Choosing Skin Care Products that Won’t Make You Sick with Dr. Cindy Geyer

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

There's emerging science-based evidence that some essential oils may be almost effective as SD at repelling ticks. There's been some research on lemon eucalyptus oil, on thyme oil, on citronella. So I think that is another reasonable option to try to get some of the tick repellent benefits without causing harm.

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark. Now, you probably heard me talk about how much I love infrared saunas on the podcast. Well, they've been linked to many different benefits, like better muscle recovery, calming of the nervous system, improved circulation, even activation of the immune system to support healing. Saunas also promote the release of feel-good endorphins that give you that blissed out feeling and give your skin a healthy glow. Now, I know everyone doesn't have the room or the budget to have their own sauna at home, so I was really excited to learn about Higher Doses infrared therapy line. They have an infrared sauna blanket that gives you all the benefits of infrared in an easy to use portable blanket at a much lower cost than a standalone sauna. The blanket's really cool. It has layers of amethyst, which is a crystal to deepen the infrared benefits, a tourmaline layer to generate negative ions, and a layer of clay to balance heat and a charcoal layer to bind pollutants as you detox.

That sounds good.

Or if you're someone who wants to experience the benefits of infrared without the sweat, check out Higher Doses Infrared PEMF Matt, which combines the dual technology of infrared with pulse electromagnetic fields. It works by sending electromagnetic waves to your body at different frequencies to help promote your body's own recovery process. The mat comes in two sizes, is built with a thick layer of 100% natural purple amethyst crystals in a mesh fabric across the entire mat. So whether you deal with chronic pain, work out frequently, or just need a moment to relax, lying on these mats even a couple of minutes a day will help ease your mind and body from the inside out. Get your own infrared sauna blanket or infrared PMF mat at higherdose.com today and use my exclusive promo code: Pharmacy75 that's F-A-R-M-A-C-E CY75 at checkout to save $75. That's higherdose.com and the exclusive promo code is Pharmacy75 or just go to higherdose.com/pharmacy F-A-R-M-E-C-Y to get your $75 off today. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine.

As your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual.

Person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables can help us find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. But up till now, that meant you are usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs.

And I'm sure many of you can.

Relate how time consuming this process was.

And then it could all feel like a lot of work to keep track of. Now there's Rupa Health, a place for.

Functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty labs from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains and more. Rupa Health helps provide a significantly better patient experience and it's 90% faster, letting you simplify the entire process of getting the functional medicine lab tests you need and giving you more time to focus on patients. this is really a much needed option in functional medicine space and I'm so excited about it. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out and look at a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com that's R-U-P-A-Health.com Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Doctor's Pharmacy with an F, a place for conversation that matters. And if you ever wondered about what you put on your skin and is it making you sick, whether it's makeup or tick insect repellent or sunscreen, you're going to like this podcast because we're going to get in deep about what goes in your skin and on your skin and through your skin and how that affects our health and what to do about it and how to pick the right products. So this week we have On our special episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy House Call, my friend and colleague I've known for, gosh, decades now, someone we brought in to Canyon Ranch when I was just beginning there as the medical director, she took over the place and now has joined us at the Ultra Wellness Center, Dr. Cindy Geyer, who is just an extraordinary doc and is teaching all over the world in fields of integrative and functional medicine. And we're so lucky to have her.

At the Ultra Wellness Center now.

So welcome, Cindy.

Thanks, Mark. Good to be here.

Okay, so it's, you know, it's a big deal to think about what you put on your skin. I remember, you know, learning that basically if you wouldn't eat it, you shouldn't put it on your skin. And you and I both know that when we were in medical school that we delivered all kinds of drugs to the skin. I mean, one of the quickest ways to get someone relief from chest pain if they came into the emergency room with angina are no heart disease, was to slap a toothpaste tube full of nitroglycerin cream and put a bandage over it. And that kind of went right through the skin. There's hormone patches for women, there's pain patches, there's all sorts of patches that people use because the skin is a vehicle for delivering medicine. So it makes logical sense to think that we should be aware of what we're putting on our skin in terms of sunblock, insect repellent, make up, you know, body care products, and yet most of us never give a thought about it. So tell us, Cindy, why should we really care? And I think it's, it is, you know, because this is, it seems to be like maybe a trivial issue, but how big of an issue is this? And why should we worry or should we?

