Pigs, Pores, and the Power of Lard: Charles Mayfield’s Guide to Skin Health and Regenerative Farming

I can't think of a population of people on the planet with a lower need of skin care products than a 10, 12, 15 year old girl. I can't change the policies, I can't change the fda. There's a lot of things I can't do. But what I can do is make a product that's clean, efficacious, that a young girl, not dissimilar from Adeline, my daughter. Now she's at least got something she can take home that's not going to destroy her microbiome and destroy her hormones and all the fun things.

Welcome back to Everyday Ancestral. I'm your host, James Berry. How are you enjoying our show so far? We're at episode four, so thank you so much for sticking with us and participating. I can't even tell you, I am having so much fun talking with all these amazing guests. So I hope you're having as much fun as I am. I hope you're getting something from them and if you are, please, you know, follow us, share with your friends and family. I mean, let people know because I want to keep doing this and getting your encouragement through shares and follows is what's going to kind of communicate to me that you're also enjoying it. My next guest, he is a doozy. His name's Charles Mayfield. He's a friend. I got to tell you, he's someone that when I first met him about four years ago, we immediately connected. We were like long lost brothers. We're about the same age. We're both running businesses that focus on whole animal and regenerative farming. And there's just so much to love about Charles. He's not only just got a good heart but he, he really cares. So who is Charles? Well, Charles is the founder of Farro Skincare. Yes. A man who is the founder of a skincare company. I guess there are a few out there, but not like him. So Faro is a lard based skincare brand that was launched following Charles's unique experience as a regenerative farmer and health enthusiast. Charles wrote a bunch of Paleo cookbooks and really was supporting the Paleo movement. Grew up, I think on dairy farms, worked with pigs and now he's doing skincare. But he's using everything, you know, the culmination of his life experience on this company because he is a health enthusiast and he's a friend of the farmer and so he's incorporating both. Skin is the largest organ you have and it needs proper nutrition. And so how and where that nutrition comes from is the key to a healthier human and planet. So let's let Charles tell us why. The swine is divine, but the lard is hard. Here's Charles Mayfield.

Charles, so good to have you on, really, the only podcast where curiosity is not a crime. You are focusing on lard at a time when natural skin care is kind of focusing on tallow. So what made you focus on lard versus tallow?

I guess we could call it the swine intervention. No, I just, I happen to like pigs. I cook with lard quite a bit back in the days of discovering this and I sort of ran into it. Lard was the first fat, natural fat, sort of picked on by big food, big seed oil, you know, Procter and Gamble, way back in 1911. And so I think it's just, it's fallen out of the cultural vernacular. And so, yeah, you see a lot of tallow products today. Why I use lard. I tried it first. It seems to work extremely well. The biology of pigs and humans is way more similar than humans and cows. I say that with the fact that we use tallow in our products. Tallow is an amazing fat. The long and short of it is the biology's a way better match for human skin.

I love that you brought up about how pigs are kind of closest to humans. Now, historically, that's been an issue of eating the meat, right? People have said, oh, actually you shouldn't be eating pork because of how close it is to human meat in terms of putting on your skin. Can you talk about that?

I can. I mean, skincare is a fat based business. And so when you talk about fat, you're talking. Well, when you talk about anything that goes on your skin, you're talking about a couple of different sort of overarching themes. Ph. So anything with a ph that's naturally aligned to human biology, which is basically neutral. You know, we, we run a little bit. Want to say 67 to 6, 9, but pH is a big thing. It is a fat. So how are the lipids? What is the balance of saturated monounsaturated polyunsaturated fats? How do those match up with our fat? And then the third piece is really the fat's the big part. But also subcutaneous fat is a storage organ. And so what's stored in there? These are obviously with animal fat, you've got naturally occurring vitamins, minerals. And it just so happens that pigs metabolize those things the same way humans do. And so, you know, vitamin D from the sun, vitamin A, E from Diet and exercise and, you know, just sort of lifestyle. And so those three sort of overarching big metrics make it an ideal fat for. For human consumption. You've got a number of different religious texts that address and forbid pork consumption. And James, you're a chef, a very accomplished chef. Have you ever seen pork tartare on a menu? No, no, you don't see chicken tartare on a menu. And that's because these are monogastric omnivorous animals, right? And so they can eat a bunch of different stuff, but they also metabolize those things. Very different than a herbivorous ruminant, most commonly a cow. And so. Well, let me take it back to farming. In a farming setting, the pathogenetic load of a pig versus a chicken versus a cow, those are all very different. When I say that, I mean like bugs and viruses and bacteria and various things. And again, you can get trigonosis from undercooked pork if it was not raised in the proper manner. And so, you know, rewind the clock a hundred thousand years, even 10,000 years, you're hunting, you're gathering, you kill a pig. You know, it was very common practice to eat the organs on site and haul the meat back to your village. And if you didn't cook that pork thoroughly, then there's a chance one or more people in your tribe would get sick. And, you know, it doesn't take but a couple times that happening, you're going to start telling stories about how dirty this animal is and you shouldn't eat it. I have the utmost respect for people that for religious reasons or whatever, choose not to eat pork. But man, when you raise a healthy, happy pig, their fat and meat are not only dietarily, but also from a skin care perspective, for the fat. We don't put their meat on our skin.

