AVOID This Ingredient In Your Skincare Products! A Guide To Skin Health

Ectoin is very interesting because it is a protein that is expressed in tardigrades. These are little animals, they're called extremophiles. They can live in extreme, extreme environments. They say that they can even survive on the outside of spaceships. It can actually protect from environmental stressors like UV light blue, light pollution and like emf. We're putting it almost everywhere. So it is in the youth products, it's in the sunblock. Almost all products we're going to come out with are going to have that because it is a game changer, changer.

Seems like everybody these days is asking me what kind of stuff I smear on my face when I get up in the morning. And I've revealed in the past what some of my preferred skincare products are. But I've never really taken a super deep dive into some of the myths about so called healthy beauty care products and what you have to think about when you use them. As well as a lot of other questions I'm asked like could collagen help to improve your skin health? Or what about all these new ingredients like NAD and spermidine and peptides for the face? So there's one guy I know who's been on podcasts before. He's one of the smartest guys I know when it comes to skin health. We did this podcast called Demystifying the Ultimate Biohack Skincare Routine where we talked about what order to put stuff on in terms of the moisturizer and the cleanser and the toner and the serum and the unicorn tears and everything else. But his name is Amitay Eshel. Amitay is the CEO of Young Goose. Yungoos is a pretty cool company. I think they're one of the companies that's at the cutting edge of skin health and skin care. On my bathroom counter is the entire Young Goose so called anti aging package. It's just kind of everything that you need to put on in the morning, everything that you need to put on in the evening. I got into Amitay's cool backstory about his background and Israeli special forces and the and becoming a skin health expert and all of that in the original podcast that we did. So we won't spend too much time on that and we'll kind of jump into the good stuff. But all the shownotes are going to be@BenGreenfieldLife.com YoungGoose2 this is the second podcast about Young Goose. BenGreenfieldLife.com Younggoose the number two, if you want the show notes. And let me tell you, for people who maybe didn't hear our first podcast, even though, of course, we don't have to go into the whole backstory. If you're sitting next to somebody on, say, like an airplane, how do you describe to them your approach to skincare that might be unique in terms of what you're doing at Young Goose?

Yeah, it's a great question. Just because you can really, you can go into like a couple hours philosophizing on what we're doing, but to the, to the person next to me on the plane, I'm just going to say we take what has been proven to work on a cellular level.

To extend cellular life, cellular vibrancy, whatever we're trying to achieve, and we translate it to cosmetic formulations. So that is quite rare within the sphere of skincare, because normally companies are trying to either have one ingredient that they claim solves everything, or they're trying to create a product that everyone would understand.

So what we're doing, I think within that aspect is extremely unique where we're saying we just want the literal best in longevity and health optimization in skincare products.

Well, if you look at, like the charts that show all the different anti aging power, or not the anti aging pathways, but the pathways responsible for how aging occurs, cardiovascular pathways, immune modulating pathways, neuromuscular pathways, et cetera. There's even a chart floating around there I saw a while ago on the Internet. It's just this massive image that's super detailed about all the different ways that we could target aging and improve lifespan and health span. When it comes to skin, obviously, I would imagine there's different ways these pathways affect aging, or there's different pathways of aging when it comes to the skin. So how do you actually take what you just described, the idea of not just using one single ingredient and apply it to multiple aging pathways?

Well, you could do that, but because obviously nothing works in isolation, right? Like, you can take whatever ingredient that is that we understand works to combat aging in general, and we can probably look at different pathways that it works within or on. But when you talk about the skin, first of all, you're privileged in a way where you do have ingredients that might not affect the entire human that robustly, for example, like resveratrol. But because you're talking about local application, they're actually extremely impressive in the way that they function. That's number one. We try to understand how an ingredient is going to work on skin cells, and that can start in a lab in a petri dish. Now, when you are going ahead and checking if it works in reality on living human beings, that becomes a little bit tricky because you need to have the people apply it while living their daily lives. And you need to create like tests that are based on like punch biopsies. Yeah, it's very difficult to, like, let's say we talk about peptides. It's very difficult to understand how a peptide is going to work in real life after we've tried it on some. Some cells in the petri dish.

What do you mean about the punch biopsy part?

So let's say we looked at a product called Procare that the main thing we were trying to do there is to.

Modulate mtor, which is a pathway responsible for.

Many things. It's called the survive pathway. But mainly we were trying to decrease senescent cells. It's actually pretty easy to.

Modulate MTOR if we're looking at very simple organisms or if we're looking at skin cells in a petri dish. But it's proven quite difficult to extrapolate modulation of MTOR to the entire human being. So, for example, by the way, that's why intermittent fasting doesn't work as well on large and larger creatures, rather than C. Elegans for that matter. Right.

Yeast or fruit flies as well. Even once you get up to a rodent model, you see benefits from calorie restriction. But intermittent fasting really doesn't turn out to be quite as impressive.

Yeah. And if I will kind of abuse intermittent fasting a little bit more, then rodents normally are nocturnal and most of the studies we're doing are during the day.

That is a very good point.

Yeah. And that point could be extrapolated also to Skincare. Like, okay, I'll have people apply something in lab settings for forever. But actually I'm not letting them, I don't know, live their lives in their polluted city because I'm making them come every day to my lab. So it's very difficult. Or by the way, the opposite can happen. Where they're used to being out and about and breathing fresh air. And I'm making them sit under artificial blue light, halogen lights, for forever, every day. Right. So that could change things too. But in general, when you're talking about. And that's how I'm going to get to punch biopsy, I need to have people live their lives.

Go through their routine and literally take a, like, imagine, you know, how you stick a drinking straw on a potato.

That's what I have seen in a human being.

