin treatments like retinoid creams can create a nice acute inflammatory response that can actually be anti-aging for skin but it's that chronic inflammation that can be a major problem and that chronic inflammation a lot of that is pushed by one of the things that you're not a fan of is excess sugar in the diet and then the next thing is going to be a uh is cellular is basically a reduction in autophagy or the buildup of cellular waste and this is something that plastic surgeons and dermatologists really are not on the ball with and something that holistic practitioners are really uh on The Cutting Edge of this and this is something with intermittent fasting I think that is so so important and one of the big parts of my book is uh to try to get that cellular Rejuvenation that clean up of that intracellular waste by promoting autophagy I think is a huge part of the whole anti-aging equation when you're looking at trying to turn back the clock uh using your body's own natural rejuvenative abilities and so I came up with this concept of Auto juvenation which combines all of these in a natural way to turn back the clock to rejuvenate your body from the inside out and as a plastic surgeon obviously we look at it a lot more from the outside I know a lot of what you cover in your podcast and your books is so much about anti-aging from the inside well you you spent some time talking about collagen already and I think we should uh really double click on that a bit more because um you know we know that we lose collagen as we age but what other other things are going on that leads to its degradation why are we losing our collagen well the way I describe it to my followers is that the collagen of your skin basically they're fibral okay and it's like the logs of a log cabin and as we get older that collagen those fibers start to denature they start to fray they start to fall apart a bit and that can be increased by the process of glycation uh glycation is when sugar molecules will actually then uh attach to the collagen fibers of your skin and that can cause the collagen and the elastin which is also a huge component of the skin to become kinked to become irregular and to like those logs in the Log Cabin it's like those logs start to fall apart and so a lot of these treatments that we're looking at let's say if we're doing a chemical peel or a laser treatment in the office then tries to take that collagen it creates that acute inflammation and when the collagen then heals together those logs become basically tighter in that log cabin again now you can do this also uh by internal mechanisms too and so really for me the way I look at it is ideally you look at an inside outside approach and so by in in and how you do it from the inside approach is going to be to increase the amount of protein in your diet because collagen is a protein it's a large protein uh and also taking collagen supplements uh and that can be very controversial in the traditional medical field and I'll talk a lot about that if you'd like uh and then bone broth is a great source of collagen as well so for me the way I look at is a true kind of inside outside approach uh and both of them I think if you really want to combine it and get younger looking skin and younger skin from the inside out then that's the way I recommend so to be sure the the collagen that we're talking about serves as a scaffolding really giving our skin support and you mentioned the glycosilation uh it sounds pretty technical but it really is as you mentioned The Binding of sugar to the protein in this case collagen that renders it uh less effective or less uh functional and you know that may sound like a really technical term but again for our viewers I will remind you that there is a gly glycated protein that we're all familiar with it's called A1C you know everybody talks about getting your A1C checked because of you're you're monitoring your diabetes that's sugar bound to a protein in this case hemoglobin and so that's what happens sugar binds the proteins and changes them so so I think what you're saying then is that it really serves Us in terms of wanting our skin to be healthy and Youthful that we keep our blood sugar under control oh exactly you know sugar really is the great Ager of our skin and that's something that I think a lot of people don't realize you know a lot of people think oh it's eating fat Fat's what's bad for my skin like no actually Sugar can age the skin via that process of glycation just like you said where those that Sugar can bond to the collagen uh proteins that can deform them cause them to be not as essentially youthful as they used to be they don't function as well but the second thing is inflammation you know that being also a huge part of Aging chronic inflammation so you get those chronic sugar spikes from there you get chronic insulin spikes uh and then having high levels of insulin has also been associated with uh certain types of issues you can have higher levels of testosterone you can get potential issues with acne and so sugar really uh and that doesn't even take in the microbiome part of it and how sugar can also uh cause the uh uh not really production but I suppose the encouraging of the bad bacteria in your gut uh and so the actual microbiome becoming less healthy and there are definite connections that have been made in our scientific literature U between the gut