Deep Dive Skin Microbiome Part 2 - LIVE Q&A

All right, people are filing in. Let me fix the chat. I am in a weird place today. I am in my wife's parents house in Berkeley, California, visiting. That's why we're at nighttime so it's not the middle of my night. I'm fixing the chat so that it works because they always make it not work. Okay, it should be fixed. If you guys could let me know you can see and hear me. Kieran should be here any minute. We have all your questions from last time and let me know where you're signing in from and let me know that. Or you can switch the two in the chat so that if you want everyone to see it, some of you are set to host and panelists. So I'm the only one who sees it. So if you want everyone to see it, you got to switch to everyone. Uh, if you haven't been here before. I'm Michael. I haven't introduced myself on a webinar in probably five years but there might be someone new and we're going to use the Q and A for more questions. But we do have about 45 questions from last time and I got a couple email questions so those have first dibs. We will do the best we can to get through all of them. Last webinar was awesome. Was quite blown away by all the stuff he shared. The presentation which I didn't know we were getting. That was great. And then it was so loaded that we ran out of time and had to come back for more. So there he is. Butter. That is a strong statement shirt my friend.

I'm smooth like butter.

Oh, just got my two bottles today of civ. Everyone's checking in in the chat.

Awesome.

Welcome back to our primetime slot. I am in America.

Yeah, welcome to America. How does it feel?

I'm tired.

Where are you? In the west coast, right? Somewhere.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm in Berkeley. I'm at. I'm at Mira's parents house. This is. Hold on, let me show you. This is Mira's childhood.

Are you guys sleeping on top and bottom? We are.

And the baby's on the bottom. Yeah. I've slept until 4am once and the other days I've been up around 3 so I'm feeling nice and zombie. We have not adjusted yet. We missed one connecting flight, got stuck in London for 20 hours which is super cool with a baby. And then so it turned into two full days of travel plus the circadian dysfunction. So it has been an adventure.

But yeah, well, hopefully, hopefully you'll be here for a little While.

Yeah, two. We're here almost two weeks. My folks are in town. They said to say hi, by the way.

Oh yeah. Tell them I said hello.

I will. All right.

Turn my lights down a little bit.

Leslie it is. Her parents came to Italy and saw the baby in September, but it's the first time my parents have seen him and her great Mira's grandmother, Elio's great grandmother is 95 and she lives here, so we brought him to see her. Arnica for jet lag. Thank you. I have some for pain. And we did send out the recording and the transcript from part one. Yes. Thank you, Victoria. Well, thanks for all the welcomes backs. If anybody's in the Bay Area, I'm teaching a full day workshop on Saturday on completely unrelated topics to this. But I am teaching in Berkeley and people are coming from Chicago and Boston and San Diego and Orange county and Idaho to Berkeley for a workshop. I am teaching on Saturday. So if you're in the area, come say hi. And we are here for part two that we accidentally made because we had so many questions and we didn't know we were getting a presentation last time. So thank you for that. That was awesome.

You're welcome.

And I'm sure you'll get other requests now to give that presentation. Yeah. So what I did is I There were 55 questions in the chat that I copied down and then some of them are very similar. So I kind of lumped them together and I apologize. I'm used to working with a giant monitor where I can have the zoom open and another window open and read it. But now I'm on my laptop, so. All right, what we're going to do, if you're all right with this format, I am going to ask you the questions from last time. Then we have a couple email questions and I told people if they have other ones, they can put them in the Q and A. These are going to be anything related to the skin, skin, microbiome, leaky skin, all the crazy stuff we talked about last time. And then there's some product specific questions. Everyone that ordered siv, we're going to be sending you an email very soon with some questions we want you to answer too to get feedback about your progress and how things are working for you that they gave us that we're going to send out to you. It just, it got lost in my travel chaos. So that will happen and that's what we're going to do for the questions. If somehow, miraculously we get through all of the old questions and Email questions and any new questions. Then if there's any time left, we can open it up for whatever questions. But I think we're going to be pretty full with these. So. Yeah, we are. Q and A. All right, let's do. I'm just going to kick it off. We're not doing introductions today. This is Kiran. He's a microbiologist. Watch part one. You'll get it. So what, okay. The skin or the lining of the mouth in the oral microbiome, is it similar to the skin microbiome or is that completely different?

It's interesting that the oral microbiome can in fact, influence the skin microbiome to a certain degree, but the structures are quite a bit different. So the oral microbiome is considered a mucosal biome because the inside of the oral cavity is considered a mucosal tissue. So it's moist, it has a mucous layer on it. So those are slightly different types of microbes that reside there. Well, now there are microbes that reside in both areas. So streptococcus, staphylococcus, for example, you'll find it on the skin, you'll find it in the mouth, you'll find in the sinuses. And in fact, if you have a lot of strept and staph and all that in your mouth, that can actually influence your skin microbiome in the region as well. Right. Imagine every time you sneeze or you breathe out or cough, you're getting a lot of those oral microbes on the regions near your face and they can settle in there. So there are different regions, they have typically different microbiomes. And the structures of the oral cavity and the skin are going to be different. But a dysfunctional oral microbiome can actually influence the skin to a certain degree as well.

Interesting. I'm sure that I'm not surprised there's a link. As I'm learning, there's no separation between any of the biomes, really. Can you speak to biome, skin biome and HPV being able to live on the skin? Slash, susceptibility to warts. Is there any evidence that there's any wart biome correlation that you know of or anything to do with HPV or warts?