I've had punch biopsies done before. I had one done during an exercise performance test right before a three hour run on a treadmill, which really sucked because it's like daggers in your thighs every time your foot strikes you. It's basically like shoving a guillotine in your muscle.

Exactly.

But although still uncomfortable, you need to do it in a very 3 millimeters depth when you're talking about the skin. So you do a punch biopsy in the skin and you have just really, to anyone listening, imagine sticking, drinking a potato. You're taking that piece out and you can now measure different things. So we ended up showing not only that we can reduce senescent cells, but also that we can upregulate the expression of 14 different genes that we deem very positive for aging. So collagen gene, elastin genes, hyaluronic acid genes, et cetera.

And that was with the product Procare that you were developing?

Yeah, that's with a product, Procare, which is a very specific product to target again mtor and also by the way, like a facial fat loss.

Subcutaneous fat loss. But you don't always need that. So for example, we looked at.

Spermidine, which is, we are the first skincare company in the world to integrate spermidine into skincare. And we learned that one of its major effects, it's on the skin microbiome and skin barrier. So sometimes you don't even need to do that. But you still want to check human beings, right? Not petri dishes.

So when I look at this whole lineup of the six, bless your heart, annoying things I have to put on my face every day because I got to press each pump bottle. And you, fortunately you told me I could just put them all in my hands at once. Most of the serum just do it all at once. Which has made things way more convenient because what I was doing was I put one, rub it in, then put the next one on and rub it in. Now I just put them, most of them on the serums, I move on to the moisturizer, etc. But so like the pro care, are each one targeting a different mechanism of aging? Like if the pro care is doing things like subcutaneous fat or mtor, are the other products hitting different aging pathways?

Yes and no. So sometimes we want to have something extremely specific like procarement or like bioretinol, for example, because retinol just doesn't play or vitamin A doesn't play nice necessarily with other things and other Times you're going to have to apply things on your skin. So you only need to apply that night, et cetera. So that's the yes part. But for example, we launched last time we talked about a product that's going to be launched by now. It's launched, it's called the youth series. So we have a youth reset serum, Youth daily moisturizer, more products are coming for the eyes, for the neck, whatever. But all of those target the entire 12, what we call the 12 hallmarks of aging, the 12.

Subjects around cellular aging. So sometimes you can target many at once. So spermidine targets nine, for example, of.

Those 12 hallmarks, why wouldn't you just replace your entire lineup then all your SKUs with this new youth series that you're doing?

That's a great question. And a lot of people, if they are.

Not, they just don't want to apply like 100 different things on their skin either because of their attention, budget, what I call, or their fiscal budget, then they should do that. But normally when you go wide, you can't go as deep. No pun intended. For example, we know spermidine does affect autophagy. Sorry, affect senescent cells to some extent, but it doesn't do it as robustly as a senolytic.

Okay, I got it. So we could say that you do have a shotgun approach, but you could take an even more precise. Sorry for the violent analogy. I guess you were in the special forces. You don't care. You could take like a sniper approach instead.

Yeah, and not only is like, also, you know, if we talk about going back to like mtor, we know, for example, that.

Modulating up and down creates a better effect than basically.

Targeting the decretion in MTOR activity all the time. So we need to design a product that its half life is like four hours and then you apply it twice a day.

Oh, that makes sense. Okay. So similar to how you'd exercise, recover, exercise again, you're not trying with the product to keep MTOR down regulated the whole time. So you're actually looking at the half life of making sure that you're not suppressing MTOR too much. I would imagine so that you're not. So that you're allowing skin renewal to occur.

And inflammation. Inflammation is actually extremely important in the skin. It is the chronic, by the way, I call, I try to explain that inflammation and information are tightly linked because inflammation is just information for, for repair. But if you have chronic inflammation, it's like background noise. If we shut down inflammation all the time, that's not a positive thing. Your body can't communicate that it needs repair. On the other hand, if there is information, you know, overload all the time, your body is not going to repair or not even going to repair. Well, it's going to repair very sporadically.

How much would it cost? Like, let's say I wanted to just use like the youth products. I want to use that shotgun approach. How much would something like that cost me on a monthly basis versus if I wanted to go with the full meal deal, anti aging package?

So we, we deal in 60 days. That's, that's how much a product's going to last. So every 60 days you're going to be looking at like $370.

For the youth products and the full, you know, the full line is going to be about eleven hundred dollars.

Okay. For sixty days. So you'd be looking at, if you were going to go with the best of the best skincare products and you want to keep your skin as young as possible, your monthly spend would be about 550 or so.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah. Okay. It's kind of funny, like, I have two friends in the past couple of months who have spent $130,000 on cosmetic protocols with it. Now I'm not saying you can parallel like topical skincare products to full on cosmetic surgery. And I also realize that there's a certain subset of folks listening in from 550amonth is still slight sticker shock. But I think that if you're somebody who really wants to keep your skin long term in the game, looking good for a really long time. How long have I been using this stuff on mate? Maybe 10 months, something like that. And people are walking up to me all the time asking me what I'm doing. And I'm not saying this is to brag, obviously just to speak to the efficacy of your products. Telling me I look younger so they're doing something.

But also if you imagine so if you, I mean, you could speak to that way better than I would imagine. Only, you know, running in order to compete in an ultra marathon or actually doing things around it, you know, to really optimize your, your health.

Right. Core, core strength, knees over toes program, you know, protein intake, etc.

Yeah, exactly. That is the difference between spending 300, $130,000 on aesthetic procedures or spending $130,000 on aesthetic procedures plus $550 a month. Your recovery is everything. So 130,000 is actually only signaling for repair. The actual repair happens during the recovery. So the better you recover, the better the results.

What about peptides? I think last time you mentioned that, you're starting to figure out a way to put some of those in the products and make peptides somehow transdermally available. Are you still pursuing that route or putting those in the products?