Not yet.

Not yet. I'll tell you this, if you read a bunch of medieval texts, pork skin was a very, very common treatment for skin ailments. They would skin the pig and you take the skin which, you know, had this sort of subcutaneous fatty layer on it, and they would use that as sort of wound healing, bandaging. St. Anthony was a medieval traveling. They sainted him and he's often portrayed with pictures of pigs. He wasn't a farmer, but most of his travels through what is now Europe today, there were a number of skin conditions in the 13, 14, 15, hundreds, sort of medieval times. And he was very famous for treating skin conditions. And so he's often depicted with pigs in paintings and whatnot that you find on him. And I'm convinced it's because he was using parts of the pig to heal people's skin.

You do bring up a really good point, though. Like, you really never see chicken, turkey, pork, raw, I mean, ever. But yet you'll see fish and beef raw.

Again, different diets, different pathogenic loads, different. You don't eat a lot of shellfish raw. Again, if you look into the sort of, the religious text, a lot of bottom feeders, you know, pigs were known as dirty animals because they, they would eat feces and various other things. Shellfish, like eating mushrooms, like, if you don't know what to eat, there's a chance you're going to poison yourself. If you don't have this, this oyster is good. That mollusk over there will kill you. It's a matter of what? Viruses, bacteria, worms, various things. I mean, we all have these things Every, every living creature on the some level of microscopic organisms and various pathogens and things like that. With any omnivore, you run a risk because of the way they, you know, they've only got one stomach and no fermentation involved. And so there's various different pathogens that, that have figured out how to coexist with that animal. And so eating raw is not a good idea.

Yeah, yeah. But to your point, though, I mean, the fat has been used for a very long time. And in a sense, the leaf lard was the first. Crisco is what Crisco is built off of. Right.

I would say that the golden age of the skincare industry started in 1911. The 1% is talked about all the time. The wealthy. Okay. It's a very, very small percentage of the world in 1910. And in 1910, we cooked everything with, well, lard, really. Tallow was made for soap, soap making, candle making, predominantly. I'm not saying people didn't cook with tallow, but if you walked in the General Store in 1910, there is a 100% chance you walked out with a can of lard, maybe leaf lard or lard. But the point is that 99.9% of the people on the planet in 1910 cooked. And they cooked every single meal. And a lot of those people also hunted and gathered and they were out there securing their food. And so the, the males in the family were constantly in contact with visceral fat as they eviscerated the carcass and carved it up and butchered it and prepared it for salting or curing or eating right then. And the women in the family were in the kitchen most of the time and they were constantly covered in lard. And so skin care historically has been an industry exclusively reserved for the elite because they were the ones with enough wealth to remove themselves physically from the act of securing, cooking and preparing food. Fast forward to 1911. Now Lard starts moving out of popularity because Crisco is introduced, by the way. It's dyed white, it's bleached white, so that it looks like.

Like lard.

Yeah. And then the nail in the coffin of lard, if we want to do this historically, the nail in the coffin certainly here in the United States of America, I would say globally, was World War II because you can't make nitroglycerin out of cottonseed oil. Lard from 1940 to 1944 was rationed because they needed it for the war effort to make explosives. But that's okay because here's this can of Crisco. I mean, we lost all but three, I believe, lard pig breeds following World War II because the demand for lard dropped so drastically because everyone basically habitually replaced their can of lard with a can of Crisco. Crisco stands for crystallized cottonseed oil. It's a seed oil. It's a rather nasty product, but also it's almost unrecognizable by your skin. You know, it's this super high in omega 6 fatty acid. There's all sorts of stuff that, that are not great. But also when it goes on your skin, it's. It's not really feeding your skin. Your skin is this semi permeable membrane. It's a two way street, albeit most of the traffic goes inward. You know, if you've ever rolled around in poison ivy, you know, it, your skin's going to soak up that oil and make you itch. But it's also semi permeable. It's also excreting sweat. That meat suits a very dynamic organ and it's your largest organ.