Well, I'm glad you pointed out that we absorb things through the skin. So we think we put it on our skin and it's just going to stay on the outside, but it can potentially get inside our bodies. And one of the challenges, Marc, is trying to do good research to actually prove cause and effect when you're looking at some of the carriers or preservatives that are added to the things like the cosmetics that we put on our skin. Our old model of what happens with toxicity is the dose makes the poison. You have to have massive amounts for it to have a negative impact. But there's so many things that are in our skincare products like phthalates or parabens that have been dubbed endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And what that means is even tiny amounts, especially at critical windows, may actually muck up hormonal signaling and have long-lasting impacts that's less related to the dose but the cumulative exposure over time. Yeah. So it's hard to tease out. I mean, you might be having exposures every day in teeny-tiny amounts that don't seem immediately problematic, but down the road when you're struggling with insulin resistance or breast cancer or uterine fibroids or thyroid issues, it could be related to these endocrine disrupting chemicals that have wreaked havoc on our hormone balance.

I mean, so, yes, so why are all these compounds used in these products? I mean, why do we need all these petrochemical, endocrine disrupting, hormone busting, disrupting compounds? Why are they there?

It's a great question. So parabens typically are added as a preservative to extend the shelf life of your skin creams or your topical creams.

Phthalates.

So we'll go rancid. Yeah, so we'll go rancid. So you can keep it on your shelf for a year or two and it won't smell funny or it won't go bad. And so you don't get bacteria. I mean some of them are trying to keep contaminants out. Phthalates tend to be embedded with fragrances to make things smell pleasing to us and we put them on our bodies.

And those are also endocrine disrupting chemicals.

And.

Is there a way to measure in the body whether there are these chemicals that are there from these products that people are using?

That's a great question, Mark. In studies that are trying to tease out how they influence our health, they often look at urinary levels to see how much people are exposed to. It's a little bit challenging, however, because it turns out that All of us show evidence of exposure to these chemicals. So it's a little bit hard to know what to do with measurements other than trying to do it from a scientific standpoint to say, do the levels track with health outcomes? In clinical practice, I have not done that. I don't know if you found it helpful or not when I was first looking at it. We ended up coming back to the same recommendations anyway. We need to-- yeah. Reduce exposure and find ways to support your body's getting rid of them.

Right. I mean, everybody should cut out toxins from their life and everybody should do all the things they can to upregulate their biology to detoxify these compounds for sure. But sometimes it's really helpful. Like, you know, people just don't know about their exposures. I had one woman who was using a sunblock for years in her makeup. We checked her urine, super high levels of parabens. I'm like, oh, this isn't good. And other people, you have high levels of phthalates because they're drinking plastic water bottles or people have BPA. because they're not aware of where it's coming from, which is best phenol A that comes from credit card receipts or restaurant receipts or, you know, just all kinds of your own gas station, all that stuff. It's just, it's a lot. It's in Plastics, it's in bottles. So I think, I think we really can raise awareness by seeing that it's in your system. You know, I think, I think I find that often helpful for people to change their behavior, too. It's like, and, and then, then you can actually track it and see that it's coming down and see what's happening. And I think you know, it is a little amorphous because, you know, when you look at, you know, on an individual level, it's hard to draw the connections in a one-to-one level of whether this caused the problem or not. But if you, but if you look at a population-wide level, these toxins clearly are linked to all sorts of harmful effects in terms of endocrine disorders, heart disease, cancers and more. And, and I think it really is important people understand what they're doing, what they're putting on their body. Right. So the, the Now, the other thing I'd love you to talk about is some of the epigenetic effects of the toxins on the fetus when the mother is exposed to the products that could cause this hormone-disruptive chemicals to get in the blood of the baby.

Yeah, I think that's really important to understand that there are critical windows or critical timeframes that it's even more important to reduce exposure. One of those classic timeframes is when a woman is pregnant. Even little bits of exposures in utero may affect the fetus, and then those impacts persist into adolescence. A study a few years ago, what they did, a lot of the data has to be correlative, but they measured urinary levels of phthalates and parabens in women at two different points in their pregnancy. And then when their babies were born, they tracked them for 9, 10, 11 years. And they found that higher levels of phthalates and parabens in the urine the daughters of women with those higher levels ended up going into puberty earlier, which now that doesn't prove cause and effect, but sometimes you can't ethically design a study. And when we see research like that, that it does correlate with endocrine challenges down the road, we have to take that seriously. We have to take that seriously. There's been some other research linking exposure in utero in particular or early childhood to phthalates and parabens to higher incidence of ADHD-like symptoms in adolescents. So even neurodevelopment. Again, a lot of the data is correlative and epidemiologic, but we can't really design a placebo-controlled double-blinded trial to willingly expose one group of women and not expose another and track their children for 20 years.