Yeah. So a few things around. First of all, yes, I would say peptides in general are one of the overhyped ingredients in skincare. Not because peptides are not good, peptides are incredible. But the skincare industry has a tendency to take.

What is becoming a hot product in other areas and trying to superimpose it on skincare formulations. So since peptides are now notorious because of FDA regulations, but also because they're creating some wonderful results for people, now skincare is not even going to say what peptides we have, we have there. They're just going to say skincare with peptides for that matter. So unfortunately, most peptides don't do a lot for the skin. And the ones who do probably should be injected if we really want, like incredible efficacy. Having said that, ghkc, for example, copper peptide, or very small peptides like T Go Pep Up 4 are peptides that can actually affect your skin and it is measurable. So T Go Pep Up 4 is a peptide that is only used in skincare.

What are you saying on that? Because I know ghk, Copper peptide. What's the Tigo one?

Tigo is a hexapeptide. Okay.

Is it T I G O?

Yeah. T, I G O P e P U, P4.

Okay, got it.

And it can actually upregulate the expression of collagen genes, which is kind of, if anyone remembers, like the saying, oh, you produce less collagen as you grow older. This is because of that lowering in expression of those genes. So we. Yeah, we can actually. And the company that owns the patent has proven it. They can actually upregulate the expression of collagen genes in the skin.

How new is that one? Because I haven't heard that much about it.

It's just extremely expensive to formulate with.

So.

Okay, I think we are one of two companies that actually use it.

Which one of your products is it in?

It's in the hyperbaric mask. Okay. And also one of the. So hyperbaric mask is one of those products that we created around the idea of.

Not replacing anything in someone's routine. Like you can plug and play this to any routine that someone has. It's a gel, we call it a mask for no apparent reason. It's a gel that you apply after a moisturizer overnight. And we can do like crazy things with that mask up regulating genes. We can activate or increase the expression of Clotho, which is a cool gene. It's pretty cool.

Why do you call it hyperbaric?

Because the original preparation of the mask, it's more. It inherited. This is the third iteration of it. It inherited the purpose that we made it for in the beginning. We actually made it for one pretty famous guy that we can't say who he is, but he had the hyperbaric in his house and he wasn't get. And all he wanted is skin benefits and he wasn't getting them. And he's in his 50s. And basically what it came down to is his mitochondria's inability to basically he had mitochondrial dysfunction. He had. His mitochondria was unable to respond to the excess oxidative stress, etc. That is caused by hyperbaric. So basically it cost him too much energy to create energy, in other words. So the, the original mask was basically just a gel with one ingredient which was derived from yeast, which increases mitochondrial capacity. And when this guy went berserk on this mask and said, you know, I want like 50 gallons of it. I want it for the entire body. I'm not kidding. We said, okay, we can actually make a product out of it. And we went to the lab and we said, how can we make it even better? And what we tried to do is we actually tried to mimic all of the pathways that are being activated or downregulated by hyperbarics in the skin specifically. And that was kind of the second version. And the third version is a version that has now that special peptide that I mentioned or some things that have nothing to do with hyperbarics, but they're just very, very good to have.

If you were using a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber for the skin health benefits and you put it on before you gotten hyperbaric, would it amplify those benefits?

Yeah, yeah. And this is something that is used in very, I would say very specialized or very avant garde hyperbaric centers in the United States, mainly, like we have one in Europe. But those who know, know, you know, really, really professional hyperbaric locations offer and carry that mask for that purpose. I don't. Most of them don't even sell it.

Wow, that's incredible. Congratulations. The guy who wanted for a whole body reminds me of like Queen Cleopatra. Didn't she bathe in like goat's milk or wine or something like that?

I'M not kidding. His assistant sends me texts every week with different questions to this day.

That's funny. Okay, so we started talking about that because we were talking about peptides. You mentioned GHK, Copper peptide. You mentioned the super expensive one that starts with a T. What is again?

Tigo peptide.

Yeah, Tigo peptide. You mentioned spermidine, GHK Copper peptide and spermidine. And collagen too. So it's kind of like a three parter question. You see all those three advertised as something you could take orally to improve skin health. Would there be any efficacy behind that idea for any of those three?

Yes, it's just, it's just, you know, the nerd in me wants to tell you yes, there will be, but it's just not the best way to go about it. As far as collagen. Collagen is like extremely important. People should take it as a, as a supplement or in powder form or whatever that is. But there you're just increasing the surplus of building blocks in your body. So you know, I'm sure as you covered like many times before, when you take protein, what your body does, it's breaking them down to the essential amino acid, to the amino acids that comprise them and then it uses them as it sees fit, if you would. So when you take collagen, by the way, there are different type of collagen, but I'm just not to confuse everybody, I'm just going to call it collagen. When you take collagen, it's not like your body is like, oh, he's taking collagen. Because I really need collagen in my skin. Let me go ahead and do that. No, it's actually, it's actually not. Not only that, it doesn't do that.

Couple of things are needed in order to kind of rejuvenate your skin. Collagen wise. First of all is stimulation is actually inflammation. So we actually want to go ahead and create some kind of introduce some kind of minimal trauma to the skin. The same way when you're going to exercise, you need micro tears in your muscles in order for the muscles to adapt and grow. And the second thing, you actually need vitamin C. So vitamin C, lack of vitamin C is going to impair collagen production. So it's a co factor for collagen.

Okay, so let's say I'm going to supplement with Collagen, maybe like 20 to 40 grams a day for the purposes of skin health. I would need to create inflammation, I would need to co consume it with Vitamin C. I actually want to also ask you about red light therapy because that's also often.

Championed as something that would go, well, hand in hand with oral intake of collagen. But first, the inflammation piece. How are you, how are you suggesting that? Is that like derma rolling, microneedling scrubs, things like that?