Are you focusing on a specific breed of pig when you're picking where to get the lard? And then could you also talk about what kind of health, what kind of feeding, what are you looking for when you're sourcing your lard from pigs?

I'm not farrowing right now. I had to shut the farm down. Pharaoh's growing and I've been able to secure fat from a very, very reliable source, several sources actually that raise pigs in a manner that I'll talk about right now. But in terms of breeds, I'm A little bit breed agnostic. All I care about for pharaoh's sake is the fat. But beyond that, you know, you've got all, you've got the ham, you've got the bacon, you've got the pork chops. And so preferentially I would probably look towards more of a lard type breed. You've got New guinea, you've got Mangalitsa, you've got large blacks. The pigs that I was running when, when we were farrowing, I had a glacostra old spot sow and a red wattle bore. I loved that combination. They're sort of a, an equal mix of pig breeds. You know, rewind the clock 100 years. Pig breeds were separated into sort of two phenotypes. A lard based breed which was really, really fat and super efficient at putting on subcutaneous fat, just like humans. And then you had sort of your torpedo breed, which is a little bit more of a meat breed. Longer bellies bacon, the lard breed has sort of been exchanged now for a bigger ham. You still got the torpedo. The breeds are split into two predominant phenotypes from an industrial pork standpoint. One is this torpedo. If you're a bacon enthusiast, you're going to want that. And the other is more of like a fire hydrant or a trash can. It's sort of a squattier, bigger, rounder, but big old fat hams.

What is Pharaoh mean exactly?

Pharaoh as a noun refers to a newborn batch of piglets. So there's, there's a pharaoh of pigs. Pharaoh as a verb, it really sort of moves from the pigs to the farmer. So if I'm facilitating the perpetuation of the pig species, I'm managing mama pig and daddy pig and making sure they're making pigs. That's called farrowing. You know, God charged us with the care and nurture of animals. Farrowing is facilitating that in a farming setting. You know, in nature they just, they just do what they do. You know what, let's go back to a question you asked because I haven't finished answering it. So how should a pig be raised? Here's my standard. Outdoors you'll hear pastured pork. You shouldn't have the pigs out in your pasture. They, they really like the wood glands and on the edges of a pasture, but they are destructive and they can dig holes. So keep them out of the pasture, so to speak. But yeah, they should get plenty of sunshine. I draw the line at a non GMO soy free diet. Our pigs get corn. It's a non GMO corn and they get a snow pea, which is sort of the protein replacement equivalent to soy. And diet's important, James, but it's all we talk about, you know, this like how the pig is raised and the environment is way more important. So plenty of sunshine. Pigs metabolize vitamin D, which it shouldn't even be called a vitamin. It's a hormone, it's foundational. Again, pigs and humans, lots of biological symmetry, right? And so a pig needs plenty of sunshine, fresh air, fresh water, good food, and plenty of movement. They will do all of that if you just give them the opportunity to do that. Animals in nature move and so you don't want excessive excrement buildup. You know, they pee and poo just like we do. And so I would say no more than a week on any one patch of land. Almost everything I know about farming I've learned through books and also practicing a lot of the methods that Joel Salatin teaches up at Polyface Farm. His general rule of thumb is no more than a week on the same patch of land. The biggest batch of pigs I ever had, and again, I was a micro farmer, was about 22, and I'd have those pigs on a quarter acre for a week and then a new quarter acre and a new quarter acre and you can usually circle back around giving the land time to rest and also all that excrement to be absorbed by the bugs in the soil and the birds and everything. You usually want to give it at least an 8 to 10 week rest period. And so if you think about that, you can, you know, on a 10 acre patch of land, you can run a whole lot of pigs, giving the land optimal rest and also making sure that you don't have an over buildup of, of their excrement.

This is going to sound like a bizarre question, but can pigs get sunburned like humans? Because technically, particularly when the very light pigs, right, depending on the breed, they're not covered in fur the way some other animal might.

