Ep 378 – The Rogue Pharmacist: Why Soothing Ingredients Backfire

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0:00:55.0 Maggie Staszcuk: 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 am Maggie Staszcuk, ASCP's program director, and joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hi, Ben.

0:01:11.8 Ben Fuchs: Hello, Maggie.

0:01:12.5 Maggie Staszcuk: Ben, estheticians are often taught to reach for soothing ingredients whenever skin is reactive, and probably consumers are too. But clinically, that doesn't always lead to better outcomes. Why do calming ingredients sometimes make things worse?

0:01:27.6 Ben Fuchs: Well, if you have a baby and your baby's crying and you soothe your baby, what generally can happen after you soothe the baby, when the baby's soothed?

0:01:37.2 Maggie Staszcuk: I don't know. Oh, baby goes to sleep.

0:01:40.2 Ben Fuchs: Baby goes to sleep. Exactly. Do you want your skin to go to sleep? No.

0:01:43.5 Maggie Staszcuk: You don't?

0:01:46.7 Ben Fuchs: No. You don't want your skin to sleep. You want it moving. You want it dynamic. It's a barrier. You want it revved up, doing stuff.

0:01:52.4 Maggie Staszcuk: That went right over my head.

0:01:53.8 Ben Fuchs: Yes. So soothing ingredients, with... If you use soothing ingredients, you can suppress skin chemistry. In fact, this is one of the big problems with our standard skincare products that we use, the emulsions, the lotions, and the creams, is they have a suppressant effect on skin chemistry. The classic example is the so called, nobody can see me doing this, but I always have to do this when I say this, moisturizer. Right? How does a moisturizer work? It shuts things down. Now, they're not necessarily soothing, but many of the ingredients in moisturizers are used, are soothing ingredients. They're occlusive. And occlusion is one of the strategies for soothing the skin. And while occlusion can be helpful for things like eczema or when the barrier is disrupted, like if you have a burn or some kind of trauma, for the most part, you do not want to occlude healthy skin. And that's one of the strategies that's used with soothing is occlusion. So number one, occlusion and soothing can suppress skin chemistry. Number two, another soothing ingredient or soothing class of ingredients are herbal. And while lavender has wonderful soothing properties, and St. John's wort can be soothing, and chamomile can be soothing, and calendula can be soothing, you run the risk of allergenicity and you run the risk of sensitivities because many people are reactive to the terpenes and the phytochemicals that are in these ingredients.

0:03:12.1 Ben Fuchs: So number one, you run the risk of suppression of skin chemistry. Number two, you run the risk of allergenicity. And number three, when you soothe the skin topically, you're trying to counteract a response that the body wants. When our skin is irritated, it's actually... Or you're using something to soothe the skin. Your skin is telling you something. It's telling you that there's something getting into the skin, usually from the bottom up or from the inside out, not from the top down or from the outside in, that's causing an inflammatory response. And so the real answer is let's figure out what the heck is inflaming the skin. It's kind of like we were talking before, rather than trying to tamp down the inflammation and the irritation from the top down. Now, there are times when soothing can be very helpful, for sure, particularly if you have eczema, for example. And Avena sativa or oats can have wonderful soothing properties, and oatmeal baths have been used forever for their soothing properties. And those can be an important way to address these conditions. But any more than as a temporary solution, you run the risk of, A, not really solving the problem and the problem continues, but even worse, B, the problem gets worse and becomes systemic as opposed to the skin.

0:04:25.7 Ben Fuchs: So if you have eczema and it's due to toxicity that's getting into the bloodstream, as we've talked about many times, through a leaky gut, and you don't address it at that level, you could end up with arthritis, autoimmune diseases, ultimately cardiovascular health issues, and a shortened lifespan because you're ignoring the signal that's being communicated to you through the skin by trying to strictly soothe. So soothing has its place, for sure, but you gotta be a little bit careful because it can be counterproductive in the sense that, A, it can occlude and suppress skin chemistry. And by the way, skin electricity, skin respiration, this is one of the big problems, as I say, with so-called moisturizing products. Number two, if you're using herbal ingredients to soothe, those can actually trigger a hypersensitive or immune or allergic response. And number three, if you're trying to take care of an irritation or inflammation that's topical on the skin without addressing the cause, which oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes is internal, you run the risk of allowing the problem to perpetuate and sometimes get worse and cause other systemic issues that can ultimately shorten your life. So if you have a burn, like a mechanical trauma of some kind, or if you've gone to an esthetician or a dermatologist and had a laser peel or a chemical peel, soothing can be beneficial.

0:05:45.0 Ben Fuchs: But the best soothing ingredients, as always, because I'm a nutritional pharmacist, is going to be nutrients. And vitamin C is tremendously soothing. Vitamin E has soothing properties. There's a fatty acid called GLA, which I don't know if you've heard of, which is a derivative of an essential, it's not an essential fatty acid, but it's a derivative which has wonderful soothing properties. Topical ionic minerals, ionic polyelectrolytes, fulvic minerals, if you will, those have... In fact, that's my favorite soothing ingredients. So the best way to soothe the skin, if you want to, number one, not have to deal with occlusion leading to suppression of skin chemistry; number two, if you don't want to deal with any potential problems with herbal or botanical ingredients stimulating or activating the immune system, the best strategy is going to be nutritional. And vitamin C is a super, super, superstar anti-inflammatory, as is vitamin E and as are ionic plant-derived minerals.

0:06:38.7 Maggie Staszcuk: You may have touched on this a little bit already, but what's happening physiologically when skin reacts negatively to ingredients that are supposed to calm inflammation?

0:06:49.6 Ben Fuchs: Great, great question. What is that about sensitivities and inflammatory and immune reactions that are induced topically? In order to really understand that, we gotta understand the skin should never be sensitive. It's designed by nature to not be sensitive. It's a barrier. That's its job. You want it to be not sensitized. You want to be able to have things bounce off of it without initiating an immune response. If you do have an immune response, inflammatory response, sensitized response, as you're asking, to a topical ingredient, you can rest assured that your immune system is jumpy. It's spring-loaded. And what happens is, and this is really an interesting mechanism, when you get toxicity in the blood, one of the things that the blood will do, and this is a survival mechanism, really, because you don't want toxicity circulating around the bloodstream because then it's gonna toxify the whole body, the body will actually dump out those toxins. The body will dump out toxins from the blood into the various tissues of the body. In fact, if you have... The classic example is autoimmunity. If you have an autoimmune disease, they'll actually look in your blood for immune complexes.

0:07:59.0 Ben Fuchs: They call them CICs, circulating immune complexes. And they'll look for these immune complexes. The immune complexes are indicative or a marker of some kind of immune response. What happens over time, in order to keep the blood clean, the blood is a sacred space, it has to stay clean, the body will dump these immune complexes into various tissues. One of the places it'll dump it out is in the connective tissue. And the connective tissue almost is like a sieve, like a spaghetti strainer for the blood, and it's one of the ways that the body filters out the blood to get rid of toxins. A second mechanism is deposition of these toxins in soft tissues. And this is one of the mechanisms for autoimmunity. Deposition in the thyroid can cause Hashimoto's thyroiditis or even Graves' disease. Deposition in the joints can cause rheumatoid arthritis. Deposition in the connective tissue can cause various connective tissue diseases, Ehlers-Danlos and diseases like this. But one of the body's favorite places to dump toxins is the skin, the dermis. Once those toxins are in the dermis through the digestive tract, the dermis becomes very jumpy. The skin's response, the dermis' response to these toxins is the secretion of powerful molecules that modify cell responses, particularly immune responses, called cytokines.

0:09:14.7 Ben Fuchs: You've probably heard the term cytokines. These cytokines are released from immune cells, from white blood cells, and they sensitize the skin. And then when you put your lavender on the skin, boom, you get an immune response. So the skin becomes jumpy due to, prime number one, step number one, deposition of toxins, usually from the digestive tract, almost always from the digestive tract. And then secondary release of cytokines from the immune cells that migrate to that area to protect the skin or whatever tissue it is. And then when you put something topically on the skin, because there's cytokines and immune activity that's already present, it's like the skin is really jumpy. It's like spring-loaded and, boom, you have an immune reaction. The reason this is important is because it'll look like it's the ingredient that's causing the immune reaction because the immediate cause is the ingredient. But you're not gonna be able to solve the problem permanently by just getting rid of the ingredient. You gotta backtrack to the cause of the initial sensitization, which is stuff that's coming into the skin or whatever organ you're dealing with from the bloodstream, which itself is coming in through a leaky gut. Does that make sense?

0:10:24.6 Maggie Staszcuk: Oh, yeah. Makes perfect sense. I mean, from an esthetician's point of view, they wouldn't know.

0:10:30.1 Ben Fuchs: They wouldn't, because they're putting something on and then there's a reaction, so it looks like it's the ingredient. But the way you know this is not the case is because the skin's designed to be a barrier. It's designed to protect. So if you're not getting that protective response, you're getting an anti-protective response, an inflammatory response, you know there's something percolating underneath.

0:10:48.1 Maggie Staszcuk: 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.