Yeah, it's linked to ADD. to neurodevelopmental issues, behavioral issues, later stage symptoms of obesity, even diabetes, heart disease, cancer, when they're exposed to these compounds in utero, which is kind of striking. So the question is, what are we using? What are the things we're using? And clearly there are a lot of topical things we use, everything from shampoo to makeup to body care products. to make all the kind of skincare things we use like sunblock and tick repellents and insect block, insect blockers. How are these things different? Let's take sunscreen for example. This is something summertime people don't want to get skin cancer. They're putting on sunscreen and is it okay? What should we be doing and how do we figure out what's going on? I mean, a lot of the sunscreens also have compounds that destroy reefs too. reef damage to the coral reefs. So you're only killing yourself, but you're killing the reefs.

Right. Well, there's a lot of the chemical sunscreens like Avobenzone, I don't even know all of the names of them, the chemical sunscreens, and many of those are potential endocrine disrupting chemicals as well. The flip side is, Mark, I'm one of those people who grew up in the South, had more than my share of sunburns, had my first skin cancer when I was 37. So I also want to slow down skin aging and wrinkles and skin cancer. So we kind of have to say, well, how do you get the protection without putting yourself at risk. I personally am a real fan of the zinc and titanium, the mineral based sunscreens, or even just a hat covering your skin, staying out of the sun in the middle of the day. I mean, I think there's a lot of other things we can do that are going to be safer for us and safer for the planet. One of my favorite one-stop shopping places to learn more about safety levels and which either skincare or sunscreens contain things we do or don't want is the environmental working group. And I know you've been a big supporter of their work for years. I think they were some of the pioneers at really raising awareness. And what I love about them is they have a safe cosmetics database that you can search by type. So you could search sunscreens or you could search by brand. Plug in your favorite brand and see how it rates to others on their list.

Our category, your makeup, your fragrances, baby care, oral care, men's stuff. It's really quite a robust and really robust website and it's really science-based. And there's, I think there's 74,000 products that they looked at, 2,500 brands and then 1,800 are verified and have been tested to make sure that they're okay. And so that's a really great source for sunscreen, for makeup and all these products because when we look at what we're doing ourselves, we're kind of like steadily polluting ourselves with the best of intentions. And I think the sunscreen ingredients can be problematic, the oxybenzone, the homosalate, the octocrylene, these are all compounds that have been often banned in other countries, but they're used here. And the great news is there's other other benefits you can get from other sunscreens like zinc and others that are mineral based. And they sometimes are a little messy, but there are ones that are quite good and you can use it. People can go to ewg.org and learn more about all the different kind of topical care products and what to pick and start to move the industry in the right direction by helping them emphasize the right stuff. What about the sort of things like the tick stuff, because people are worried about ticks and DEET is really common, which is a terrible toxin that's used to kill insects, but also it's a neurotoxin that can affect humans. So, they say not to touch yourself, don't put your mouth, but like putting your skin, it goes through everything. So tell us a little bit about DEET and what to do about that.

Yeah, so that's another one. I mean, you know, Mark in the Berkshires, ticks are everywhere. So for those of us who love to be in the woods, you always have to be mindful of enjoying your time in the beautiful woods and hiking without putting yourself at risk for getting a tick-borne illness. So how do we navigate that balance as well? You know, for people who are super concerned, I don't know how you feel about this, but you know, if you tuck your pants into your socks and put a little bead around where they join, maybe that's enough. I don't know. I don't do it. I mean, I hike all the time and you know, the other nice thing about being in the Berkshires, I can come home, strip on my front porch, leave my clothes on the outside, go in and do my tick check because I think that's probably the most important thing. The other interesting piece though is there's emerging science-based evidence that some essential oils may be almost effective at SD, at repelling ticks. There's been some research on lemon eucalyptus oil, on thyme oil, on citronella. So I think that is another reasonable option to try to get some of the tick repellent benefits without causing harm.