Some pigs are. Some pigs are white hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The consumer's idea of a pig is like a porky pig or a, or a Wilbur from. Yeah, Pink pig from Charlotte's Web. Having said that, a heritage breed pig of any variety is more often than not going to carry plenty of hair. Now, having said that, yes, they can sunburn. And this is one of the multitude of reasons why they will find a low spot where there's a little bit of water and they'll cover themselves in mud. Again, it's so funny. This is one of the reasons why they're labeled a dirty animal, yet they're one of the cleanest animals on the landscape. Right, I've heard that, yeah. So the wallowing in the mud serves three purposes, okay? One, pest protection. So any flies and mosquitoes and stuff like that, it sort of builds a protector. It's usually wet mud and so it's a cooling effect through evaporative sort of cooling. So they cover themselves in mud and then they go lay somewhere and as the mud dries, it sort of evaporatively cools them. You know, pigs aren't the most heat tolerant animal on the planet. And then the third thing it does is if they're exposed to direct sun, it does help protect them from sunburn. And so those are the sort of the three primary reasons why they do it. Now again, I said earlier it's called pasture port. But ideally they're off on the edges, you know, where there's shade, where there's trees. If you have to run a pig through a field, make sure you've got a shade structure. That's incredibly important for pigs.

Now, I was recently given some tallow based skin care by a rancher who swore that his constant use of it was actually protecting his skin from the sun from getting sunburned. And he, you know, he's on a horse all day, you know, so he's talking from his direct experience. Do you find, from your experience, did you ever experiment with other fats? I mean, as you were developing the product or did you just go straight to lard?

We went straight to lard. But then, well, this is a fun story. So I figured out lard is awesome. And then first thing I did, this is back in July 5, 2019. I'll never forget the day I was, you can see this red on my shirt here, this red bee. I was that red. I came home barbecued and so I just used lard. Well, it worked. It was amazing stories on the website if you want to go check it out. But more importantly, I went to the, to the Google machine and I was like DIY skin cream, right? And so here's this recipe. I think it was Katie, the wellness mama. I saw a recipe and it was like coconut oil, water, beeswaxes and emulsifier. So I just did a one for one substitution of lard for the coconut oil and I made this. I mean, James, it was the most luscious cream you've ever imagined until about six or seven days later it turned black, smelled like death and Went rancid. It took me like a month to figure out, okay, it's the water that's causing this, right? Because we've all cooked bacon and you pour the drippings in a coffee cup and it sits on your kitchen counter for two months and you just spoon it out as you need it. And so it's sort of light bulb moment. I was like, I gotta get the water out of there. Well, you know, this lard at room temperature is almost liquid. By contrast, tallow at room temperature is very, very solid. In an effort to make a more viscous cream something more akin to what you'd see if you walked in your local pharmacy, I brought in tallow, different ratios and leaf lard. And leaf lard is sort of the pig equivalent to tallow. And so started playing with ratios. But yeah, we use all three of those fats, you know, at some point we'll start playing with other fats, I would imagine. I've heard bear fat's amazing, but there's not a commercial bear industry. And so the supply side is probably not going to be as robust, if you will. But there's bad, good, better, best. It's very easy to talk about bad. Any petroleum derivative, I would say any hot pressed or chemically pressed seed oil, that stuff's just terrible for you. And then you've got good, I would say in the good world you've got fruit based or plant based fats. Coconut oil, avocado oil, olive oil. I mean, God, we've been putting olive oil in our skin. Read all the Egyptian texts, right? That's your good fats. Better is going to be anything in the animal fat kingdom, any monogastric omnivore or any ruminant. So, you know, your deer, your elk, your bison, any of the fat from them is going to be in the better category. Candidly, I believe pigs offer us the best option when it comes to, again, human biology and pig biology and, and what our skin ultimately craves. And so bad, good, better, best. There's your spectrum.

Something that is kind of a white elephant in the room is you're a guy and you're in the skin care business. You know, I mean, like you could say in the larger industry, you know, Estee Lauder, you know, the really big, big, big industry, there's lots of men in that industry. But when you work the circles like we have and you go to these conferences and you see all these kind of natural skin care line, you know, founders, it's all women. I don't, I mean, I'VE rarely met a man. And I'm not talking like a biohacking skincare, I'm talking specifically a natural animal based skin care. The majority of them are women, so you stand out a little bit. But also I'd love to hear like, well, how did you get into this? Was it just that sunburn or. Because I know you used to be in that Paleo field and you know, doing cookbooks and helping people around that. So what got you into skin care specifically?