Yes, the best is actually buying like a derma pen or derma stamp. And the reason is when you have a derma roller, it doesn't enter the skin in a zenith in 90 degrees. It kind of rolls into the skin and when it leaves it also kind of bores a little bit and rolls out. Having said that, if someone has a derma roller they should use it, but it's just not like optimal. It creates.

More.

Trauma that isn't needed. It's not as precise. So stamps, there are like stamps both for hair and for skin and dermapen, they go in and out in 90 degrees. So that's better.

But also things like.

By the way, even like manual facial massage to some extent does it Gua Sha? Very. Not a lot, but it does it to some extent. But then also yes, scrubs or.

More advanced things like lasers obviously in office do it. Not to be confused with red light. I think a lot of the times people think, oh, red light therapy is just whatever the doctor is using to rejuvenate my skin, just an at home version. So they're actually very different.

What do you mean? The laser and the red light are far different?

Yeah, far different. Like one would, would actually be used for the purpose of getting absorbed and causing some damage in your skin and the other is only hopefully creating chemical energy, more ATP, more cells, cellular energy.

My wife got lasered and pardon the expressive, she looked like shit for like two weeks. Like full on inflammation, like bleeding, like, like. And then this was one of the, you know, cosmetic lasers. Way different than putting on like, you know, she has one of those higher dose red light masks that you can wear, you know, when you do a clay mask or to stimulate collagen in the skin. Way different than that.

Yeah. Also overdose wouldn't look the same by the way. Like, you know, you could not even if you asked me when would be when the mask is not very strong. But let's say you use red light therapy, a very, very, very strong red light therapy product. Overdosing on it is not going to look like, like bleeding and scabbing and things like that. It's going to be actually again mitochondrial dysfunction. It's going to be a completely different overdose rather than Actual damage, maybe some.

Excess reactive oxygen species, that type of thing, which is why red light benefits top out around 20, 25 minutes. You mentioned the stamp. What's the stamp?

So, derma stamping, it literally looks like a little handle and square or round needle bed, and you just go in and out. So you basically stamp your skin. So it is very, very, very, very similar to derma rolling. But instead of having like a cylinder that you roll on your face with those needles, you literally just use it like a stamp. You go up and down or, you know, away from you and towards your skin. And that way you can have a much better control on the angle that the, that the needles actually penetrate the skin.

And what about the pen? What's that?

The pen has the. You can imagine a stamp that is shaped like a pen and it has an engine that would, that would, you know.

Go up and down.

And that allows you to mechanically microneedle your face. So you move it like you're drawing with a pen on your face. But the needles inside that, it's pretty large. So it's about probably like a centimeter.

In diameter, maybe 2cm in diameter. And it would basically have 10 needles that go up and down, and you're drawing on your face with this thing or on your body, and the needles go in and out.

Okay, so let's say you had to choose between a derma roller, a derma stamp, or a derma pen. Because those three someone would be able to buy for their house. Which one do you think is superior?

The pen is superior. It costs more. And also the disposable elements, because you need to replace needles once in a while, are going to be more expensive.

From a time standpoint. Does it take way longer to do the pen if you're going to do your whole face versus a stamp or a roller?

No, no.

Probably the pen is going to be faster than a roller or a stamp. And a stamp and a roller should take the same amount of time.

Okay, how many times per week would you do that to allow for the proper amount of inflammation and then recovery?

So I will do it one, two, three times per week. And it would depend on, by the way, if you're male or female, it also would depend on that because testosterone plays, plays a role here, but.

And skin thickness, et cetera. But it also depends on the depth of the needles. And again, what you're doing is an adjunct, how you're treating your body.

For recovery, what products you use, etc.

Okay, what if I also have a scrub? Would that play a role here. Like if, let's have a scrub and I have one of the derma devices and I'm doing the derma, let's say the stamp or the pen, one to three times a week, would I then do the scrub a certain number of times per week?

Also, first of all, all of the needle based products that we mentioned, they actually are aiming to stimulate a lower level in the skin. And obviously they go through the top of your skin to do that. But the reason I'm saying that is because the scrub isn't actually supposed to generate a lot of trauma. Since it is, since it is very blunt, the idea is more to dislodge dead skin cells or what is closer to it, Basically the topmost layer of your skin. And most scrubs, for example, I just sent you a scrub, I just didn't tell you about it. But we sent you a scrub that's called NIA polish. And the idea is to actually assist the other types of exfoliants that are there. Enzymatic exfoliants, beta, like papain, which is obviously from papaya.

And some. So. So papaya has some beta and alpha hydroxy acids. So all of those things combined.

Kind of release the topmost layer of the skin off, but they're not supposed to actually penetrate all the way to the area in the skin where collagen is created.

That's interesting. Those are some of the same things you'd use for meat tenderizing or marinade. Yeah, that is kind of funny. So the scrub, how often would you do that then? On a weekly basis.

So most people will do it once a week.

The reason I mentioned testosterone or men and women is because testosterone plays. It plays a key role in skin thickness. And obviously the thicker the skin is, the more you can do those things. So men's skins tend to be everything else being equal, 25% thicker. So you could do these things more. So you can go up to three times a week.

And obviously it depends on the person. I know women who do it five times a week because they built skin thickness and resilience through that.

Yeah, it's like building calluses on your hands almost.

So minimalist routine that if I'm understanding you correctly, I use a derma roller. Right now after this conversation, I'm going to look into switching to a stamp or a pen. And then I could, if I wanted a full minimalist protocol, just do the derma stamp or the dermapen once per week and the scrub once per week.

I do have something I never talked about. It before.