Yeah. So, you know, HPV is a opportunistic virus. One of the things that it does really well is remain latent. HPV does infect the. The epidermis, but it infects the lowest part of the epidermis. So there are these basal cells that are actually Cells within the bottom part of the epidermis. That's actually what generates the epidermal cells. And so HPV makes its way down the layers of the epidermis to the bottom part of the epidermis and infects those stem cells. Now, like papilloma and other similar viruses, like herpes simplex virus, it can remain latent in its host cell for a long period of time and then only express itself when the, when certain conditions are right and certain serotype of hpv. Right. Not any, not all serotypes of hpv, which there are hundreds upon hundreds of different versions of hpv, not all of those produce warts. Only a certain number of them produce warts. The ones that don't produce warts can just remain latent and you'll never know that they're, you know, and everybody's been exposed to them and everybody carries them to a certain degree as well. And so they'll just remain in those cells. Now, the propensity to gain infection from HPV may be related to your skin microbiome, because when a virus or bacteria or any other foreign microbe lays upon your skin, one of the roles of the microbes, both the transient and the resident microbes that are commensal, that are, that are friendly to the area, is to defend the skin from those things that are coming in. So if you've got a disrupted skin microbiome, you are more susceptible to opportunistic type infections like that. And not only do they produce antiviral compounds and fight against the virus, but then they can also alert the immune system to the presence of the virus. And if you have a really strong barrier structure, like a nice ceramide layer and so on, it makes it harder for that virus to get deeper into the skin, to the bottom part of the epidermis layer, right? So once it gets in, though, if you have the serotype that produces warts, it's going to produce warts from time to time. If you have the serotype that creates cancer, it's going to create cancer at some point or like most people have, it's one that doesn't do either. It just kind of sits there, remains dormant. It's a highly evolved virus, right? So what's interesting about viruses is the ones that kill their host are the worst kind of viruses in the realm of viruses. Meaning that they're the least evolved, Right. Even the ones that make you sick are least evolved because the whole point of a virus is its ability to come in, take over cellular machinery of the of the host, but not damage the host because it needs the host for survival. Right. So papillomavirus and herpes simplex virus, Epstein Barr, cytomegalovirus. A lot of these viruses are highly evolved in that they can live within the host and not actually damage or kill the host for the most part and don't cause any symptomology in many. The skin might kill me.

It dies too then.

Exactly. Doesn't, you know. And it needs another host with close proximity to transfer to. So I would say if you already have hpv, improving the skin microbiome may reduce its expression to a certain degree, but I don't think you can get rid of it. But if you don't have HBVR and we're all constantly exposed to HPV anyway, it's probably better to have a healthier skin microbiome to prevent deep penetration of that papillomavirus.

All right, Is there, do you have any knowledge related to red light therapy in the skin microbiome or infrared?

Yeah. So this is interesting. There is. I, I couldn't think of a study that has directly shown. Here's what red light therapy, how it manages, how it impacts the skin microbiome. So you have to connect some dots. Right. We know that red light therapy can reduce inflammation, can reduce sebum production, you know. Can, can.

Sebum is the oil from the skin.

Yeah, it's the oil from. Produced by a sebaceous gland, which is a gland that's dotted out throughout your skin. You have much higher amounts on your face, head and neck than the rest of the dry areas of your body, of course. And that maintains moisture. Right. And that's a, that's an important part of it. It also creates an anaerobic environment in some of the regions of your body. But red light therapy, with its ability to reduce inflammation on the skin, stimulate collagen production and a few of the other benefits, it's not unreasonable to think that it would be beneficial to the skin microbiome in terms of expanding diversity, at least on the body and those sites now on the face, it could actually help with improved circulation and all that. You can get more immune cells, more blood and all that flow to the regions that are now potentially cut off to blood flow because of over production of sebum, because of clogging of the pores, because too much dirt getting in, too much inflammation. So it may help in that regard, but I'm not familiar with any studies that show a direct correlation. Red light therapy is just Good for your skin. I don't, I don't see any reason why it would harm your micro skin microbiome. So I think keep using it. You're using it.

I, I'm in this group on Facebook. I'm actually going to be interviewing the guy who runs it in a couple educational pages on red light therapy soon and the research there, and it's a total side subject, but the research behind red light and near infrared is rather remarkable. If there was pills that did what red light therapy did, the drug companies would be all over that one.

Yeah. Who, who is the guy?

His name, well, his name is Bart who writes the con content for him. And then I don't know, I'll bring it up while we're doing this and I'll let you know. Alex. Alex. Alex. Red light. I don't know. Alex. His name's Alex.

It's on Robbie.

Alex. Alex Fergus. F E R G U S Alex Fergus. He has a YouTube channel, he has a web websites, he's got tons of content out there. And they're like not affiliate with any of the companies. They do product reviews and post studies and whatever. But the research and studies behind red light therapy are very, very convincing on a whole bunch of levels. And it's so cool too that our body responds to light. Yeah, so we talked about that last time because the microbes use probably photons or light or something to communicate. So our skin microbes mostly aerobic. I know, you answered. Or you talked about how some areas have more anaerobic microbes because there's like smush folds or more oil or something, right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. So areas that are like high moisture areas where you have a lot of sweat glands, you have a lot of hair follicles, sweat glands, hair follicles, sebum, sebocytes, those areas can, can house anaerobic bacteria. So that's mostly areas like your armpits, groin, scalp, face, neck. You'll, you'll have a predominance of anaerobic bacteria in many of these areas. But most of the rest of the body is predominantly aerobic bacteria because there's not a lot of anaerobic environments in the rest of the body.

Okay, speaking of moisture and wet places, how do skin microbes survive bathing or saunas?