I tell you what I'm into. I'm into results, right? Paleo worked for me. I've been 99% carnivore now for a couple years. It works for me. I love Paleo as a template. It worked. So step number one was I had this nasty sunburn. You and I share a melanin content. You're probably a little bit more fair skinned than, than I am. But you know, we've all got those tragic memories. I can still remember the day my back peeled off because I played volleyball, you know, on a beach with some friends for way too long and got barbecued. And so it worked. And I didn't peel. Not to ruin the story on the website for your listeners, but when I never peeled, that was the light bulb moment, right? And then the, the real second phase I would say to heightening my conviction around this was when the stuff started going rancid. Okay. And I'm trying to figure out, I mean, I'm not a chemist, I'm not an esthetician, I'm not a dermatologist. So I started reading labels of other skin care products, trying to find what, what can I put in here that's going to make it a viable product? You know, I can't make this stuff into the Seven days Later it's, it smells like death. I started reading these labels and you know, again, just like the food industry, it's like I can't pronounce these things. How bad are they for their skin? I started doing some research and these chemicals are just terrible for like what they allow on our skin. That was the research. And so I, it's like I got a. Put a product together. This is the same charge behind Paleo. You know, I just love Paleo. It works for me. Julie and I wrote these cookbooks just to give people a tool to sort of move them in the direction of a healthier life. I didn't do a ton of research. I mean, there weren't that many animal fat skin care brands at the time. But I was just like hyper Focused on how can I turn this into something? And I'll tell you, my conviction has gotten even more increased as Adeline's gotten older. She's 10 now. The amount of marketing by the skin care industry at young girls is absolutely mind numbing. And I can't think of a population of people on the planet with a lower need of skin care products than a 10, 12, 15 year old girl. And so this is like my new resolve and I'm never giving up. I'm going to continue to do this. I can't change the policies, I can't change the fda. There's a lot of things I can't do. But what I can do is make a product that's clean, efficacious, ultimately serves the consumer while showcasing regenerative agriculture and various other things. That's at the very least putting a product on a shelf somewhere that a young girl, not dissimilar from Adeline, my daughter, can go in there and at least choose. We still gotta market it and all that fun stuff. But let me go back to this. A dude in skincare. Yeah, it's a little weird. You know, it was a guy that developed the tampon and it was a guy that developed the bra. But I enjoy coming at it from sort of the, I wouldn't call it naive, just open. I'm not an esthetician, I'm not a dermatologist, I'm not a woman. But the difference between male and female skin is not this big. It might be this big, it's human skin, so there's that. And then I'm also, I try to pride myself in making sure that I don't leave out, you need to eat right, you need to sleep enough, you need to hydrate. Like big skin care doesn't want to talk about all the things that really need to be in place for your skin to be in its best state. They're just pushing, you know, 17 products and 14 routines and AM and PM and all that fun stuff. So I try to stay very, very close to always educating people, men and women. Men have a skincare routine too, whether they admitted it or not. You know, we shave and various things. I try to constantly communicate that yes, my products are great, especially when it comes to chronic skin, you know, eczema, psoriasis, cheilitis rosacea. It's like, listen, topically our stuff works great. And are you getting enough sleep? Are you drinking enough water? Are you exercising regularly? Are you getting enough animal fat and, you know, vitamins and minerals through Eating real food. A fire is not going to burn unless you seed it the right fuel. Pluck is the same thing. You know, we've taken this ancient multivitamin, like, critical piece of our health and we've just. We're throwing it in a landfill.

You bring up a really great point though. I love that you said this because my daughter is also inundated with skin care lines, skin care advertising, even though she doesn't watch network tv. Right. So where is she getting this? She's getting it from social medias and we even try to limit that. So whether it's her getting screen time, which is very limited in our household, or just her friends getting screen time, which potentially is not limited in their household, she's getting exposed to skincare routines, being mindful of skin products. But what I love about what you said is this is probably the one period in their life that they really don't need these products. So how are you navigating that with your daughter? I mean, A, I would say how are you literally, as a father, navigating that? But then B, are you getting her to use your product or is she being like, you know, a typical daughter of someone who is got a product and saying, well, I don't want yours, I want, you know, or like, for me as a chef, I get, well, I don't want your cooking. I want to go eat at McDonald's. Right? So they want what they don't have, you know. Is that happening for you as well?