But it's pretty cool. It's a Korean company. They actually are having a lot of issues. They're not succeeding that much because their skincare didn't translate well to American standards. You need to change a few things. The Korean skincare kind of fad is a little funny because the formulas that come to America need to be changed. So their formulas didn't change very well. But what they have, which is pretty cool, is a dermapen that the needles are made out of hyaluronic acid, and it's called the stemtoc. T O C S T E M dash T O C. Cool.

I'll look it up, by the way. I'm taking notes, you guys. I'll put them in the show notes@bengreenfieldlife.com Young Goose, too. So the Korean stem talk, is it just like crazy expensive or.

I'm not sure how much it costs, to be honest, but it shouldn't be a lot. Should be a few hundreds of dollars, maybe like two, three hundred dollars.

Insider tip. I know some people like to, especially if they're listening in America, like to keep their business in the usa, but you can get some pretty slamming deals on Alibaba on some of this stuff. That's the same stuff some of the fancy skincare companies in the US Are importing when it comes to devices.

Yeah. Actually, the insider tip would be.

Especially useful here because there is regulation around again, the depth of the needles, and if someone wants to kind of push the envelope, they started at 0.25, then they go to 0.5. That's the limit of what you can use at home in the United States. But you could go deeper. You could go 1 millimeter.

So you can buy those on Alibaba. And they are. You're correct. It's the same ones that are used anywhere else.

Okay. Is there something to be said for the idea of doing the red light right after you were to take something oral, like the collagen and the vitamin C? Or does it matter as long as you're doing it daily and it's in your bloodstream and your red light's just.

Done whenever, though there is something to say about that because you are releasing nitric oxide from the mitochondria pretty instant, instantaneously, and that would bring more blood that is statistically enriched with those compounds to the areas that you're irradiating. I would say if you're doing a full body panel, that's a little bit irrelevant. If you're interested in the lines on your forehead. Right. But also, you do want to consider the time that it takes to metabolize what you took.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Okay, so you could have your cup of coffee, maybe do some of your morning work. And for your second round of emails or whatever, after you've sipped your cup of coffee with some collagen, or drank a glass of water with some vitamin C and collagen, put one of those red light masks on and, you know, 30, 45 minutes later or something like that.

Yeah, I actually know a lot of people who are doing it for BPC157 and Kineon.

Oh, that would be more for, like, joint support. Meaning you would inject BPC157 into a joint that's injured and then layer on top of that red light therapy, like the Kineon, to speed up healing.

Not even to a joint. Like, you would inject PPC157, you know, to your belly fat, and you would irradiate your knee. And since that's in your bloodstream, pretty quickly you're going to get more of it there.

Yeah. There's a guy in the healthcare industry, Dr. Todd, I always butcher his last name. It's like avocados or Avocados or something like that. But he does stem cell therapies where he'll administer stem cells and then use red light. I know another guy who does it with electrical modalities to draw the stem cells into the area of the tissue where healing is desired. So this is a similar approach. You could inject some healing peptide, like BPC157 or TB500 subcutaneously near the abdominals, then slap red light on a region that's injured and expect there to be some kind of a paracrine signaling effect of the red light that would draw the peptides into that area.

Yes, but also. So actually, what I'm going to say right now applies both to any type of. Of biologics. You know, stem cells, exosomes, prp, and some peptides that are involved in collagen, specifically, which BPC would be one of them. That most of the supportive effects are going to be using red light therapy not only at time of injection, but continuously, because red light is shown to improve the scaffolding of collagen, for example, something called lumicans, which are kind of what builds collagen. And the same would go for the proliferation of stem cells. It would assist the proliferation. So it's not only a time of injection, it's something that you want to do continuously. And that I think is very important to say about red light in general. It is not something you can do one time and it would help with anything. You really want to do it, you know, every other day for that matter.

You're the second guest who's brought that up, actually, Forrest from Kineon who I interviewed. He highlighted the collagen building and the pain reducing benefits of red light therapy for a joint done pretty consistently. Like putting on the Kineon around a bum knee every 24 hours for 20 minutes for a couple of weeks at least to constantly stimulate the body. And frankly, I have some areas of my body that are just beat up from life. Yeah, my left knee is probably at about 90%. You know, used to be probably 60%, but thanks to stem cells and some regenerative medicine protocols, it's pretty good now. But I literally keep one of those Kenny on red lights up by my laptop computer workstation and every time I sit down to breakfast I just wrap it around my knee. So I just do red light every day. And it'll probably just be something I do for the rest of my life on that joint.

Yeah. Because what you cannot do, and that could be, that does happen in this facial skin as well. There are structural changes and that's something. So In Copenhagen in 2022, they, they attempted to add like a few more hallmarks of aging to the list. And one of them is mechanical changes to the tissue. So if you have mechanical changes that create constant inflammation, red light is not going to be able to do much with it. Nor would, you know, most other other things, stem cells included. Right. Like I tried to inject stem cell, not myself, but I had stem cells injected into my knee after I had a bucket handle tear in my meniscus. It didn't prevent surgery because I had a flap like flopping around there, so.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. If there's actually an anatomical piece of debris in the knee. Yeah. You do have to get that out like that. There's something that's going to dissolve that. At least not yet. There's no form of shockwave or ultrasound or anything. It'll just get rid of that, unfortunately. So you're right, it does kind of depend. Now, what about hydration? There was an email you sent me at one point where you were talking about structured water. And I caught my attention because my father and my brother and my sister, they're all in the structured water filtration industry. I got one of those whole house filtered water units that make structured water. What's the link between that and the skin.

So I think it's a big conversation about structured water in general. But I would start by saying.

What'S the relationship between hydration in general in the skin and a debate on how much you need to drink or anything like that is besides the point. We know hydration leads to anything from dryness, flakiness, dullness, premature aging. Compromising the function of skin barrier and elasticity.

