9 Strategies for Slowing, Vibrant skin

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions. And this week's question is actually a series of questions that I've been getting about skin. So we're going to do a whole series on skin, skin overall, acne, eczema, and psoriasis. Okay, here we go. What about skin? What causes you to have good skin? Well, you know what? The dermatology industry and the plastic surgery industry and the cosmetic industry is selling us all sorts of stuff to slather on our skin, potions, lotions, gels, creams, everything to make us look better and actually fix our skin. But what if I told you the secret of healthy skin wasn't what you put on your body, but what you put in your body? That beauty, in fact, comes from the inside out. In fact, most skin problems can be healed by changing what you eat, your nutrient status, and balancing your gut and balancing your hormones, whether it's acne or eczema or psoriasis. And I know this because I personally had great skin and all of a sudden I had lousy skin and I got everything. I got psoriasis, I got acne, I got bags under my eyes, I got swollen eyelids, I got pale gray, sallow looking skin when I got chronic fatigue syndrome and it wasn't coming from what I wasn't putting on my skin. It was coming from inside, from being toxic, from having hormonal imbalances, from having gut imbalances, from eating foods that create allergies and sensitivities. All these things affected my skin. I developed nutrient deficiencies and all these factors were driving my skin to look like crap. So I had pimples. I never had pimples. I would get these weird rashes. I never got rashes. I would get swollen eyes and baggy eyelids and dark circles, all this stuff was coming from inside and didn't get fixed by putting stuff on my skin. And you know what? Dermatologists want to sell us all kinds of stuff. Glycolic acid peels, retinoic acid, salicylic acid, creams and gels and potions and lotions, all that stuff. Doesn't really work that well. You have to keep putting it on, putting it on. Now, it doesn't mean you shouldn't take care of your skin from the outside in. You should. And there's some great creams and things you should use to help your skin stay healthy, but it's not going to solve the problems. Dermatologists give you steroid creams for eczema and psoriasis. They give you antibiotics for your face. They give you all kinds of peelers for your face, and it can help temporarily, and they even give you antibiotics that actually you take by mouth. Now, those are dangerous because they can deplete your gut flora, they can cause imbalances in your gut that end up causing all sorts of other consequences. And I see this much later, people who take antibiotics when they're young for acne often get autoimmune disease or get inflammatory problems that don't get better, they just sort of bury the problem. So there is a way through functional medicine, through the science of getting healthy, basically treating your body, what I call tending the soil of your health, that can help you reset your system, reset your biology, and get healthy skin and make it look better by working on the inside out rather than the outside in. So we're going to go through all that in our series of weekly house calls that are coming up Stay tuned. And if you have a skin problem that you've had trouble with, please share your story with us. If you've gotten better through some tricks you've learned, please share that with us. And if you enjoyed this video, please sign up for our weekly newsletter, share this with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter, and submit your questions so next week I may make a house call to you.