health and the skin health and so it used to be only they talk about the gut brain axis which I know you're a a huge person that has gotten this out to the masses but there also is a gut skin axis that is so important uh that I think a lot of people don't realize well well let's segue then to the skin microbiome to the fact that our skin is deeply colonized by a a rich array of organisms and what sort of attention is paid to that in terms of the things that we're putting on our skin how we wash our faces Etc what what's the consideration there you know there's very little talk about this skin microbiome in the Dermatology and definitely not in the Plastic Surgery Community you know if you talk to plastic surgery and say hey what do you think about the skin microbiome and its effects on aging and the of the skin you would probably be met with a lot of blank stairs um but you know I actually credit skincare companies there are skincare companies now that are following uh functional medicine and holistic medicine physicians and they're creating probiotic Rich skin care so just like you have the microbiome uh in your gut there is a microbiome on the skin that we know uh does have significant impacts on the health of the skin but we're just learning how far-reaching those impacts are um we do know that some of the practices that we used to recommend back in the 90s and early 2000s where you would actually strip the skin of its microbiome by really aggressive skin care we're finding now that that is actually harmful to the skin and so it used to be people would use all these astringents uh which are toners in our skincare that are alcohol-based because you wipe your face you know so initially people would cleanse and then you use this uh EST stringent based alcohol based toner you apply that onto your skin and it does make your skin feel nice andle clean afterwards and people like that feeling and they think that oh because it feels clean just like if you take an alcohol swab and you wipe your skin it feels clean uh they think that that's actually then healthy for your skin the interesting thing is that people would do this for acne and for oily skin and they say hey we'll get rid of that oil by using these alcohol-based astringents and what they would find afterwards is that it would actually cause the skin to secrete more oil as a reaction to it and so acne would actually get worse and on top of that now we're learning that you are now stripping the skin because of the alcohol you're killing off that healthy microbiome that those bacteria that are living on the surface of skin and you're not only creating potential oil issues but you're creating issues with the overall health of the skin as well back in my day there was something called stridex medicated pads and I had them in my locker in high school because you know of get the risk of getting acne which I probably had and I remember you know the the more I could theoretically sterilize my skin the better I thought I was doing but let's go back to collagen for just a moment because um there are things that we can do ostensively I mean you talk about bone broth uh and I think the the notion that many people have is that to have enough amino acids for building collagen you've got to be eating a lot of meat but you actually talk about the fact that we can be supportive of Co of collagen via various vegetables that we can consume so how do you how do you challenge the Dogma well I think that for me the way I look at a plant-based diet you know is is that people are doing plant-based diet that's more of a lifestyle than necessarily a diet specifically and I admire people who are on that lifestyle because I know that they're doing it for ethical reasons uh that being said yes you know in order to support the collagen of your skin you do need sufficient protein how much protein obviously depends on your health on your size but trying to get 100 grams of protein a day would be ideal the interesting thing though with collagen is that there are studies that show that actually taking a collagen supplement can really help benefit the collagen of your skin as well you know there's this big controversy regarding collagen supplements and do they truly improve the skin can you get those benefits just by increasing the amount of protein that you eat in the diet well I don't know of any studies that have been performed that have actually just increased protein in the diet and and checked as far as wrinkles skin hydr ation um elasticity but there are a lot of studies that have actually looked at collagen supplements and taking supplements like for example there was a metaanalysis in published in 2021 uh that looked at taking 90 days of a hydrolized collagen supplement and found a statistically significant Improvement in wrinkles hydration and elasticity of the skin uh in of those studies that that were looked at in this metaanalysis there have been uh Placebo controlled clinical trial that have found very similar things and they've even actually taken biopsies of the skin after people have been on collagen supplements for a couple of months usually two months and have found an increase in the thickness of the collagen afterwards uh and and what I tell people really with trying to improve the collagen the skin number one you always want to start with the food you know you cannot supplement yourself out of