Oh, sure. I mean, I take the same approach that I do with what they eat because I can't be there all the time. They're at school, you know, they live with their mom most of the time. But, you know, hey guys, read the labels. Can you pronounce this? When it comes to food, it's like, hey, guys, you eat whatever you want to eat. But this is where your energy comes from and this is where lack of energy comes from. Just, I just educate them on the skin care front. I don't push it on them. I do involve them. I mean, you've seen some of the stuff on our social media. I mean, Scott's our VP of fulfillment and Adeline's our VP of manufacturing. And when they're with me, I try to keep them involved in the company so that at the very least, they're sort of mindful of skin care. We went and stayed with a buddy of mine in Atlanta. This is probably two months ago. I think they still have them, although they've fallen out of favor do you remember Candied cigarettes?

Oh, yeah, sure.

Yeah, yeah. So the two largest mergers and acquisitions in the 90s were two big tobaccos bought two big food companies, okay. And they brought their addiction scientists over to. This is what we see in Hyper Palatable Foods now, right? Skincare is owned by the same. I mean, if you look at the market, you've got a consolidation of maybe five to 10 brands, ultimate holding companies that control maybe 80 to 90% of the of the products you see on the shelves. And so we stay at this buddy of mine's house. He has two daughters. One's 11, one's turning 13. And they were out of town. They were out of town with their mom. This is the timing worked out for us to just overnight there. Adeline had a swim meet and in one girl's bathroom, and then the other girl's bathroom, James, there was probably $3,000 worth of Sephora products. I mean, just mind numbing. I have since been into a Sephora a couple times. I've been into a Ulta just doing market research. It's a status thing. They're very smart when it comes to marketing. They know exactly what they're doing. And just like Candied cigarettes, you know, from our youth, they are getting these girls addicted to a routine of, you need this, you need this, you want this, you know, and. And there's a status symbol, you know, with all the pretty colors and the bags and so what am I going to try to do? You know, right now we're with Farrow. We're just direct to consumers through our website. But I am in the process of figuring out how to develop some products that can potentially, hopefully sit on that Sephora shelf so that if my daughter does choose to go in there and take in this rite of passage, girls, you know, mean girls, preppy girl, you know, whatever, you know, all the clicky groups, if they want to go in there now, she's at least got something she can take home that's not going to destroy her microbiome and destroy her hormones and all the fun things.

You make some really good points. So, yes, our skin is our largest organ, first of all, right? And then secondly, that with food, that's definitely the message of like, hey, understand what are the ingredients? If you're buying something that has ingredients, understand everything that's in that ingredient list. So. So we're definitely getting some conditioning around that, but I don't see that really happening very often in the skin care line.

Now.

I know there are definitely companies and products that are pushing a more natural product. But even in those natural products, I sometimes don't know what the ingredient is. Right. Because it's got all these chemical and or scientific names. You know, you just, it might be salt, but it's sodium dioxide. You know, it's something that we're not familiar with as a title. How are we going to educate and help to change people to look at that?

Well, by talking about it, by having this conversation. Part of the real problem with skin care is we don't fully understand that the skin is our second stomach and it does eat things. I mean, if you look at the chemicals, for example, the FDA prohibits 11 chemicals in skincare in the United States of America. 11. And you think, okay, well that's great. There's 11 chemicals that they don't let in. By contrast, the European Union's list of prohibited and controlled substances is 1300.

1300 to 1100.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So balance those out, right? You can't. And so part of the problem with skin care, you know, industrial skincare in the US is I mentioned earlier, it's a fat based industry. And typically they're not using fats that align with our biology. They're using a petroleum derivative, even these seed oils. I mean, our skin has evolved over thousands of years. And 90% of the stuff we put on our skin today, again you walk into your local pharmacy and get a moisturizer or a sunblock. 99% of those products, there's nothing other than maybe water in that product that our biology even recognizes because it didn't exist, certainly not in a natural state. And so you've got sort of two or three pillars that you've got to seek out and utilize safer, more efficacious ingredients. You've got the fat. I'm talking about like in an emulsified cream, you got the fat. Okay, are we using animal fat? Are we going to use plant based fats or are we going to use petroleum derivatives? Bad, good, better, best. Then you've got the emulsifiers, and there are good, better, best, bad, good, better, best emulsifier. So can we find the thing that's going to help the water and the fat come together? Let me just say this for your listener. We don't use any of those compounds in our current products. Everything we use, there's no chemicals, there's no preservatives, there's none of that. It's full fat, lard, leaf, lard, tallow, a little bit of honey. And then in our scented products, essential oils, however, I Do recognize the battle is being waged on the retail shelves. The battle's being waged in a Sephora. So you've got the fat bad, good, better, best. You've got the emulsifier of bad, good, better best. And then you've got a preservative. And there's bad, good, better, best. I would say there's bad, worse, really bad. And then. Okay, right. It's almost impossible to make an emulsified product that doesn't, in some fashion, disrupt your microbiome. Okay, so again, back to these bugs and parasites and various things. You know, our skin, our gut, every stitch, every square inch of the human body, inside and out, is coexisting with a number of microorganisms, our microbiome. And these bugs we know less about than we do space. But they are. They're there for a reason. A lot of them are hormone signaling. A lot of them, especially in the gut, are critical to proper digestion and satiety and hunger hormones. And so it's the same with food. Like, all these preservatives in food are doing the same thing that all these preservatives in our skincare are doing. They're disrupting this microbiome, this natural environment. And so we need to find ingredients that are less troublesome to human biology.