So those essential oils are basically plant chemicals that are repelling. And it sort of loops back to, you know, the sort of view of functional medicine, which is that plants are highly intelligent. They, they're in fact sentient beings, believe it or not. They have 20 different senses and they do all kinds of smart stuff that we, you know, we don't really attribute to plants, but they produce these molecules to deter insects from the cells. So, and they communicate with other plants. So if there's a caterpillar eating a plant, that plant goes, ooh, I'm getting eaten by caterpillar. I'm going to produce this molecule. And by the way, I'm going to send a message to my neighboring plant friends over there. through the mycelium rhizome network that you should secrete this chemical too. And so these plants produce all these wonderful chemicals that we use, you know, for our own benefit, but they're really for their benefit. And, and, and I think the essential oils are great. And there's a lot of natural alternative products out there that are for insects, repellent, for skin care, for makeup. The only thing you don't realize is makeup is like lead, you know, and a lot of makeup and a lot.

Of lipstick is leaded lipstick. Yes. Oh, my gosh.

So, oh my gosh. And those things are really avoidable. It's just a matter of education. And I think the beautiful thing about it as we move in the right direction, as people start to become conscious, as we push those companies by our financial choices, we actually can drive the marketplace into a better set of products. And that is really what we need to be doing. 'Cause I think people don't seriously think about what they're putting on their skin, but it is one of the most important things that you do every single day, literally you're doing, besides eating, most of us put stuff on our skin every day, whether it's shampoo, whether it's face cream, whether it's makeup, whether it's sunblock, whether it's insect repellent. Like, these are things that we use a lot of in America, and, and unfortunately, they're really problematic. So let's say, let's say you, you go, oh, geez, i've been using this stuff for a while. I'm gonna switch to all these other products. But what do I do to get rid of these embedded toxins? Because if we did a fat biopsy of every american, you know, we wouldn't be too pretty. There'd be a lot of these compounds in there that are stored in there. What are we going to help? get them down. And we've done podcasts on detoxification, but we're not talking about like a water fast or some crazy thing. We're talking about you supporting the body's natural built-in detox pathways. How do we do that?

You know, Mark, before we jump into that, I want to come back to something that you just said about the fat biopsy. And I know that urine levels can sometimes be really helpful at motivating people to say, oh my gosh, I need to look at this. but we have to be aware that even if they're not showing up in the urine, if we've had old exposures, they do tend to get deposited in fat and we're not doing fat biopsies on people. I just want to point that out. So don't use an okay looking urine to say, okay, not a problem for me.

Right? Right, for sure.

And it's been a concern as well if those are all residing as deposits in fat tissue, if somebody really rapidly loses weight and starts to mobilize all that, all those stored toxins, it could potentially put extra burden on a lot of different processes in the body. So it's just food for thought. And you have, and you have done a lot of podcasts on detoxification, and it really is coming back to the basics. I mean, how do we get rid of things? We sweat by, we break a sweat by going out in the woods or exercising or sitting in a sauna. We really have to focus on optimal gut function, hot fiber dense diet, a healthy microbiome, and specific foods that support all of our detoxification pathways. We can talk about a few of those. Drinking enough water. I mean, it's really, I don't know that there is a super magic for these endocrine disrupting chemicals, except it's really important to make sure our detoxifying enzymes have the nutrients they need to do their job.

And what are those things that our body needs most of to actually get rid of these toxins?

Yeah, we need B vitamins, we need magnesium, we need these sulfur containing amino acids that are rich in foods like broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, garlic, onions, the allium family. Antioxidant rich foods can kind of fill the gap with some of the deeply pigmented fruits and vegetables. You know, similar theme I think that's come up in other areas, but those are some of the foods that are most important. Prebiotic rich foods that can select out a healthy, robust, diverse microbiome that can also kind of, if we have detoxified and mobilized things, can help us get rid of it and clear it out of our system.

No, it's the same. Other practices that we can do to help our detox system, like saunas, exercise, lymphatic drainage and infrared saunas, hot and cold therapy, all those things help mobilize toxins from our system. Right. Right.

Do you have any favorites yourself?

Do I have any favorites? I do have.

A lot of things.