a poor diet uh that being said we also know once again we talked about nutrient depletion uh and so I do believe that supplements can help and when you're specific specifically looking at skin and wrinkles of the skin hydration elasticity and all that uh taking a collagen supplement I think can be very very helpful well hi everyone Dr David promter here we hope you're enjoying this content and if you would do so go ahead and hit the like button and if you're not already a subscriber to our Channel please consider doing so uh we're really grateful to have you as part of our community so let's get right back to the presentation so when you when you go to bi College in sub there are various forms of Cen what is best for the Skin So number one thing you want to look for is a hydrolyzed collagen supplement that are ideally hydrolyzed collagen peptides so collagen is a large protein and in order for it to be absorbed efficiently it needs to be broken down into smaller proteins uh amino acids and peptides and so the good thing with hydrolized collagen supplements is they have actually the protein has been broken down into these single amino acids and peptides so that you can fully absorb it better so that's what I would look for ideally uh when you're looking for collagen supplements uh unfortunately there isn't uh for the plant-based uh people there isn't a true uh plant-based collagen alternative there are collagen quote unquote supplements for people who are plant-based but they're not really so much collagen as their protein and they um hope or claim that by taking those that eventually that will help with the collagen of your skin but I don't know of any scientific studies that have looked at those and and found those to be effective you had mentioned uh supplements and we talked about free radicals uh that damage the skin uh I mean I guess before I get to the where I was going with this how does that relate to sun exposure and what should we be doing yeah so sun exposure will create damage the DNA of our skin and that also you know I did have somebody asked like well what about you know sun damage where is that with the Aging of the skin and that truly can create inflammation uh it can create free radical issues but mainly what it can do is it can damage the actual DNA structure um there is a um controversy in holistic medicine about sunscreen you know should you get sunscreen I mean so many people are deficient in vitamin D uh we do find that so many people get such a mental and psychological Boost from being in the sun having your you know having sun on your skin especially first thing in the morning so as a plastic surgeon and as a holistic leaning doctor what do you recommend well dermatologist will tell you to put sunscreen on your skin every day whether you're whether it's Sun sunny or cloudy and whether you're sitting in a basement all day you should still apply I am one for moderation in general you know I think that there's a good in between you know there are people in our holistic space who feel that sunscreen is toxic and you shouldn't use it at all um you know I have seen a lot of patients who've come into my office with skin cancers on their face and there is nothing more disfiguring than having a skin cancer lesion on your face getting Mo surgery and and some of the defects are just absolutely horrifying you know I've seen patients Say Hey I just have this tiny little thing on my nose it's a little spot and then I see them a couple weeks later and literally half their nostril is gone uh because that that skin cancer had infiltrated so deeply so what I recommend in general you know we do know that that sun does that sun exposure does create uh the UV radiation does create DNA changes in the skin that can lead to skin cancer ideally use a sunscreen every day when you're out in the sun SPF at least 30 but at the same time I also understand the psychological benefits of getting sun and I you know for me do I wear sunscreen every day not necessarily uh if I'm out if I'm on vacation I'm going out to a beach if I'm going to be outside a lot definitely but I also encourage people that there is a difference between sunscreen and sun block and so there are certain ingredients in sunscreen that I discourage people from using octinoxate and oxybenzone are two that are considered potential hor hormone disruptors uh they are in a lot of our sunscreen nowadays so I would try to avoid those if you can and for your children try going with the mineral based sunscreens that contain zinc oxide and titanium dioxide because those will just sit on the surface of your skin right A lot of people don't like them because they can create this kind of whitish hue to the skin uh but encouraging you with the kids our kids don't need these chemicals uh so go with the sun block zinc oxide or titanium dioxide for them especially what what are the two chemicals again that you want to to avoid oxybenzone and octanoate so there are some studies that do show that they may uh be hormone disrupting agents we also know that they may also disrupt the coral wreath so if you go to Hawaii you go to the Caribbean a lot of them will actually not allow you to wear oxybenzone or octoxide based sunscreens uh I've been very successful wearing a buff that's good too I know I mean it uh you know I know it it looks a little bit strange I think postco is not looking as