Ah, yeah. So, so you will kill every time you bathe, every time you go swimming, every time you do a sauna and you sweat. It's less in a sauna than, than bathing or showering or swimming. You will kill microbes on the skin, right? But you'll kill typically less than a log. So less than a log means you're probably killing down the numbers by 40, 50%. And it may sound like a lot, but with microbes, that's not much because they grow by binary fission, logarithmic growth. So you, you take a shower and let's say you excessively soap, which you shouldn't do, but let's say you excessively soap and you're using all kinds of crazy shower gels and all that, you're probably going to knock the volume of bacteria down, or microbes down in general by about 50%. And then you come out your towel dry and, and then you put on moisturizer, hopefully. And by the time you go along your day, over the next eight, nine hours, most of those microbes will come back, right? So, so it's okay to do that. But let's say you showered again seven, eight hours later, then you're knocking down those microbes again. And you, if you do that too much or if you use too harsh of a soap or astringent or antimicrobial things with antimicrobial properties on your skin, you're going to maintain kind of a low diversity, low volume of microbes. That can be problematic. One of the first things you'll notice is drying out of the skin and dullness of the skin, right? So when we, when we wash our skin too much and it gets dried out, it's not necessarily because, like, the washing is somehow sucking out moisture, right? It's because you're, you're dramatically reducing the number, the amount and concentration of microbes on the skin, which the, then the microbes are the ones that are playing an important role in regenerating the ceramide later layer and regenerating the skin tissue so that you, you can generate new tissue, maintain moisture, and so on. So you do want to be careful of too much bathing, too much showering and all that. My little hack is number one, I love showers, right? So standing under warm water is not going to reduce your microbes by that much. When I. So I do so lightly and I soap and I soak relatively quickly. But the hack is, you know, when I'm not traveling, I'm home quite a bit. And when I'm home, I don't shower every day necessarily, right. I sometimes I'll go two or three days without showering because it actually feels better for my skin. And it allows your skin microbiome to build up a little bit. You build up some of the oils and some of the immune modulation takes place and all that. You don't disrupt that by, you know, jumping in the shower and soaping up too much.

Okay, that makes sense.

Another reason why you shouldn't bathe babies every day either. Right.

So, yeah, we've. We've reduced our soaping of the baby since the last webinar mirror. Was a little hesitant at first, but he's doing just fine. And she does put moisturizer on him, so he gets just a water bath most of the nights because he likes it before bed. It seems to calm him down. Yeah. Any studies on the skin biome related to collagen synthesis or the skin microbiome related to collagen? I thought you talked about this or mentioned it.

Yeah, yeah, in fact. So the cells in your skin that are responsible for the formation of collagen and laying down collagen are cells called fibroblast cells.

Right.

So fibroblasts. And anywhere in the body, when you hear the word blast associated with the cell, it's actually a cel. It's kind of counterintuitive because it says it's called a blast cell. Like osteoblastic cells are cells that actually build bone. Osteoplastic cells are the cells that break down bone. So fibroblast. Yeah. Are cells that build the fibrous. The collagen fibers. Now, what's super interesting is there are really good studies that show that certain commensal microbes on the skin stimulate fibroblast activity. Now, they do it in many contexts. They do it in the context of wound healing. They do it in the context of turning over and maintenance of the skin. They also do it in the context of recovery from inflammation in the skin. And the microbes play an important role in secreting compounds that stimulate this fibroblast. Some of those microbes are like staph epidermidis. It's been known since they started looking at skin microbiome and its. Its association with health that staph epidermatis is a really healthy beneficial microbe to have on your skin versus staph aureus. Staph aureus is a pathogenic one. In fact, you can have the worst version of Staph aureus, called mrsa, which is methicillin resistant Staph aureus. Right. So that's the one that cause all kinds of infections and can kill people. But we always have this balance between staph aureus and staph epidermidis. And what we want is a Higher level of staph epidermidis, because that's one of those key microbes that, that enhances fibroblast production, sorry, fibroblast activation, so that it can then produce collagen for you. So, you know, that's one of the, one of the issues with, you know, taking all the collagen supplements. Right? Sure, it might help. You're putting in amino acids into your system, but there's still mechanisms at play that have to function in order for that dietary collagen to turn into collagen in your skin. Right. No different than things like in the gut lining. Like why just taking glutamine is not going to heal the lining of your gut. You still need the microbes in there to, to be doing the work for you. They're the mechanics of the system. So, so we know, for example, with the sieve serum in, in a couple of the subjects we tested in the top five microbes on, on some of the body sites that we tested, Staph epidermidis wasn't even in the top five, which is not a good thing, especially in one. One of the subjects had kind of aged looking skin already at a relatively young age. We had showed her before and afters in the PowerPoint last time. And what we saw is that there was no staph epidermis picked up even within the top five microbes. And then after, I think it was two or three weeks with sib, we saw a lot of those symptoms alleviate more uniformity to the skin, which is another indication of skin turnover and increased collagen function and thickness to the skin. And then we saw when we retested the microbiome that now epidermidis was like number four on her skin. So it was a nice correlation between now the appearance of staph epidermidis and then the improved appearance of the skin as well.

Okay, that makes sense. And I'm still stuck on, on fibroblasts. I got to play. I'm going to date myself here on the flight. I played Asteroid and salute. That's God bless you over there. Salute. When Elio sneezes, we all yell salute. And he thinks that's hilarious. So baby sneezing is one of the most entertaining things that there is. It's like a full body ordeal. I got to play Asteroids. And when you said fibroblasts, I was thinking of. So if anybody out there has never heard of asteroids, you're probably younger than me. So this relates to collagen sun overexposure early in life, collagen loss, wrinkles, arms and legs quite wrinkled. Skin is thin, even though no longer overexposed from previous sun. Is there any way to. Is that beyond help or is it possible to bring life back to that?

Did they mention their age?

I think she's a like probably 50s. I. I know this person, so I'm not sure how old she is, but I think probably 50s.

50S, okay. No, I don't think it's too late to. To make improvements on the skin. Certainly if the skin is thinned out, if it looks dull, meaning it's not turning over effectively, if there's lots of fine lines and wrinkles, which means clearly that there is a collagen and elastin function, and if it tends to be dry, that means there is a loss of ceramides. And the ceramide layer, there are things you can do to improve it. Right. So the SO SIV may help because a key component to skin maintaining youthfulness is having the right microbiome on the skin. So increasing things like Propionum bacterium, increasing things like Staph epidermidis, those types of microbes will improve the condition of the skin even after all these years of sun damage. Keep in mind that skin, like the lining of the gut and all that are these areas that are designed to turn over and repair. Right. So it's not like you, you busted it up early on in life and then now you're stuck with can turn over. It continuously grows and it continuously regenerates itself. You just have to put it in the right condition. So I would consider looking at s on the, on the outside and then on the inside you can add in things like prebiotics. So at microbiome Labs as the mega pre. There is the production of acetate from taking prebiotics can improve conditions on the skin from the inside and then taking phytoceramides. So ceramides are that fatty layer on the skin that I mentioned that is really important for maintaining moisture and maintaining kind of the, the youthful glow of the skin, if you will. And, and being able to get an increase in ceramides into the skin can be achieved through taking phytoceramides inside. Right. So if you just Google phytoceramides, I use a product that I have here. I don't. If you're in the U.S. there's this product called Source, which is Skin Glow and it's. And it's loaded of phytoceramides. It's a company that, that, that I know that I've met with and advised and so on. And so they have, they, they put the phytoceramide, a really solid dose, in, in a, in a chocolate hard piece, chocolate like this. And they sell this at Sephora and of course on their website and so on. But the phytoceramides become important as well. So that combination of things, the prebiotic, the phytoceramides and the sieve on the outside, could be really dynamic and improving the skin. If you're in your 50s, it's certainly not too late. If you're in your 60s, it's still not too late. If it's 70, 80, then it may be harder to make a significant change, but you can always improve your skin. Yet, you know, the, the degree of improvement will, will be dictated by the age.

Skin improving chocolates. I bet they are printing money.

They're doing well. Yeah.

It's not a tough sell to a lot of people. I can eat chocolate and it's good for my skin. This is a good deal. I'll have to look that up. There's so many things I try to snag really fast while we're here and bring them back because it's impossible to get things over there that my. They must think we're insane. My suitcases, when I go back are just filled with random things and products and supplements and tinctures. And it's like I have a whole suitcase just for that Wild west. Yeah. So something like skin peeling and other aesthetic treatments, probably very damaging to the skin biome, cause an immune reaction. Probably not good for what we're trying to do.

Yeah. And, you know, I, and I understand that in, in aesthetic practice, they do skin peels, they do chemical peels and other versions of the peels. The idea behind the peels has been to kind of remove that very top layer of dead skin. But then some of the peels go a little bit deeper and that's why you get the redness. The top layer of the dead skin can also be removed by exfoliation. Right. So that can just scrubbing, which can be fine. But I think peels you have to be careful of because it can disrupt up the microbiome of the skin quite dramatically, which means that when the microbiome grows back, it could grow back in a more erratic fashion, which could then cause more problems to the skin. Right. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying be cautious and certainly don't do it very often, you know, and not that I've seen a study on this. I can't quote a study that says, here's how skin peels affect the skin microbiome. But just intuitively and just using my knowledge of, of science and what's happening in the world or what's happening on your biology, my guess is that it would disrupt the skin microbiome quite dramatically. You know, but if some people swear by it. I know people. I think my sister gets regular peels. Not. Well, when I say it's like maybe once a year. But I've seen it a few times where I see her and she looks very different. I'm like, what happened to your face? She's like. And I'm like, oh, God. Okay. It's like a coming out of a cocoon or something.

I know you mentioned skin cancer last time, in short, because we do have a lot of questions, so we can't go long on this one because it's probably a long answer. How does this skin microbiome relate to skin cancer? I believe this was discussed a little, but I was unclear. Is there any research on this?

It's very light, so. So here, here's the, the light connection. Right. And we don't want to make any sort of claims that, that anything will help with cancer, but.

Disclaimer. Disclaimer.

Yeah. So with skin cancer, for example, so the, the most common skin cancer is melanoma, of course, and, and that's a cancer of the melanocytes, which are the, the cells that produce melanin, the pigment in your skin. Of course, those cells get a lot of. Of damage from UV radiation. Right. So it's the job of the melanocytes to produce this compound that absorbs a lot of the radiation from the sun, and so they take the brunt of the hit. And if you get a lot of UV radiation and you have certain predispositions, that UV radiation can create immortal cells and then eventually create cancer. Now, one of the things or two of the things that we know that drive a risk of cancer are inflammation and oxidative damage. And oxidative stress, Right? So. And melanocytes go through a lot of inflammation, go through a lot of oxidative stress. Now, there's data that shows that a healthy skin microbiome reduces the oxidative stress on melanocytes and also can reduce inflammation in the melanocytes. So through that connection, there can be some beneficial effect there by having a healthier skin microbiome. But I can't say that there's been any studies that directly impact the 2. Cancer is in general a kind of a trifecta of, you know, genetic susceptibility and risk, environmental issues, and then. And then to some degree, biology as well, like your biology in terms of how your cells and all that function and risk factors that are determined by your lifestyle and biology. So if we can impact the biology in some way by making it healthier, maybe that'll help. Help. You know, I certainly keep that in the. In the back of my mind when I'm, you know, out in the sun doing things that I know are impactful in a negative way, but we can't. Sure.

Okay, that makes sense. There's a few questions I'm going to try to do my best to smush together is. How to say this. So you talked about the skin anatomy a little bit last time because it's a much thicker, more how the gut barrier is one cell and one cell thick, and the skin has like, layers and there's this subcutaneous and like, it's a. It's a much thicker, bigger, more solid barrier surface than the gut. So does stuff that. It's gonna be very scientific. Everyone does stuff that affects the inside of that skin layer. So things like movement, exercise, massage, things that are known to impact the F and the blood flow and the. Everything that's going on. You know, say, here's the skin. Everything that affects everything down here. Does that. Is that able to. Let me see. Does skin biome communicate directly through the surface into the subcutaneously? Like, does the stuff that happens underneath impact the biome or the things that are happening on the top of the skin? And I know that I'm butchering this, but I'm mixing together about four questions that are asking things about, like, does the. The deeper therapies have an effect on the surface appearance and the biome of the skin? Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, totally. So. So things like yoga, massage, you know, so on.

Yeah, Lymphatic things like.