Yeah, absolutely. You and I had an interesting conversation around, like, putting your products on hair, you know, so maybe you can talk about the uses of some of your products, because something you just encapsulated, is that really what thero is or what you promote is technically everything in it is something you could eat if you wanted to. So there's. There's nothing in it that's not edible. Thus your skin is eating it, in a sense. But what else can people do with it other than the skin? Also, you mentioned some eczema stuff. You mentioned some conditions that it might work really well for, but what are some others?

Well, let's see, the first question was, what can you use it for? Let's talk about hair. Hair health is follicle health, and follicle health is skin health. Right. And so I use it in my hair as sort of a pomay, which means it, over time, it naturally gets on my scalp. I've noticed the hair all over my body has gotten. I'm going to say it feels thicker and healthier since I started using the product. What is it? Frank's Red Hot Sauce with the ad, like, we'll put that shit on anything, right? Yeah, that's kind of our product. You've got two paths in skincare problems. You've got acute skincare problems. You talked about a few. Sunburn, wind burn, razor burn, bug bites, poison ivy. You know, it's here and then it's gone. Anything on the acute side of the house, if you had to choose one product, I'd probably go with either our skin food or our epidermis. Those are our lard heaviest products in terms of the ratios of the fat. So on the acute side of the house, I mean, I haven't had razor burn in three years. I haven't itched in about three years. And you know, itching is just dry skin. If you ever get out of the salt pool and you let yourself air dry, you know your whole body starts to itch because it's dried up and that salt sort of cracking your skin. A mosquito bite. It's not the mosquito bite that itches, it's the swelling. So you get bit by a mosquito and then it starts to swell. You know, you got your little sort of bump. Well, if your skin is remotely dry as that bump expands, think about on a microscopic level, your skin is cracking. And so when it cracks, it itches. So that's the acute side of the house. Then on the chronic side of the house, this is where it's absolutely foundational. So for topical relief and improving the skin from a chronic skincare condition, eczema, psoriasis, cheilitis, rosacea, I would even say hemorrhoids for that matter. But you know, those are probably your four or five most common chronic skin conditions. You got to talk about both sides of the coin. Topically, our stuff is fantastic. It's going to help take the burnout, take the itch out, sort of give the skin permission to heal and thrive. But what you're suffering from is a symptomatic response to something underneath. So what are you eating? What's in your diet? Do you have an autoimmune disorder? Are you eating lots of processed foods? We should really talk about both sides of the coin. My stuff's fantastic topically, but if you want a long term solution for this eczema or rosacea not coming back, let's get under the hood a little bit, talk about your diet, talk about your lifestyle. That's what you're not going to hear from a dermatologist. That's what you're not going to hear from an esthetician. The American Academy of Dermatology, which is one of the anointing agencies. If I want to be a dermatologist, I should be a member of the American Academy of Dermatology. There's 27 corporate sponsors for the American Academy of Dermatology. 26 of them are Big Pharma and the 27th one is a skin testing lab that's basically, you know, big pharma adjacent. So who's controlling the narratives and the advice and the guidance? This is nothing you and I don't know about. You see the same thing in your primary care physician doctor's office. You know, who funds all the medical schools? Big pharma. And so from a skincare perspective, I'm just trying to have this conversation. If you have a chronic skin care condition, yes, our products are a far cry better than almost anything they're going to prescribe to you. James, what's a skin care cream prescription? Here's what it is. It's a base emulsified garbage cream, okay, that they make en masse and ship off to this compounding facility. And when your dermatologist prescribes your, you know, Accutane, think about the cheapest, nastiest ingredients that you can get away with making a skincare product. They'll put the active ingredients in with the stock cream, call it, you know, and so you're getting this cheap, probably petroleum derived based fat, cheapest emulsifiers, cheapest preservatives. And then they put the active ingredients, you know, read the label, it's like.02% of Accutane or whatever, that's garbage. The base cream is unrecognizable to your skin. It's just destroying your skin. You know, the shelf life of my products is probably six months to a year. In the skincare industry, you don't have a product unless you've got a two year plus shelf life.