That I do to actually mobilize my toxins every day. I make sure that I eat Brussels every day. So last time we had a big bunch of broccoli rabe for that night, we had Brussels sprouts, lots of garlic and onions. I use a lot of spices in my cooking. and I also make sure I do saunas. I do ice baths. I sweat. I actually like to sweat a lot. So my exercise is great. Yoga is great for lymphatic drainage, getting massages. It's great to mobilize tissue, lymph stores. So there's a lot of techniques you can use to actually help. And then I take the right supplements. I make sure I take a cocktail because I've had mercury poisoning. I have weak detox enzymes. I take an acetyl cysteine. I take all the methylation vitamins. I take a lot of the things that actually help to mobilize these toxins, even the sulforaphane boosting compounds. I even use indole-3-carbinol-methane as a way of sort of helping with some of the effects on hormone metabolism. So, I'm sort of pretty fanatic about it because I've been so sick from being toxic and I don't want to be toxic anymore. But, you know, the truth is it's hard. I didn't stop eating fish. and I, you know, I've got my mercury levels down years and years ago from, like, almost 200 to, like, you know, eight or five. Wow. And I was like, oh, you know, it's been a bunch of years, and I've been sort of a little bit lazy about fish. I don't eat tuna. I don't eat swordfish. But occasionally, occasionally, I have a piece of tuna when I go out. Occasionally, and I'll eat halibut. I never read swordfish. Occasionally, I'll have, you know, more fish than I would think. And I thought, oh, I'm good. But I just checked my levels, and I, again, my level was super high. I have, like, 37 on a challenge test. you know, like, I think we're just, we're just in such a toxic world and it's hard. It's hard. I mean, last night I made a delicious, you know, Spanishy kind of Greek baked cod with tomato sauce, but like cod is not terrible. It's not the worst, but it's definitely got mercury and I'm just like, oh, what am I doing? Like, what are you gonna eat? You know, so I've come to believe that, you know, grass-fed regenerative meat or wild meat is probably the safest protein on the planet. I know it's maybe controversial to say that, but you know, even, you know, even you've got, unless you've got really well grown whole grains and beans that are generally raised and have no glyphosate sprayed in them and are not, you know, genetically altered. I mean, there's like a lot of messy stuff in the plant world. So I don't know, but I definitely make sure I upregulate my system all the time.

You know, Mark, you raise an interesting point as well. I think everybody is different in terms of their genetic predisposition to handle a given amount of exposure or not. It's not that we're just going to let, okay, you're a good detoxifier, you can let yourself do whatever. But I think that's also an important point that some people need more support than others. We all want to reduce burden. We want to reduce what's coming in. But some of us have to go the extra step and really do more aggressive programs like you're doing.

Absolutely, absolutely. and so, you know, the good news is that you don't have to be exposed to these things by, by all of your typical skincare products that you should be aware of it, that you should seek out sources of your favorite products that are alternatives to the environmental working group resources at ewg.org that you should eat brussels sprouts every day, or at least some kind of brassicas. Make sure you have plenty of garlic, make sure you sweat, make sure that you're, you know, especially even, you know, when you think about what's going through your skin, what are you touching? Like, I, I'm so aware of like when I, when people say, do you want a receipt? I'm like, no thanks. Like, no thanks. Email, text me the receipt. Do not give me the receipt because I don't want to touch that. It's full of BPA, bisphenol A, which.

Has all these endocrine disrupting aspects to it. So, you know, Mark, that might have been one of the positive things about the pandemic when people were afraid of any kind of paper passing hands. A lot of people got rid of their recepts. A lot of manufacturers got rid of their paper receipts.

I think that's a good thing. Yeah. So it's all good together.

Oh, boy.

So I think we're in this interesting moment where we have a possibility of really changing our lifestyle, changing our exposure, changing our choices, and really making a big difference. And so people listening, I think it's important to be really aware of what you put on your skin. Just remember, whatever you put on your skin, you should be able to eat. It should be edible because it's going into your bloodstream directly. It's going to affect your biology in a real way. So I really encourage you to make sure you pay attention to that and to break down all these systems. And let us know if you've been listening to this podcast, you love it, and you've found products that work for you, or you've noticed how you've maybe been affected by topical stuff. Let us know. Share with your friends and family on social media, subscribe wherever you get yout Podcast. and we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman.

Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I hope you're loving this podcast.

It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter and in it I share my favorite stuff. from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

Hi everyone.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make.

Changes, especially when it comes to your health. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial.