[Bonus Episode] The Surprising Secret to Clear Skin Most Dermatologists Won't Tell You About with Dr. Vincent Pedre

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I will tell you that I struggled with acne from like the age of 10 or 11. I still remember my mom had these like brutal fingernails and used to like pull me under the light and squeeze out blackheads. You know, it's like total trauma and right. And I mean I tried everything. I tried oral antibiotics, Accutane. I remember going to the doctors all when I was a teenager and even a young adult and they go diet has nothing to do with it. And I just was like, that couldn't be. But back then everyone thought it was chocolate that did it. Hey it's JJ and welcome to Ask the Health Expert. But this isn't just any old Ask the Health Expert session.

This is your bonus session.

Yes, it's the weekend and because it's the weekend, we are going to take some time with an amazing expert. So be on the lookout for these.

Saturday Ask the Health Expert bonus sessions where we're going to go deep into.

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Hey, it's J.J. and what if I told you that when you make your gut happy, you clear up your skin too? Well, our guest today, the author of Happy Gut, longtime buddy of mine, Dr. Vincent Pedre, is going to show you and talk about the surprising secret to clear skin most dermatologists won't tell you about. We're going to be talking today about skin health and the gut skin connection. So let me tell you a little bit about Vincent before we dive in and then I'm also going to share something super awesome he's giving to you as a loyal listener. He is the medical director of Pedre Integrative Health and the founder of Dr. Pedre Wellness, Chief medical officer of United Naturals and a Functional Medicine certified practitioner in private practice in New York City since 2004. And we've had him on the show before talking about his book Happy Gut that has helped thousands resolve their gut related health issues. Plus, he has got something super awesome to share with all of you. And you will be able to get this by going to jjvirgin.com skinmap you're going to get there the Happy Gut Skin Roadmap and it is three steps to skin that wins compliments in only 28 days. So make sure you grab that, and I'll be right back with you with Dr. Vincent Pedrick.

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Doctor Vincent Pedre. Welcome back.

Ah, thank you for having me back. Such a pleasure.

Yes, well, it'll be fun to talk about skin and gut health today before we dive into that. I cannot believe this. Now that I've known you for what, five, six, seven years?

Four and a half years.

Four and a half years.

I kind of track it from when my. This is like, I don't know, some other post phase of my life because I met you a month after I separated and went to my first mindshare. Actually, I met you before that, but I didn't officially meet you meet you until I went to Mindshare, which was right after my separation four and a half years ago.

Boy, a lot has changed. But the thing I don't know about you, which is kind of crazy, is I don't know your origin story, like, in medicine, how you went from medical school to America's gut doc and the author of the Happy Gut. So how did that happen?

Oh, God. Wow. How long do we have? Do you have a glass of wine?

Hit the highlight. I've got a green drink that's not quite the same.

Okay, green drink for now.

No tequila in it or anything. Funny.

Actually, my story begins before medical school. I almost did not go to medical school. And I had just taken the MCATs and flew to Miami for Thanksgiving and sat down with my parents, and I told them, I don't think I want to go to medical school. I'm going to go to Wall Street.

I thought you were going to say, I'm in a salsa dance.

They're like, what? Well, my dad's other passion was watching the stock market and investing, and I would do it with him when I was in high school. And I was really good at picking biotech stocks and picking the ones that were going to be winners and looking at what their pipeline was and predicting who was going to have products that were going to be blockbusters. So I was interested in that. But the reason I said I didn't want to go to medical school is because I was afraid of needles. And anytime. Anytime I had my blood drawn or I had a shot of any sort, I was on the ground. A couple of seconds later, you know, my heart would race. I would start sweating, cold sweats. And then suddenly the entire room would start going dark. And next thing I knew, I was, like, waking up, and people were, like, trying to bring me back. And so I was like, how can I become a doctor if I'm afraid of needles? Like, how can you be a doctor and be afraid of needles? And, of course, my parents, you know, being good Cuban parents, sat me down, talked to me for an hour, and at the end of that hour, I was like, okay, I'm going to be a doctor. And. But the elephant was still in the room, right?

I was going to say, so how. How'd you get over that?