Reduces our ability to protect our. Our DNA against environmental stressors. So in general, you know, it's important to be hydrated as far as the skin is concerned. But that's easier said than done. And that's, I think, where water restructuring in the skin.

Plays a very, very, very interesting role.

So just to give a very, very short explanation, so restructured water is like organized, stable water molecule that can enhance skin hydration because it's easier for your cells to kind of usher those structures.

In, usually because of hydrogen oxygen bonding that's induced by that water are there having passed through something that almost like electrically activates it, like a body of minerals or in other cases, water that's been activated by certain spectrums and wavelengths of light. Like red light.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's pretty interesting because you can actually also.

Create more energy in your mitochondria because even mechanical parts of the mitochondria that need to move, even move better. Okay. But it also improves moisture retention. So we can build skin barrier better with structured water.

And again, we. When we improve skin barrier, we prevent something called transepidermal water loss, which is why you get chapped lips when you go to Vegas. Okay. Because you're losing more moisture to the environment, for that matter. So.

What I emailed you about is a molecule that's now really taking the skincare industry by storm. Again. What I love about part of what we do is, is that we are not the innovator of a technology. We just wholeheartedly adopt it. And then we can see that we were right. Other companies do it as well. And ectoin protein is one of those. One of those molecules.

Ectoin, like E, C, T, O, I, N. Yeah. Okay.

Ectoin. And the. I would say the better version or the version that is studied more is actually called ectoin natural.

Okay.

And ectoin is very interesting because it is a protein that is expressed in tardigrades. And these are water bears, if you want to call them water teddy bears. I don't know how they call them, but these are little animals. They're called extremophiles they can live in extreme, extreme environments.

Oh yeah, I've seen this. Yeah, yeah.

First of all, they're very cute under a microscope, but they can live in very salty water. They say that they can even survive like the, on the outside of spaceships when they, when they go out of the atmosphere.

Cute and very tough. Just like my wife.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they found out that the way that these creatures survive is that they have this protein. And this protein, first of all has high affinity to water. It can actually kind of amass a lot of water around it. It can contain, you know, a thousand times its molecular weight in water. But what it can also do is it can change the structure of water and structure water. And it does it around proteins, it does it around the cells of that organism. So it actually protects against anything from like radiation to different aggressors through that what we call water shell. So what ectoin natural doesn't, and we assume ectoin does it as well. It's just less studies around it is that it can actually create a protective shell around skin cells as well. So it can stabilize water so they are more available to cells. It can reduce dehydration and wrinkles. As I said, it can reinforce skin barrier and prevent transepidermal water loss. But what I think is the hidden piece here and that we can see in higher percentages, that I think only us and another company out of Taiwan which does it for medical.

Recovery from surgery, is that it can actually protect from environmental stressors like uv, like blue light, like pollution and like emf.

Is that what you put into your.

Sunblock?

Yeah, we put it. Now we're obsessed, we're obsessed with putting, we're putting it almost everywhere. So it is in the youth products, it's in the sunblock. Almost all products we're going to come out with are going to have that because it is a game changer. And one of the things that you can measure, and that's, I think the only product that ever does that. If you think of a moisturizer.

You really aren't moisturizing the skin. You can prevent the skin from losing moisture and you can increase the feeling that you have of hydration. But it's a user experience. If you really measure how much water are used by a cell, almost no difference. But ectoin doesn't only increase that. It actually has an 11 day carryover. It means that let's say you stopped using it, your cells still have more water than they would have otherwise for 11 days.

That's incredible. And then the sunblock, by the way, I learned this from you. I started putting it on when I'm in airplanes going through airports, kind of like going out around the city, even on a cloudy day, like going around near roads, toxins, pollutants, et cetera. And there's something about it that when it comes to skin protection that goes beyond just protecting yourself from UVA and UVB radiation. Did I understand that correctly?

Yeah. So what we do is we have a few.

Really cool things there that address. So just to throw some statistics there, if a person lives in a city, they age significantly less from uv, mainly uvb, which, which. Well, from UV in general.

Because they're, because they're inside more.

Because they're inside more. Just because other things are more prominent. Like pollution, like, like emf, like blue light. By the way, if you go to your office at, you know, 7am and you come back to your house at 5pm, the amount of UV we're exposed to is pretty minimal. And if, you know, what you were exposed to is artificial blue lights, that I'll give a statistic. Artificial blue light lowers mitochondrial activity almost as much as red light increases it. So if you're, if you think your acute 10, 20 minute red light therapy panel or mask were good, then it equated to like eight hours under, you know, blue light. Artificial blue light, by the way.

Unless, unless you, you shop like I do and go to either bon charge or block blue light and get the non blue light, you know, biological LEDs. But yeah, in most cases you're not going to convince your employer to replace all the cans at the office.

Yes. And if you, and if you, if you do, I think you should take like employee of the month or whatever. But so that's, that's one thing. The other thing is emf, which is very difficult unless you've really engineered your life around preventing your exposure to emf. It's just extremely difficult for people.

Now I got to jump in because people are going to ask, are you just saying that or is there actual studies that show that exposure to electromagnetic frequencies can impact skin health?

Oh yeah, by the way. Not only.

Skin health in totality, different things within skin health. So studies show that EMF exposure increases oxidative stress. Most of the things that we're going to talk about, by the way, whether it is pollution, uv.

Heavy metals, blue light and emf, they're all broken down the same way. We said, well, protein is just, it's amino acids at the end of the Day. All of those aggressors in your skin equate are equal. More oxidative stress, more free radicals. Most of them are oxygen based. So your body has an innate ability to fight some of them off. I mean obviously we know glutathione, the body's master antioxidant is there for some of its function is that reason.