Yeah, lymphatic drainage and all that. So, yeah. So generally you can think about it this way. Anything that would reduce inflammation at the dermal layer of the skin. Right. So you have the epidermis, which is a thick outer layer that has multiple cell layers on the epidermis. And then below the epidermis is a dermis layer. Right. So anything that impacts inflammation or circulation at the dermis or even below the dermis layer in the circulation itself can have a positive effect or negative effect, depending on how it's impacting that layer on the skin. Microbiome itself. Now, in part, it's because of inflammation. So if you reduce inflammation in the dermis, you can change positively the microbiome on the skin. Inflammation in the dermis is going to translate to some degree to inflammation in the epidermis. And inflammation in the epidermis can create dysbiosis in the skin. Skin, right. There's also the function of your immune cells. So you've got dendritic cells and T cells which tend to be kind of the, the main players in the skin. But you got these dendritic cells that'll come through the dermis and reach tentacles up through the dermis in the epidermis to sample what's happening and produce antimicrobials and things like that. Now, if you, if you have less activated dendritic cells, less irritated dendritic cells, less, you know, activated by pathogens and inflammation and all that stuff, then you're going to have less impact of the, of the dendritic cells in the epidermal layer, which could improve the skin microbiome. So I can't say that there's any studies that show that massage, yoga, you know, warm baths, things like that impact the skin microbiome in a positive or negative way. But just thinking about it logically, if you reduce inflammation, you improve circulation, you improve lymphatic drainage in the dermal layer or the subdermis layer, you will likely improve the microbiota at the epidermal layer. Right? It's all connected. And yes, there is crosstalk between the microbes and the top part of the epidermis layer and the immune system and other components within the dermis layer. And there's two way crosstalk between them. Right? So I think, so I think things like massage and lymphatic drainage and all that can be very beneficial to the skill skin.

And they feel good.

And they feel good. So the other thing about the feel good is okay, so the other part of that is touch, right? So if you have someone working on you and they're massaging you, there is a component of diversification of the skin microbiome because you're in physical contact with somebody else, assuming that their skin microbiome is okay and somewhat healthy. So that's one aspect of it. But the second aspect of it is a reduction of stress.

Stress.

So if those practices reduce stress, that'll dramatically reduce inflammation, which will then reduce the alteration of the, or the compromise, you know, immune responses that can affect the microbiome both in the skin and the gut and everywhere else. In the body.

Okay, double win. That one's covered. That one's covered. I'm gonna wait. I'm gonna. Do you have a hard stop on the hour? What's your time thing?

I don't. I can go a little longer than the hour.

Okay. All right. Because I'm gonna hold the sieve specific questions like I'm gonna chunk it like we used to do with gut questions and micro megaspor questions. So, Connection between skin biome and reduced acne scarring or other long term scarring. Does the skin biome affect either healing of scarring or the development of scars or even long term scarring? I don't know. You showed some before and after photos last time. And not that your before and after photos are the definitive of what the skin biome is related to, but what is it possible that one, to heal those things, and two, does the biome play a role?

Yeah. So the skin microbiome does play a role in wound healing and reduction of scarring and so on. This goes back to the conversation we had about fibroblast and, and collagen. Right. So wound healing occurs in a couple different steps, right? So if you get damage to the skin, whether it's through a cut or a, an inflammatory les, like a pimple that pops, that's all damage to the skin. So the first thing that occurs is inflammation. Now, the reason why inflammation occurs there's is twofold to it. Number one is to quarantine the area, right? So now that the barrier is broken, we don't want things to be able to get in and spread throughout the body. So your body quarantines that area by recruiting immune cells to the region and quarantining it off. Now the other thing is the immune cells are there to protect, affect anything that does come in. So it can fight off the stuff that may enter in, whether it's toxins, viruses, bacteria, and so on. So inflammation becomes important. But the skin microbiome studies show that one of the other things that occurs very quickly is that certain microbes on your skin migrate to the edge of the wound, to the very, very, very. Right, the very last cell that makes up the edge before the actual opening in the wound. Wound, Right. So microbes actually recruit, move there, they migrate to that edge. And when they get to the edge, they are part, part of what they do is stimulate the expression of, stimulate the, the activation of fibroblasts like we talked about. So you could, your, your cells can start laying down collagen and other fibers to rebuild the matrix. And then they also stimulate the release of something called matrix metalloproteinate cases. These are enzymes that remodel the tissue, right. So the way the repair occurs, it's like much like the repair on your wall. If you have a hole in your wall, you're going to spackle it. So you're going to throw spackle on there to close it, right? And then you're gonna, you're gonna use a scraper to make it more uniform so you don't have a lump of spackle there. It becomes a uniform flat surface. But it still doesn't look like the rest of the wall. So now you have to sand it, right? And when you sand it, it starts to look more like the rest of the wall, but then you need to paint it so it also looks like the wall. So the spackling is like the production and the expression of collagen and elastin fibers, but mostly collagen, right. So that becomes kind of the spackling. Then the enzymes, the matrix metalloproteinases come in and do something called tissue remodeling to remodel that spackle. Rough looking area to look like the rest of the skin. Both of those steps require not and maybe not required, but are encouraged dramatically by the presence of healthy microbes on your, on your skin. If you have unhealthy microbes on your skin, a few risks may occur if you get damage to the skin. Number one, now you have more high risk microbes that can enter into the blood supply, right? So you've got a bunch of staph aureus on your skin and there's a break in the skin right there, that staph aureus can enter into your blood supply and potentially cause a systemic infection. If you have a lot of staph epidermidis, it won't do that, right? In fact, it'll assist in the remodeling of the skin. So that's one thing is that you, you reduce, if you have a healthy microbiome, you reduce the propensity of unwanted pathogens entering that break. Number two, you may reduce the time and the success of both the spackling and the remodeling part of it, right? So the remodeling part of it doesn't work well, then you'll end up scarring hard. Now the other thing is that if the inflammation lasts too long in the region, right. So the skin repair is not occurring fast enough. If the expression of collagen and then the matrix metalloproteinases to remodel the tissue. All that stuff isn't happening fast enough. Inflammation will remain there for a longer period of time. The longer that inflammation remember remains. And if more inflammation is stoked by the presence of dysfunctional microbes in that area, what may happen is keloid formation may happen. That's your body going, this is really dangerous. I'm going to form this big crazy blob of stuff to block it out. Right. So you might get a keloid or you might get what looks like a giant wart or scar forming in the area as a protective measure because a normal functionality of repairing that barrier was not working well. Well, so you may actually increase keloid formation scarring by having a dysfunctional microbiome on the skin. So I think, I think the data seems pretty clear that having a good healthy commensal microbiome on the skin will assist in, in clearing of the skin and reducing scarring.

Okay. We did an interview on this many, many years ago. Go. Proteolytic enzymes related to skin health skin biome in any way.

So, okay, if you take proteolytic enzymes systemically, meaning if you ingest them can be beneficial for your skin microbiome because they're known to reduce inflammation.

Yeah. Okay.

So anytime you reduce inflammation, it's good for your skin. This is why curcumin turmeric is good for your skin. Right. It reduces inflammation. Now if you put proteolytic enzymes on the outside of your skin, they will likely burn your skin skin.

So because we did an interview on it was when you first introduced me to the people that make Fibrenza which we still retail in our shop, which is an awesome proteolytic enzyme blend. And we were talking about each enzyme in there and there was one that I think you said would literally eat your skin if it was outside the capsule and I think it was seopros. Is that correct?

Yeah.

Put a memory on this guy. Sometimes I surprise myself. So there's a couple more in the thing from last time that are related to. I think that's good. The rest of the questions are from the last time are going to be product related. Product Product serum. Okay, now that's product temperature, skin microbiome, universal basic aspects of concentrateware. Chlorinated versus distilled. We did talk about that last time. He did talk about chlorinated water and how that negatively impacts the skin. If you didn't watch, it's posted as anonymous so I can't name the person but. But everything in your question was talked about in part one is petroleum. This is something that always bothered me intuitively. Is petroleum in skincare toxic to the microbiome? And my guess I'm going to this is how much I've been listening the last two times, is that petroleum is oil. And if you put it on, it can cause a barrier on the outside so that there's no oxygen that gets to the microbes. And this would be bad. Maybe I'm making that up or I'm wrong, but that's how my head sees it.

Yeah. Especially if you put it on, in dry areas. Right. So on your arms and, and your body, your legs and so on these aerobic areas of your skin, it can cause disruption because it like, like Michael said, it creates this barrier that can create an anaerobic environment. So that may change the skin microbiome. So it may create anaerobic areas where anaerobic areas are not supposed to be. So by that regard it can, it can damage your skin microbiome. I don't think it's an antimicrobial. I don't think it'll kill the bacteria like you would think an antimicrobial will. But I, I do think that if you're creating an anaerobic environment in an aerobic part of your skin, you could, you know, cause a disruption to that biome.

Okay, hold on. Jeffrey asked a question about pool and chlorine. We did talk about that pretty extensively in part one. So I reference you to part one of the, the present like last webinar and I'm going to send that link with the link to the replay of this. It was also in emails for this but we'll get it to you. But we talked about chlorine quite a bit. Some skin microbes are aerobic, some are anaerobic. Someone asked our skin micro microbes or are these skin microbes we use products. So are. Right, so now let me look at. All right, so if you guys putting questions in the chat, can you put them in the Q and A? Because things get lost in the chat to me. Thanks Sue. We enjoy having you here too. You've been here a long time, like at a lot of our webinars, please put the questions in the Q and A. I will try to get to them. So let's go back over here. Actually, I'm going to hit up this email that I got today that had a short list of questions in it that I'm going to try to do. How do you take samples of the skin microbiome and dysbiosis levels. Did you talk about how that was done in part one? If yes, we don't have to answer it right now. If you, if no, then can you give a quick synopsis of how that actually works?

Yeah, yeah. There's really only, only two ways. So you take, you just do a swab. It's literally just a swab of the skin with a, with like a Q tip like device, sterile device, of course. And then you put it in, in a buffering agent. You send it in. The other way is using biore strips to actually pull sebum out and then you actually sample the sebum. That tells you what the anaerobic environment looks like on your Sebastian skin. So those are both the two different ways that we sample the skin. Microbiome, Bjor strips and swabbing.

Okay. Do you have any data on people over 80 before and after pictures? I'm 82. This is the email. This is all from Judith.

Over 80. Not that I'm aware.

Okay.

We have a 401st fun. Yeah. Yeah. And we have a 400 subject trial going on essentially. There may be people in their 80s in that trial but, but yeah, if you want to be the first one, you know, one of the first 80 something year olds, let us know.

We'd love to see scars you talked about. Yeah. So let us know and we'll track your progress. You talked about some dietary stuff last time. Right. And like other things that are skin supportive. Didn't we? We didn't. You did you mention. I don't know if we talked about that.

Yeah, it wasn't a slide.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, you mentioned last time and we got a few of these questions. So this is gonna, this is gonna knock out about five of our questions. You mentioned that. Right now there's just the civ serum that's for the face, which actually I have one here. It's in the bathroom. Bathroom right there. I've been using it for a few days because it was here waiting for us. It's just the facial serum. So it's a small thing. It's for the face. And you mentioned last time that if somebody wanted to use it on larger areas that you put a little of it mixed with like a lotion or an oil that you're using on the rest of the body and that there are plans to produce more sieve products that are for larger surfaces or different purposes or something eventually like a whole line. But right now there's just a serum and we got a number of questions regarding what would make the best carrier for it? Or what kind of lotion or what to look for or what not to use or like what should it be mixed with if there is a should? And I have that question in about six different variations.

Yeah. So that's assuming you want to put it on your body, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For larger surface areas. Because like, if I wanted to put that stuff on my whole body, it would be like the whole thing of it. Plus it's probably over overkill.

It is. Yeah. So like, for example, there are a couple spots on my body where I. I use it directly. Right. So like on. On in between my shoulder blades, I tend to get. I think part of it is because I can't reach back there so well to get lotion on. And so I think over time it gets dry and a little bit irritated so that then I put the sip directly on there and not through lotion. And then. But to the rest of my body. I just mix it in with the lotion that I've found that agrees with my system. So there's no don'ts when it comes to lotion. If you have a lotion that agrees with your skin and you've been happy with it. Absolutely. Just add it to that. It'll get on the skin and it'll still work the same way.

Okay. So there's no common. Like if somebody's using a high quality lotion, organic like, or nice lotion. There's not stuff in any lotions that kills the microbes in the sieve.

No, no.

Spores are like tardigrades.

Yeah.

Yes. I've always wanted to reference a tardigrade in a webinar. That was the first time, if anybody.

Those are some of the coolest things ever.

Oh, look it up. They live on asteroids. Asteroids. Which is pretty hardcore.

They have a lot of little legs and little teeth.

Yeah. And little like spinny mouth things. And there is no more hostile environment and I could imagine than an asteroid. And they are there. Does he know about. Have you ever heard of anti aging Dream Cream, Dr. Joel Furman? I don't know of that at all, so I can't comment on that.

I'm not familiar now.

Okay. Thank you, K and Michael, for making cutting edge, reliable information which is beneficial to my health. Thank you for being here, Julia. She said she's been here for years and been following Quran and bought many products for the gut that have been helpful. All right, let's get over here. And when I get reduced from my giant screen to my laptop, I Feel so helpless using one small thing and.

I can't move stuff around.

Yeah, I have to like close one to open another one and then it, it's not good for 80 for ADD brain. I need to have all the windows in one view. All right, let's go. Grandson with eczema at 4 months, used steroids. Now 14 months, has topical steroid withdrawal. We think he's on IGG Mega, IGG 2000 Omegasport. Any suggestions beyond that to help the skin heal? I would guess that the sieve would be helpful. I don't know. I don't know the, what's the word? The mechanisms of steroid withdrawal in the skin. So I don't know what's happening there.

Yeah. So normally what happens with steroids is it thins the skin, right? That's, that's, that's the effect. Now part of why it thins the skin is likely because it changes the microbiome on the skin where you use it frequently. You know, skin turnover, you know, increase in collagen, elastin fibers, the production of the fatty acid layer in the skin. All of those things are dependent on a healthy set of microbes on the skin. So most of those things get compromised when you use steroids long term on the skin. So. So my guess is that Siv would certainly help him and be beneficial to his skin. What else can you do? I would say similar to what we talked about with the lady that had sun damaged skin, kind of similar issue of trying to rejuvenate the skin both from the inside and outside. I would look at prebiotics, I'd look at phytoceramides. And then using the sieve on the outside side, you should be able to alleviate that over a course of time because, you know, it's not a withdrawal the way you think of a chemical dependency withdrawal. It's more that it's thin the skin and the skin's not turning over, so it looks thin and red and irritated.

Okay. Why not just put megaspore paste on the skin? For those who don't know or we're not, Part one Quran has been involved, is involved with, with Civ Biome balancing serum, which contains some bacillus spores which are the same wonderful creatures that live inside of megaspore. And so somebody asked, why not just put megaspore paste on the skin?

Yeah, so we were doing that for a while. You know, I, I was doing that.

Yes, you were.

You know, that's, that was one of the first things we wanted to do.

Put a Sport put the spores on it was like. The answer was like, rub dirt on it.

It totally just put like Windex in that one movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, just put Windex on it. And we were, we were doing that early, early on. We had made a formulation once with some shea butter, I remember, with megaspore. And, and it can work. The, the thing is that the reason why sieve only has the subtilis and the coagulants is because the other strains don't seem to do much in terms of function on this skin. Right. So the, the clawsi, the lyc conformis and the indicas don't really have function on the skin. So. So they don't. They're not needed. When you're looking at skin function, you do need a good and a higher proportion of subtilis and coagulants. The other aspect of it is, you know, the delivery system, I think is important as well, because ideally what you want to do is get the spores a little bit past that very top layer layer of epidermal skin. And when you formulate it, like with the, with the fatty acids that have been formulated in sieve, you're actually pulling it down a little bit deeper into the skin and you don't have any of the stuff that doesn't need to be there like the other strains. And you've got everything you need. You've got all of what should be there with the subtilis and the coagulants. So it's a better way if for some reason you're somewhere that you can't get sieve and you're getting a skin issue, you can absolutely just try to put megaspore on it and it may provide some benefit. But if you're trying to use it on a regular basis and you're trying to improve your skin, I would go with the one design for this.

Okay. Yeah, I figured it was the synergistic things because there's a lot more in it than just the spores. Fungal treatments. Doesn't white spots, strange, suspected fungal things. There's a number of questions about this. I know you guys don't have studies yet. Like, you just had the small sampling and then you're doing the wider one right now. But I don't remember anything last time that you talked about specifically. I know you've talked about how the spores react to fungal overgrowths and things in the gut, but I don't know how that would be as a topical situation.

So. So I think the spores would absolutely compete with fungal Overgrowth on the skin surface. So I think if you have fungal overgrowth or you suspect that it is, it's. It's worth using it. The spores in general are good at targeting fungus almost everywhere in the body, on inanimate objects and so on. So there's no harm in, in trying it. I, I would guess if I had a fungal overgrowth, I'd put the sieve on it. Now, we do have some, some empirical feedback from people with things like athlete's foot and, and, and the benefits from that. So, you know, we don't have a study, but we've got, we've got good rationale and good empirical feedback.

Okay. Dandruff in the skin. Biome that was not talked about last time. I don't think like dandruff. And then also this is for me. My beard gets super itchy if I don't wash it, which goes against what you said before, but I found, like one face soap that actually works for me. And then if I don't wash it, like at least once, sometimes twice a day and put some. I'm trying to sieve on it now after the washing, it gets really itchy and it's obnoxious and it almost makes me not want a beard. But I haven't shaved in 12 years, so that would be a disaster. Um, so. But I'm guessing there's relation there between, like, that's the similar problem. So what's the biome's situation when it comes to scalp and itchy and flaky things?