Yeah. So when I. When I finished Cornell, I actually finished in three and a half years, went back to Miami, had eight months off before medical school. And I started looking into, like, what the hell is happening to me? Like, why do I pass out every time I'm in a room with needles and Alcohol that didn't do so well for me, meaning, like, rubbing alcohol. Like, the smell of alcohol was just like, would make me feel queasy. And I discovered the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems and the fight or flight response. And without even realizing it, I was beginning my journey into meditation and breath work, because I found a book by Dr. Herbert Benson from Harvard, and I thought, okay, Harvard doctor, I can trust him. And started learning how to use my breath to control what I thought was not under my control, which was parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system and the balance between the two. And I did that for eight months. And by the time the big thing was, like, I felt like I was training for a race. The race I was training for was to be able to take the three. Three hepatitis B vaccines and not pass out. And that was going to be my test, and I was going to start the first one when I got, like, the month I was going to start medical school. So that was eight months. I was doing all this breathing, started getting into yoga. And by the time I was in my first semester in medical school, I was meditating for 30 minutes almost every day. And I would do that when I got home from school. And I was listening at the time, so this is going to date us. These were cassette players. Maybe you used your Walkman, those old headsets. And so I was listening to these guided meditations. And this is 1995, so this is not when meditating is in vogue. And I kept that a secret. Like, I did not tell any of my classmates that, oh, I'm. I'm meditating every day. And. But they would always ask me, why are you so calm? And so I became known as the Zen guy in my. My medical school class because you could find me the day before a really difficult test. And I was just even keel calm. And I attribute it to meditation and having discovered the use of breath work. And thanks to me not backing down. So I know you talk a lot about, like, facing your fears, and the greatest growth happens when you jump past your comfort zone. And my comfort zone was facing those needles. Turns out, though, jj, I was not afraid of blood. So put me in an OR and blood and open. Like seeing them cut open a body, like, none of that phased me. So it was really strange that I figured out in medical school, really, it was just the needles, like, I wasn't afraid of anything else. And thus that really shaped the type of doctor that I knew I wanted to become, because I saw the power of the mind to Shift the body and to shift our own internal experience. And I thought, you know, I'm not going to be one of these pharmaceutical driven doctors. And at the time, I was really influenced by Deepak Chopra, Dr. Andrawal. I had read their books before I got into medical school. So it was like I opened my mind before medical school, tried to come in and shut it with all the pharma information. And that really kind of guided my path to then studying yoga, studying medical acupuncture, eventually studying functional medicine and becoming functional medicine certified and writing my book on gut health. Happy gut.

So when you were in medical school in the 90s, meditating, having read Deepak Chopra and knowing you're going that route, were you alone? Were others there thinking that way too? Were you quiet? Did you just, like, hide?

I had one really great friend, really, really great friend who is still one of my best friends to date. It's one of those people that I could not see her for a year or two. And we meet up and it's as if we haven't skipped the beat. And she would do yoga with me and. And she was pretty much the only one. I think towards the end we got some other people to join in on the yoga. But she was also very interested in integrative medicine and alternative medicine. And we actually, we went to the dean of the medical school as fourseers and created our own rotation in integrative medicine. Like we just proposed. Like, we're going to do this for a month and we're going to go to yoga and we're going to do like, this is medical school. And the dean approved this. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you a funny story, because I was still kind of on and off a little bit shoddy with needles. We went to a meditation group in the middle of the day at the University of Miami campus. And it was for patients and whoever else wanted to go. And it was led by an acupuncturist. And for the meditation, she would come around and put a needle on the top of the head. This is Governor Vessel 20. This is like the master acupuncture point, relaxes the body. Well, I had conquered my fear of blood draws, of vaccine shots, but acupuncture needle, that was something new. So I'm sitting next to my friend and next thing I know, she's like, oh, my. She called me Vinnie. Vinnie's getting really relaxed. Because I was like my weight was on top of her and it's not. I wasn't relaxed. I passed Out.

Well, clearly you got through it since you're now studied medical acupuncture. And I know we're going to talk about skin and I'm super excited to talk about skin and gut health, like beyond excited. But before we go there, I think it's really interesting that you were looking so much at the parasympathetic and sympathetic and emotions and all of that, and then going into gut health, because I think back when you were doing that, they weren't really looking at how important your gut was with all of the. That was that what kind of led you there? What, what got you to the gut?

Oh, geez. That's, that's the other, like origin story for me is I was on 20 plus rounds of antibiotics as a child from the age of 10 through my teenage years, and that completely decimated my gut microbiome. I developed leaky gut as a result and developed sensitivity, both gluten and dairy. I could barely gain weight. I was eating 3 to 4,000 calories a day and I was rail thin. I was like £120, could not budge, and no one could figure out what the issue was. My immune system was shot. I would get sick anytime someone around me was sick. And so part of my motivation in becoming a doctor was to biohack my own health and figure out, okay, why am I getting sick so often? Why is my gut a mess all the time? And it wasn't until I discovered functional medicine that it really kind of brought it full circle. I understood what had happened to me as a child and I started working on receding my gut microbiome, working on eating healthy, bringing in organic foods, like really cleaning out the diet. And that got me really passionate about gut health. Now as I was on the gut healing journey, I started making the connections with stress and gut health and also the importance of the gut with mental health. I definitely suffered from mental health issues when I was a teenager, which could probably now be connected to just the so many rounds of antibiotics I had been on that destroyed my gut microbiome. Microbiome being so important in the connection between the gut and the brain and mental health.

So I know we're going to talk microbiome and skin before we do. We're going to take a quick break, so stay with us.

Some people think nature is like this, but actually it's like this.

That's why Columbia engineers everything we make.

For anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever.

All right, so let's talk about the microbiome and skin because now you're talking about gut and skin. So how did you start to get interested in how the gut affects the skin?

That was just something that's come up over the years, treating patients, hundreds of patients with gut health issues and seeing that a gut health issue is never isolated. Usually they come in with a gut health issue and something. And a lot of times that and was acne, eczema, hives, skin rashes. And I started seeing the connections between gut health and skin health. And just seeing like when I was working on the gut with the patient, then their, their skin would start to clear up. Or they did my 20 day happy gut reboot, the 20 day cleanse. And they would tell me, you know, my skin has never been better. Like, people are, my friends, family are complimenting me. They're asking me, what are you doing differently that you didn't do before? Like, well, I just did a cleanse. But, you know, so started seeing that, just working with patients and seeing all sorts of skin issues clear up that just continue to increase my, my fascination with gut health and gut health issues. Gut related health issues, which are so many.

So yeah, because you look at it, I know with when I started the virgin diet, I did it for weight loss and people like started coming in for eczema and psoriasis. I'm like, what? You know that it just started to work there too. So what, you know, what are some of the key skin issues you're seeing impacted by gut? I'm imagining it's probably all of them. And what are some key things that you can do to help your skin? You know, what are the. Because I know you have your gut cleanse and your gut cleanse helps your skin. What are some of the key things that you doing there that make an impact?

Yeah, and I want to say that the. I came up with this idea as we were. We first introduced the gut skin connection and started talking about it in January. And we did it on both the blog and on Instagram. And the reception was incredible. Like, so many comments, people like really liking this topic. So I decided to revisit it and we made March all about the gut skin connection. And I came up with this idea that the gut is your inner skin. And so if you want your outer skin to be healthy and look good, you need your inner skin to also be healthy. And there's a lot of interconnections there. So all types of skin issues are related to gut health because the skin is just kind of a surface manifestation of what's happening on the Inside. And it can reflect a bunch of different gut health issues. From yeast overgrowth I've seen cause adult acne to dysbiosis, imbalances between good and bad bugs. Leaky gut being a really key connecting factor between gut health and skin health. So when you have leaky gut, you have a disrupted gut barrier. And there's also something as the skin barrier, skin barrier integrity that can be affected when you have leaky gut and that causes all sorts of inflammation. Like you. I've seen connections between foods that people eat, leaky gut, and skin issues like hives like eczema. And once you clean out the diet, you fix the gut health, then you start seeing skin health really improve.

Are there some foods that you've seen that seem to be some of the worst culprits?

Definitely dairy, especially for adult acne. And study after study has shown that dairy increases the likelihood of, of acne, Especially if you're having non organic dairy that's full of growth stimulators, hormones, that's going to affect skin health a lot. Wheat also, just in the form of refined carbohydrates. White bread. White bread is a big load of sugar and again, sugar itself. I know you're big on sugar.

Like who eats white bread anymore?

Seriously? Have you looked at the ingredients in a lot of those store bought white breads? Like they, they often add sugar to them as well.

Like you needed the sugar with all that.

I, I was reading that the, the average American eats 124 grams of sugar per day.

Yeah, it was when we were like in the early 1900s, we ate five pounds of sugar per person per year. Per year. And now it's something like 150 pounds per person per year. Just crazy stuff. And I know I went to school every day with a wonder bread and bologna sandwich that I didn't eat. It was like, it was like I would have had to be starving to.

Did it get, did it just get? I know my, my, my mom used to pack a sandwich for me and by the time lunch came around, it had been sitting and it had got me squished and it was really yucky. Like this. Doesn't even know.

No. Not eating that. Okay, so dairy, dairy, sugar, gluten definitely tend to be some of the bigger culprits that you see.

Yes, definitely. As well as you know, another one that might be surprising to people is spicy foods. Spicy foods, especially foods that have chili pepper that can also aggravate skin. Conditions like rosacea, which is more common worldwide than you would Think rosacea, which happens mainly here on the face with redness. Sometimes you see the nose get thick and red and bigger. And sometimes rosacea can kind of look like acne. But spicy foods, foods that are high in histamines as well, can trigger skin issues, especially with people who have histamine intolerance.

And what about foods that would be good and healing for the skin and healing for the inner skin? What are your faves?

Yeah, absolutely. Omega 3 rich foods like avocado, olive oil, wild salmon, broccoli also is really great for the skin. And one that maybe is not so common that people have, but it's always something you can find at the supermarket is pomegranate. And pomegranate extract has been shown to reduce the risk of skin cancer. And it also, for anyone who's worried about skin damage and keeping that beautiful complexion, pomegranate protects the skin against photo damage. Hmm.

And chocolate does too, by the way.

Yeah, dark chocolate.

So you could have dark chocolate with pomegranate, and that would be really delicious. So you created a skin roadmap. What. What is this? Because I know you're going to give this to everybody listening, which I'm super excited about.

Walk us through. Yeah. Yeah. This is a free giveaway. And it was inspired by the thinking about the gut skin connection and how we can talk about it in a way that teaches people how to care for their gut, to care for their skin. And it's basically a roadmap to skin that wins compliments in just 28 days.

Wow. Tell us about a success story of a skin that's won compliments.

Oh, God, so many. I had someone write in that had read my book, and she was suffering from rosacea as well as hives, and she had been to multiple doctors, allergists, all the allergy testing was negative. And she came upon my book, decided to do the 28 day cleanse, followed my program, and her skin cleared up completely. And mind you, this is often the frustrating thing that patients run into is that they go to a doctor, the doctor runs tests, and the tests say you're fine, everything's negative, but you still have rosacea and you still have hives, so something's wrong.

Not everything is negative.

It's just that your test didn't find what was wrong. So, you know, thanks to, I think that people becoming their own doctors these days and looking at, you know, taking it upon themselves to find solutions. So she did my program, and it cleared up her hives and her rosacea, and it never Came back.

I love it so much. I will tell you that I struggled with acne from like the age of 10 or 11. I still remember my mom had these like brutal fingernails and used to like pull me under the light and squeeze out blackheads. You know, it's like total trauma and Right. And I mean I tried everything. I tried oral, antibiotics, Accutane. I remember going to the doctors all when I was a teenager and even a young adult and they go, diet has nothing to do with it. And I just was like, that couldn't be. But back then everyone thought it was chocolate that did it. Right. Now what they didn't realize is it was probably the milk chocolate. Cause dark chocolate, which was the only kind of chocolate I actually liked, which was good. But gosh, I just quit dairy, gluten and sugar and done gone. So it is a super frustrating thing when you think about so many people struggling with this. And it's a pretty simple fix to get your skin clear. So I'm very happy that you're giving away your skin roadmap because this is something anyone struggling, especially having been home this last year, maybe not getting out in the sunshine and maybe eating stuff they weren't supposed to be eating, might be struggling a bit. So you can get skin definitely. Right. So go to jjvirgin.com skinmap and that is for Dr. Vincent Pedre's skin roadmap. And you can get. It's a 28 day program. Get your skin to look fabulous. I think. What did you say?

The skin that wins compliments in only 28 days.

I love it. Great line. So awesome. Again, jjvirgin.com skinmap I know your skin wins compliments. You have great skin and you're a great dancer. How unfair is that?

Lucky gene, Lucky gene.

What you don't know about Dr. Vincent Pedre that's so hilarious. Is he. Before the pandemic, he was traveling all over the world teaching functional medicine. And there's this thing that. Where were you? And I'm looking at this picture of you leading all these doctors in like a salsa dance.

Peru. I think it was Peru.

So good. It was hilarious. So gotta love that.

That was fun. I got the entire room to stand up, dance and do a conga line. And my philosophy is like, okay, we're sitting in a room for several hours, like just being fed science. Like you've got to have some fun, right? Like you can't all be serious, right jj?

Yeah. But I think that's probably the first conga line that was probably ever done at a medical conference. So. And you know how I feel about fun, so I'm right there with you. All right, well, this has been awesome. Thank you so much, my friend. And I want to remind everyone, again, go to jjvirgin.com skinmap you are going to get that skin that WINS Compliments in 28 days when you do it for free. And thank you, Dr. Vincent.

Thank you.

All right, thanks so much for joining us today. Dr. Vincent Pedre all week always delights, and I love the connection that he's given us with skin and gut. Just wish I'd had that, gosh, 45 years ago. Oh, well, better late than never. Make sure that you grab your skin roadmap. That's at jjvirgin.com forward/skin map. And if you've not yet subscribed, you don't want to miss a show. Remember, we have these deep dives that we drop every every Saturday. And then Monday through Friday, it's Ask the Health Expert, the Q and A edition. So go to subscribetoj.com so you never miss a show.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And, of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.