But emf, since it's constant, since the waves are built to really travel through you, it really messes up skin barrier and it really messes up the balance between the amount of antioxidants we can express and oxidative stress that is generated. So one of the things that we know protects against radiation is actoin. I mean that's why it's there to begin with. And the second thing is.

We use. So that's as far as like emf, but the sunblock has other ingredients that also protect you against things that are. That our body just did never evolved to deal with. Which are free radicals that are not oxygen based or not.

Yeah, not oxygen based. So nitrogen or carbon based free radicals that are caused by pollution, by burning of obviously of fossil fuels, etc. Our body never had the, the need to create systems to break those free radicals down or to neutralize those free radicals. So we need to use a very cool cousin of C60 that is called Lipochromein 6 or LPS6 and that is.

Very good at scavenging free radicals that are carbon and nitrogen based.

Is it like a buckminster fullerene soccer ball like shape like carbon 60 is?

Yeah, but it is bound to different to different structures. The problem with buckminster fullerene is that it photosensitizes you. That's why we don't use it.

Okay.

So we had to find a molecule which.

Is again pretty unique. Not a lot of companies use it.

That provides again it is synthetic like carbon 60.

And it's pretty good at again neutralizing those free radicals that are not oxygen based.

So if C60 photosensitizes you, you could make a case for not using a high amount of a C60 supplement prior to a day at the beach or on the boat or out skiing or something like that.

Yeah, you should ask. Ian Mitchell, I think has a photo of him taking a lot of C60 going outside with his cross on, with his necklace with a cross on it and coming back home with a red chest. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

That's crazy. I did not know that. Okay, so that's really interesting about the sunscreen and the reasons we might want to use it even Without UVA and UVB exposure. The other thing I wanted to ask you, I mentioned this in the introduction was you know, all the antioxidants and clean ingredients added to these clean beauty products. I think you have kind of an opinion about that because I occasionally read some of your guys articles on the Young Goose website and there was one that discussed the potential, I believe for oxidation of some of those. Can you get into that?

Yeah. So I think clean beauty is a. I think in general we should be weary about industries that emphasize what they are not and not necessarily the benefits that they imbue upon the user rather than demonizing other things. Okay. It could be very confusing and could also, you know, create anxiety, etc. But just not a very, I'd say not a very sincere way to go about it. Like in skincare, just as a different example, we see a lot of products that are trying to convince you that they are healthy for you and they're saying plant based or vegan, but whoa. It doesn't mean anything about how well they work. The problem with what I call clean washing is that kind of confusing the consumer saying hey, we don't have any of these bad stuff. Yeah, but you're, you're creating, you're using natural ingredients that can degrade over time and that leads to, to harmful, harmful ingredients or harmful byproducts like for example.

Dihydroascorbic acid, which is, which is basically a reaction that happens to ascorbic acid. Ascorbic acid in my eyes is the least clean, is the worst product someone can put on their skin. And I know I said vitamin C before, but that is a synthetic.

Non mineral bound form of vitamin C that in the skin actually increases aging or drives premature aging.

You mean if applied topically via skin care product?

Yeah, because that's actually a lot for the skin and it actually causes cellular death. That's called theraptosis through exciting.

Of iron molecules in your skin. Or I'll give you just another random example.

Limiting hydroperoxide, which is obviously through an essential oil reaction. So ingredients that we could think of as beneficial can cause oxidative stress, can cause cellular death, irritation, other skin issues because they are not stabilized. Well.

Okay, so this makes sense. This would be like keeping your extra virgin olive oil in the pantry right next to the oven where the heat radiation from the oven is basically oxidizing your extra virgin olive oil pretty quickly. All the worse if it's in a plastic clear container. That type of concept. But it's paradoxical because aren't the type of things you'd have to add to stabilize the type of ingredients that could potentially be unhealthy. These are the additives, the preservatives people complain about in skincare products. Is there something to that idea?

Yes. First of all, we kind of need to know that we don't live in a preservative free society. And so for even touching a guardrail that has paint on it, you're going to get some preservative on your skin.

Might not be absorbed through your skin, but it's on your skin. Now the question does it absorb or not? Or if you use a pen and a pen spills on you or whatever, many things would drive more of those molecules that are maybe like alcohol based or things like that through your skin and into your body. Safe preservatives are preservatives that we know that your body is designed, as I kind of said before, is designed to kind of recognize, break down. And then we need to know the percentage, what is the percentage that's there and how much your body can break down.

So that's by the way one just to answer like about preservatives.

The other thing is, is that what happens when you don't have preservatives, you're going to have, you know, mold, microbial growth. There are things that are, that are worse than, than, than a specific preservative.

Having said that.

Because we are at the end of the day a product that people are supposed to love. Like I believe.

There is a placebo, placebo effect is real. Like if you love a product that you use, you're gonna, it's gonna affect you more. And if you have a bad connotation to something, you're gonna get, you're gonna get less, get less of a good reaction to it or potentially a bad reaction. So we've spent the last year.

Isolating preservatives out of plant material, for example, honeysuckle, in order to have preservative systems that are completely in air quotes clean, but are nice to read, you know, that you can pronounce.

So you're saying that your guys labels will change even more in the future to basically not. Not because some of the things that are currently in there as preserving agents are necessarily absorb to the extent that they're harmful. But because you want the consumer to have complete peace of mind if they're one of those people who are like, they can't pronounce it, don't eat it and don't put it on your body.

Yeah, and by the. So, so yes, the youth products already have that system. We actually, if someone looks at the website, it actually says, you know, youth reset v2, because we actually changed that part. But more like all of our products are going to be changed to reflect that. But the other thing is, I wouldn't suggest eating any skin care product just for you to know. Even if it says, even if it's made out of tallow and honey, don't eat it because it's. Something makes itself stable. And that something is not necessarily friendly for your gut.

One thing I hear a lot of people talk about, especially in kind of like the biohacking and health industry, is build up a skin callus. Right? Like get out in the sun. The more sun the better. Surely there is a law of diminishing returns, but I'm just curious to hear your take on it.

Okay, so.

I'll try to be concise and fair. Skin callus.

Is real because melanin is real. Okay. So what a skin callus is, is building more pigment in our skin because that's our natural sunblock. But there is not, not a lot else that you could think of is what skin callus is. So when you have a pretty wrong idea of your ability to deal with DNA damage from the sun.

You'Re not going to the law of diminishing. The diminishing returns are quite early. Within that exposure, like 30 minutes, 20, 30 minutes, you. You are already meeting diminishing returns. The other thing is, is that what you're hoping to get from the sun also diminishes when you build your, your imaginary sun catalyst. So your ability to. You know, we know that.

90% of the African American population in the United States are vitamin D deficient. Why do you think that is? Are they more endorsed than anyone else? Not by those percentages.

Right. Higher pigmentation equals less vitamin D absorption.

Exactly. So what you're going to get is when you're building your sun callus, you're also going to get less of the benefits that you're talking about the sun. So that is kind of besides the point. People are a little bit confused about the sun callus. The other thing is uriconic acid is something I see people talk about a lot, which is an acid that is expressed with more sun exposure, but it actually doesn't have any benefits for UVA and uvb. It only mitigates uvc, which we don't even get at all from the atmosphere, absorbs all of our uvc, so that's irrelevant. So if you want to get the benefits of sun exposure. I will suggest a couple of things. First of all, expose areas that are normally not exposed to other environmental aggressors. So right now you're talking with me. There is some artificial light, I would assume from the screen. Plus you are wearing a shirt and there is probably some EMF coming from your mic. So all of those things, your shirt mitigates a lot of those things just by being a physical barrier. When you're going out to the sun, you are going to enjoy the benefits of the sun more where that shirt was originally on, on your body. Because as we said about, you know, before about blue light and radiation and all of that, it actually hinders your skin's ability to function and reap the benefits of the sun.

So basically, the more blue light that you're exposed to, potentially the more damaging that skin that the sun could potentially be.

Yeah, and not only that, by the way, going back to red light, studies have. So there is a very cool study out of the University of Yonsei in Seoul in Korea.

That if you expose your skin to red light and near infrared light before going out to the sun, you're going to get less sun damage and you're going to get better, you know, better ratio of benefits to drawbacks.

And is that because of upregulation of nitric oxide or antioxidants or something like that, or this, your. What do you call the uriconic acid or something else?

No, uriconic acid really doesn't do anything, but it's actually just more ATP. More ATP, more cellular energy equals more DNA repair equals your cell's ability to repair or to uptake moisture, et cetera, just increased.

Okay, got it. That makes sense. Last question for. If you wave a magic wand and look around at all the things you see people doing for particularly their skin care or their facial care or their personal care products or whatever, besides, you'd want them to use young goose stuff, obviously. But if you could wave a magic wand and stop people from doing one stupid thing that you see people doing all the time that they think is making their skin healthier or getting rid of wrinkles or defying aging or whatever, and you could tell people what that one thing is that they should think about stopping, what would you choose?

So something I said before is ascorbic acid. I would tell people never to use ascorbic acid on their skin.

So look at all your beauty products. Look for ascorbic gas. If it's got it in there, switch it out.

Yeah, but the second thing is, I just have to say, because it's a pet peeve of mine is ice water face dunking in ice water.

If you want temporary effects that when you lift your head, you look in the mirror, it looks better, you should do that. But I'm just kind of annoyed by influencers and people like that touting that it can replace deliberate cold exposure.

Oh, that's what they're saying. If you dunk your face, I mean, you could trigger like a mammalian dive reflex and maybe get a little bit of an impact on cranial nerve function. Right?

You could, but you could never like, release heat shock proteins or cold shock proteins for that matter, from your liver. Right.

And these are probably people who just don't like to get in the cold bath.

No, that's a funny thing. I see it from like all across the board. I just see people saying, hey, you know, here's, here's something you can do to. You have more nerve receptor, like cold receptors in your chest and your face. So you could just expose that. But that's. We really want to modulate core body temperature. We don't. There is very little long term benefits in just exposing the area that you kind of want to affect to the cold. Actually, it might be contrary. You might be just creating some malfunction in your skin barrier.

Right. Okay. All right. So if you're getting wasted time dunking your face in ice water, just get in the whole bath, folks, or get in the cold shower. I'm going to tell you, this has been fascinating as usual. I mean, you always just blow my mind with all these little things I learned about skin care and things are going to change and go shopping later for the Korean dermapen and all those things. But what I'm going to do is for people who want the juicy show notes, go to BenGreenfieldLife.com YoungGoose2 that's Young Goose, the number two we do have. I know they are expensive, but man, are they on the cutting edge as you can imagine. After this discussion with Amitay, I got some discount codes and links for you guys to help you save. I'll put those in the show notes as well. I'll link to my first podcast with Amitay and I'm sure there will be a third to come because there's all sorts of stuff like the Clotho gene and other myths in skincare and things we didn't get a chance to touch on today. So anyways, and Amitay has a podcast as well. Is it just called the Young Goose.

No, it's called Biohacking Beauty.

I was close. Biohacking Beauty. Check out his podcast as well. Amitay, thanks so much for coming on the show, man.

Thank you. It was my pleasure.

Hi, folks. I'm Ben, along with Amitay and Young Goose. Signing up from BenGreenfieldLife.com YoungGoose2 have an incredible week. Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes? My weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life, and a whole lot more. Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com it's all there. BenGreenfieldLife.com See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's why it's important to subscribe, like and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings, and the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review. If you got a little extra time, it means way more than you might think. Thank you so much.