We were talking about, well, how do we educate people on this? How do we change the message? And maybe that, that is one of the messages is that, hey, look for skin care that has an expiration, you know, that's six months or less because that tells you it's actually, you know, perishable ingredients.

You mentioned earlier, there's some great brands in the space van man, you got tubes and company, Emily Tupes, phenomenal product line. She's ventured out into makeup and various other things. These are my peers. Like we're all sort of fighting tooth and nail to get more. Certainly now young girls. That's one of my biggest motivations, to look to healthier and more efficacious products.

Hey, well, I appreciate that that is part of your mission because as you mentioned, I got two daughters and you know, they're susceptible to this, this marketing blitz, you know, around skincare as well. And, and as you said, it's our largest organ. It's a living, breathing organism. It's, you know, this is important. And as parents, we're always looking to support our children's health so they can thrive and we want them to be happy. Right. Those are the main two things we want of our kids. And so I appreciate what you're doing to support their self care and their health. Where can people find you?

Farrow Life is our website. F A R R O W. Life is the website. If it's your first time to us, you can just enter the code first order. F I R S T O R D E R. That'll save you 15% off our products. And man, we've got some cool stuff that you and I are doing. By the way, my kids are absolute unabashed fans of pluck. You're doing for food. What I'm trying to do for skincare, like they can't get enough of it. It's just packed with nutrition. If you're going to feed your skin, like the product should be packed with nutrition. And so I love that. Our friend. Our paths have crossed, our brands have crossed. It's a real honor to be here. James, you are an absolute blessing and addition to my life and so thank you for having me on.

Oh, man, absolutely. It's, it's very mutual and I want to share too, that I use your product. I'm still kind of like new to using products, but I've been using your product and have definitely noticed my skin is looking healthy. Don't have bumps, don't have acne. You know, not that I did much before, but either way, I'm a big proponent of what you eat. It's going to support your skin health, but clearly what you put on it as well. So thank you for making such a quality product. Check Charles's product out. Farrell life dot com. Let's keep doing it for the kids because I'm, I'm very concerned. Our kids are the canary in the coal mine and we're just seeing more and more issues. And I was just having a conversation with a friend today about how there's things that I'm seeing pop up in my daughter and he's sharing with his son that I don't understand. You know, I mean, like there are things that I don't remember as a kid. And I'm not talking about ideas, I'm talking about behaviors, they have tantrums in ways, you know, that I don't even understand. It's almost as though they're, it's chemical or there's something else going on. It's not just emotional that there's literally something going on. Whether it's inflammation of the brain or something's wrong with our gut. Something is contributing to this behavior and it's limiting their self care or their resilience around it. It's very fascinating and I know that's not what this podcast is about, but I just want to kind of share that piece about how important this topic is towards the well being of not only ourselves, but our kids. And that's what it's about. We, we have to do something because there's something clearly wrong. So thank you for doing your part in fixing it.

Girls in the US are hitting puberty at younger and younger ages, which is not good. Boys. Testosterone is dropping. I think it's down 50% over the last 30 years. Most of these compounds, these nasty chemicals, are estrogen signaling and we all need estrogen and we all need testosterone. Like these are critical. But if you just look at that, I can tell you skincare is playing a role, major or minor. It is a cog in the wheel of what is a virtual pandemic of hormone disruption. Certainly in, in our country, but you could make the argument globally, but it's, it's really bad here and so get this junk off your kids and, and for adults as well. I mean this, I see this. I was just on with Karen Martell. You know, pre postmenopausal women are going through all sorts of similar stuff on the back end. Sexual and hormonal maturity and, and so stop tinkering with this stuff.

Thank you all and thank you everyone for listening or watching. Stay curious. We look forward to more discussions. Take care.

Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links and resources mentioned@eatpluck.com that's E a T Pluc.

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