strange but uh because I you know I I also have been somewhat concerned about absorption of certain chemicals through my skin which happens with various types of sun protective chemicals so I I wear the buff and I take I take my heat you know people give me a hard time but you know they say you're getting ready to rob a bank no I'm just because I've been through it I I've had a tricarboxylic acid facial peel for multiple uh precancerous lesions that were could not have been it was too many to freeze and I'd done the fudex enough times so that was a real uh experience my my entire face was burned basically with triar tricarboxylic acid they do give you um a little nitrous oxide you get to suck on the the straw of nitrous oxide and I remember uh the uh the assistant was saying do peut I think you need to go a little easier on the nitrous because I was I was way out there because you know it's you're burning your face with acid for crying out loud then you have to be in the darkness as you well know for what is it five to seven days um more recently I've been using a retina yep and uh what are your thoughts on the retinoid so a couple things so first of all the TCA peel you're talking about the good thing about that is hard as it was for you to go through it we do those all the time for a as a cosmetic thing that's one reason why you look so young I bet that has helped my youthful glow um and and yes what that can do is exfoliate the upper layer of skin if you've got precancerous lesions and that may potentially help I'm a big fan of retinoids now retinoids some people in the um holistic Community are not huge fans of it you do want to avoid retinoids if you are pregnant or breastfeeding because we do know that they can be absorbed uh through uh breast milk um but if you especially somebody like yourself where you've had a history of precancerous lesions number one is you do not want a a skin cancer on your face like I said I mean that the potential cosmetic ramifications are huge we do know that prescription strength Tran otherwise known as retina has been shown in studies to reverse early pre- skin cancers they're not going to treat a skin cancer that you develop so if you've got a a melanoma or basil cell carcinoma or sell do not think retina is going to treat it however if you have a history like you do of actinic keratoses which are precursors to sosol carcinoma then I would strongly encourage you to use retinoid like prescription strength retin retino uh because you it may reverse early precancerous cells the problem is you'll not know what it gets rid of because it just won't show up but the added benefit and we're talking about health of the skin and youth of the skin is that if I were to pick one anti-aging ingredient in a cream it would be the same product and so R retina otherwise known as Tron prescription strength has been shown to improve the collagen of the skin here we go going back to collagen it can thicken the dermis of the skin the deeper layer of the skin which also composed of collagen gets thinner with age uh and it can smooth the skin and one skin reverse early pr- skin cancers for those people who don't have access to a doctor to prescribe it because this is prescription strength you can use retinol retinol is over-the-counter strength basically it is um over the-counter and it's sold in tons of different skincare lines have them I have my own skincare un VI that has a retinol moisturizer when you apply it on the skin it it is applied as retinol as an inactive ingredient but it actually gets converted to Tran it's two steps once you apply it on the skin then eventually it gets converted to Tran so it does the same thing it's just not quite as strong well you know here is a place where preventive medicine is key and I think never talked about I mean you know the idea of getting the messaging out that the sun is damaging your skin early in life I think is really important in in my day uh we had what were called uh record albums uh you probably don't remember you would open them up and cover them with foil and then cover your face with baby oil and sit at the beach with a with a tinf thing reflecting onto your face just to bake bake yourself as much as you could and then you know for two years I I built houses in um in the Florida Keys and I was really tough that when I was 17 and 18 years old no shirt and now I'm clearly uh you know paying the price for that and I I think the issue is it's decades later that you begin to see the manifestations you don't yeah you get a bad sunburn it hurts the next day whatever but these events have longlasting um consequences I mean one severe sunburn to the point that you blister is clearly associated with increased risk of melanoma I mean know let's take it to the end game here so we've got to be be careful and you you spend you know a fair amount of time in your book gratefully uh talking about you know prevention and not just from the Sun but from you know other sources of damaging uh issues in our in our world like limiting the damaging effects of free radicals in general and you know you you also clearly um make a point that inflammation makes us look bad and is bad for the skin so uh let's more to the part in the book when you're talking about our food choices and how they affect this mechanism inflammation I mean our audience is is keyed in on this in terms of the brain yeah but it seems like you don't want to have your skin inflamed either yeah and so that's a huge thing and once again just like with the the brain the sugar that can be so so unhealthy and insulin resistance you know leading to insulin resistance can be very unhealthy for the brain we actually see a lot of the same types of impacts on your skin um and once again going back to that whole process of vication going back to the insulin spikes causing chronic inflammation of the skin this I do believe is a huge agent of the skin and one thing that you can do in addition to reducing sugar though we do know that increasing the amount of healthy fats can be very beneficial for your skin as well uh and so in the book one of the things I really encourage are pushing the omega-3 fatty acids so you're talking about cold water fish salmon tuna trout mackerel sardines all those are great great sources of Omega-3s which we know will actually moisturize your skin from the inside out uh and then we mentioned the microbiome and then mono and saturated fatty acids and nuts um and uh seeds uh and then and the other thing would be the microbiome effects and so the anti-inflammatory effects of a healthy microbiome are huge and that's something too we just don't talk about in dermatology or plastic surgery you know going back to the actual connection between the microbiome and the skin and the fact that if you are feeding your microbiome uh good prebiotics and you are encouraging the microbiome by taking probiotics or probiotic rich foods now you're also going to decrease the amount of inflammation of the skin as well as the whole body and that's another way that you can actually look younger from the inside out well to me the take-home message uh we I teed up inflammation and your immediate response was sugar yeah and you know I think that's really quite profound uh because you know dietary sugar ultimately leads to issues with insulin and and serum blood related sugar elevations and that paves the way through multiple mechanisms including glycation and proteins for inflammation and I think you know you can't see when your brain's inflamed but if your face is inflamed you get that you see that and you know I think that's one of the things that detracts from people looking good is when their faces are red and inflamed and you can see that you know I see that in people who come into my office office I can the moment they walk into my office I can tell whether they're a smoker the type of diet they have I mean in some ways you can tell how much stress they have all of this really impacts that's something one thing we haven't even talked about is stress and how that is a huge Ager of the body as well um but you can tell somebody's Lifestyle by just looking at the quality of their skin a good friend of mine she calls skin the magic mirror because it really does tell you what's going on inside your body and the great thing is a lot of what you have uh talked about in your podcast in books that can help with with the brain help to slow down a lot of those kind ofh slowing down processes that occur with your brain as you get older and reduce the risk of dementia all of those are the same types of things that you can do to improve your skin as well and I think that you know everything is intertwined part of is I think so much of our body is composed of collagen you know from our blood vessels to our skin uh that and our joints and our muscles you know that everything does intertwine together um what I try to to do in the book is take a lot of the recommendations that you know forward-leaning Physicians like yourself make uh and then show you how that relates to the skin and what you can do from a traditional dermatologic plastic surgery perspective with the treatments on the surface of the skin as well so it's truly going from that inside out the good thing now is holistic medicine is getting into now some of these uh treatments like red light therapy that can really potentially help with the Aging of the skin uh and now traditional plaster Dermatology is starting to go in that direction as well and they're realizing that hey there is an overlap here that we can work together and and and that's really what I wanted this book to be well I've always been taken by the term Heart Smart Diet as if there's a unique diet that's good for the heart which might be very different than you what you'd want to eat for your skin or your brain and the bottom line is that the mechanisms of degradation are the same throughout the body uh they are inflammation and as you've mentioned free radical mediate stress loss of or downregulation of autophagy which uh Segways to the section in your book where you actually talk about autophagy and how we can eat to enhance this process again Auto cell fagy eating where we actually able to break down defective cellular components and allow new Sailor components to take their place so how do we enhance autophagy based on the foods we eat or how we eat our food so there's two things that I would look at and one of the things I do you know my audience is very different than yours your audience has read your books they know really kind of the U basics of healthy eating um you know for me I've got a lot of people who follow me on social media and these are people who for them you know going from three cans of soda to two in a day is a big deal and I try to encourage people to make those baby steps that that they can to help improve the quality of their life and their health and their skin they're also not used to fasting you know if you bring up fasting to a lot of my followers it's going to be a very like what are you talking about um and even the whole concept of of autophagy is very new to them and so really it comes down to is autophagy is that process like you mentioned that means self- eing or essentially intracellular um renewal or recycling where you taking those uh used up and old cellular intracellular components those proteins those organel and you're essentially recycling them for energy but in order to do that you have to stop eating for a period of time and so we do know that insulin will stimulate uh or will halt autophagy in its tracts we know glucagon will stimulate it and so taking time off of eating can help with can basically get that cellular Rejuvenation process going and one of the things that I put in the book that I found really interesting as I was doing my research and we did test it on people as well is can you uh you know people will intermit and fast and if you intermit and fast fast ideally for a good 16 hours you can stimulate that autophagy process and clean up those cells so that they function more uh more effectively more efficiently and more youthfully but can you then take that and prolong it while still eating well we know that there are certain foods that will stop autophagy in its tracts okay that's carbs and excessive amounts of protein but we also know that healthy fats can actually promote autophagy and so the thing in my book that I tried to do is we tested people where they would intermittent fast 16 hours so they go 8:00 P.M to noon the next day and instead of going back to what I consider a collagen supporting diet high protein um you know a moderate amount of carbs higher amounts of healthy fats we put them on essentially what is more of a ketogenic type of a diet where we had higher fats lower proteins um made sure that those fats were healthy fats so once again omega-3 fatty acid Rich fats monounsaturated acid uh or monounsaturated fat full Foods uh and then we also added the polyphenol rich foods because we know that polyphenols also can help stimulate autophagy so now you're talking about those dark colored produce okay so like blackberries plums strawberries raspberries uh black beans uh and the idea then is can you then although you're breaking your fast can you continue that process of autophagy even longer and what we found after 21 days where we would test people and we combined uh diet uh what to eat when to eat nutritional supplements and skinc care and after 21 days we had some pretty nice changes in people's skin uh and they had people who had come up to them that didn't know they were trying anything new and say wow your skin looks great what are you doing literally in just 21 days so it's really exciting I have to say I this is a great interview because I I didn't you know I hadn't really thought that uh um you know made this connection to the skin and you know meula a bit that it's the same stuff we've been talking about those same aging factors are are there for all to see on your skin on your face so uh it's it's very true I mean you know you say a patient would walk in you know if they're a smoker you know if they're stress Etc as can I and you know especially as it relates to uh dietary choices um and I I have to admit that those individuals who are clearly not eating right who are having cognitive issues often times it's quite evident in terms of their quality their skin quality so uh you know it's a very holistic way of looking at it and the crazy and the crazy thing is is you know I'm sorry but in but the crazy thing is is that you know you have you know the goal for you is to change people's lifestyle and sometimes it's really really hard as a physician to say hey you know what to improve your heart health you should do this to improve your brain health you should do this but then if you say hey to get rid of those wrinkles to look younger you should do this it's crazy how some people are so motivated by their appearance whereas they may not be motivated by brain fog or by you know heart health or lung Health you know but gez if they're going to look older five years from now especially if they're going to look older than their friends then they will make those changes and so the goal for me is hey if I can reach those people especially in Middle America you know I've got so many people on social media that follow me because of the funny stuff I put out there but if I could just every once in a while throw in some of these little nuggets for them if they just take that one can of soda pop and switch it for green tea every day I try to encourage them that's a big deal you know if you can just quit smoking or quit vaping that's a huge deal uh and so trying to make these small little steps and gosh forbid it they could bring a little in in aitt fasting into it and start using the right products and supplements and and here you go now you next thing you know that their brain health is better and their hearts better as well yeah what what's good for one system is good is good for all Etc so correct me if I'm wrong but didn't you say in the book somewhere that people who use a lot of facial expressions tend to get more wrinkles did I read that right yes oh my goodness and that's the whole idea of Botox you know there's certain muscles of our face that are called Dynamic wrinkles and they're caused by actual muscles and the more you Flex those muscles the more those wrinkles can get actually inset in and the idea of Botox is it as you know it's a neurotoxin it it prevents the transmission of nerve impulses to those muscles those muscles are not creating those wrinkles those wrinkles smooth out the muscles can even atrophy they can get smaller and now you find that those wrinkles never really come back like they did before well what about fillers that seems to be you know they're parties now where people go and get fillers injected how how safe are they how effective what should we know so with fillers it's a whole other deal the way I describe fillers it's basically like liquid skin uh the original filler was collagen we talked a lot about collagens already um but people would get collagen injected into their lips uh famously Barbara Hershey during the movie Beaches was rumored to have had collagen injected back long ago now our fillers are made of hyaluronic acid and this is a naturally occurring moisturizer of the skin we use hyaluronic acid now because it lasts longer and you don't have to do skin testing for it the issue with fillers is twofold the first thing is people get over done you know I I published a seminal work in class surger called the volumetric faft and it was the idea that the face ages in three dimensions not just two and that adding volume can actually help rejuvenate the face um but people have taken that and like anything in plastic surgery have taken that to the extreme and you get these overfilled pillow faces that you see now in Hollywood the big but the big issue just that's just cosmetic but the big issue with health with fillers is intravascular occlusion and fillers if they're in injected into blood vessels accidentally they can cause major problems like tissue eskee and necrosis where essentially all parts of the body are supplied blood supply by various arteries and if that artery gets clogged then that part of the body that won't get enough blood supply and literally it can turn black and it can die uh and that has happened people have lost parts of their nose parts of the lip people have even gone blind from injections of filler so if you're considering filler injection you really want to know the risks make sure you have it done by a board certified dermatologist or plastic surgeon or one of their expert injectors in a very safe setting and always always use an ha filler there are other fillers out there like silicone and stuff at least hyaluronic acid can be reversed using an agent called hyaluronidase the other fillers cannot well you know the book is younger for life and uh I you know in reading the book uh it was as I expected talking about lifestyle choices all the these mechanisms that we've already talked about today but you cover things like fillers and procedures in the book as well which I thought was really important really handy because that's what people are doing yeah and you know people I think to put it out there for discussion I thought was really valuable yeah thank you I think you know for me what I want to do is there's nothing about surgery in there but it really is all about what you can do short of surgery to turn back the clock but really starting with the principles and the way I describe it's like you're building a house you know and the filler and the injections that's like the attic of the house you want to start with the foundation and the foundation is a good diet uh the first level is going to be supplements in skin care and when you get to those treatments now you're way up at the top there's so much that you can do short of going to a dermatologist or PL surgeon to help your skin look better and the great thing is you found listening this podcast today is those things that are going to make your skin look better will make your health overall better as well preserve your brain Dr Yun thanks for being with us today this is terrific information and congrats on this your latest book younger for life um I'm very happy that I got the advanced copy so I'm I feel like I'm a little bit ahead of the game but thanks for spending time with us today thank you so much doc much really appreciate you having me on well I say thank you to Dr Yun for his time uh sharing this really interesting information with us and you know it turns out that there are so many similarities with a lot of what we've been talking about that these fundamental mechanisms like influ free Radical Media distress brought on by things for example like having a lot of sugar in the diet not enough anti-inflammatory foods like Omega-3s Etc things we've talked about have a huge role to play in keeping the skin healthy and looking good and I hope that's important for all of you uh and that you got good information on the program today thanks as always for joining us I'm Dr David pretter we'll be back soon bye for now [Music]

Channel: DavidPerlmutterMD

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Keywords: david perlmutter, dr. david perlmutter, grain brain, dr. perlmutter, brain maker

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Length: 46min 7sec (2767 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2024