Yeah, yeah. So with, with the hair, so dandruff and, and itch flakiness and all that is more often than not an effect of a fungus called malicencia. So the fungal overgrowth which is present on the skin, so, so Melia is normally on, on people's skin, but at low levels, you know, think of the cousin of Candida in the gut, right? It's, it's there. It's typically at low levels. But if something disrupts the biome of the skin with the, with the bacteria that normally compete with it, it can overgrow. Now, one of the things it does when it overgrows, which is really interesting, is it is it metabolizes the oils that your sebaceous gland produces and that your skin produces, and it makes these noxious byproducts from it, and that's what actually causes the, the dryness and the flaking and the itching. Right? So if you're feeling all this itching on your beard or on Your scalp. It's because you likely have an overgrowth of malicensia that's. That's metabolizing the oils, producing a noxious byproduct that is causing the itching and irritation of the skin. And then in the case of dandruff, your. Your scalp obviously flakes, and you see the white flakes. So can the sieve help with that? I. I really do think it. It can. We don't have a study on it, but. But it's. Sue, it's.

Knowing you. You will.

We will. I mean, this is. Dandruff is a very interesting area, and it's not great. The per. The shampoos and things that people, you know, have as option to use to reduce dandruff. And you should be able to kind of, in a really short amount of time, flip it back because it's a.

It's.

It's an ecological problem on your. On your skin. Right? It's an. It's a normal organism that's there that's just now overgrown. So bringing it back under control shouldn't be too hard. So I would absolutely use that on my scalp and use it on my chin if I. If I had itchiness and dandruff and so on. Because you want to compete against the mela sensia, you want to reduce its numbers. When the mellicentia numbers go down to very low levels, it doesn't cause any problems at all. Now, here's the other aside, is that this new evidence that. That increased growth of Melissa is actually independent risk for Alzheimer's as well. Because this fungus that's very close to your other orifices, like your nose and all that can end up in your. In your nose, in your airways, cross the blood brain barrier, and end up driving inflammation in your brain as well.

Okay. Wow.

All right, so from itchy beards to. Yeah, yeah, damaged brains.

Well, maybe that makes sense to why I have to write everything down so much. I lost the. See, this is my problem. I lost the window. Okay? I found it. A lot of questions already answered because, like, is it only used for the face or can it be used on psoriasis? And how can I use it around the body? So mixing it with other things. When's your. I don't. I don't know if you guys even know this, but what's the goal as far as other products? Or what. What are you wanting to produce? Or when might it happen? Or there's a lot of questions around, like, what would be next? Or what other Products are you looking at making or whatever? Because like, I, I really think you guys could have like a whole like from a shampoo to a body lotion, to who, who knows? Even a deodorant, I bet would be really effective. So what, is there any plans?

Yeah, I, I would say the most immediate plans would be to create other delivery systems that can give you larger area coverage with the same biome. Balancing serum, that would be a top priority. The then beyond that, it'll be potentially the use of specific postbiotics that we know impact certain mechanisms in the skin, like cellular turnover, increase protease function, so you can get rid of the dead and dying cells, increase expression of collagen or microbes that specifically do that as well. All of it about balancing and protecting the skin biome. One of the things I want to do is do something related to sun exposure, you know, because the, the interesting thing about sun exposure is that when you get exposed to UV radiation and, and you come out of the sun for the next almost 24 hours, you still have UV radiation on your skin and it's still driving dysfunction in the skin. Right? Yeah, Your, your, your skin absorbs it and it remains in there creating free radicals. And you can measure this, this for the next, you know, 12 to 24 hours, depending on the individual. And so being able to dramatically reduce the formation of free radicals from the UV radiation that continues to be present once you even get out of the sun is a really interesting area for me because that's really where a lot of the damage occurs. Right. So yes, we know when we're under direct sun, we're where we're getting damage from the skin. But, but keep in mind, like burns, sunburns don't occur immediately. Right. So if you're going, if you go in the sun and you're in the sun for too long, you come out, you might be able to tell that it's red and sensitive, but you don't actually feel the sunburn until 8, 10, 12 hours later. And the skin is actually burning further through that period. Right. So one of the things that, that you can do to actually reduce the negative impact of the sun. I do this with my kids, for example, is when they come out of the sun, I actually put a cool cloth or towel on them a few times just to cool the skin down, reduce that, that irradiation that's happening on the skin. So I want to create, you know, something that reduces that free radical damage that's ongoing or once you even leave the sun. So it's like a post sun recovery.

That's pretty cool. I've never seen a product like that so I would be definitely interested. I get more sun now than used to for more of the year. So.

Yeah.

Would you need to get off anti acne skin products slash meds and Accutane before using? I'm not a doctor and can't give medical advice but personally I would strongly consider getting off Accutane regardless of what you're going to do with any skin sort of serum. But we've just had a lot of people in our community get really have some really nasty side effects from Accutane. But is there interactions or problems there?

No, you can, you can absolutely stay on them.

Okay.

Which so that there's no issue there.

I've been using civ for a week. I really shake it up but there seems to be blobs when you look at the bottom of the container. Like, like maybe the probiotics aren't integrating into the squalene. Is that the right word or something? Is that.

Yeah. So it happens in a percentage of. Of tubes. It doesn't happen in all of them but in a percentage of tubes they do settle in. And in part maybe how you store it. If you store it straight up and down in, in your region and depending on the moisture and things like that in the region it can drive it a little bit more. So in that case maybe store it on its side if you can, but shake it up as much as you can. Even if you see kind of the, the darkening sediment on the bottom, you're still getting lots of microbes when the, when the serum comes out. Right. So it's still fine. It's still working the way it's supposed to. But if you can shake it up, continue to shake it up as much as you can with the cap on of course and then store it on its side if you, if that happens a lot for you. I probably had nine tubes myself and, and I, I think I've seen it on one of mine and we've heard it from some people that it does happen in some tubes but I think it's. There's a geographic component to it as well.

Okay, interesting. There's a few questions about the hair and the, and the scalp and what is alopecia? Saw you saw. I saw you on a different webinar or a different thing and you talked about the hair or hair growth or something. I was reading through questions for part of when you were talking about the dandruff. So I don't know, if you mentioned application use, like maybe mixing it with. I, I didn't.

No. So talking about. Yeah, addressing hair, I. I wouldn't guess that it has. Would have much impact on, on regular, you know, androgen based male pattern. Yeah, regular hair loss. But if it's alopecia areata, which is an autoimmune type of response, we have seen really positive responses. We've had, you know, half a dozen or more cases of people using it over the last, you know, eight, 10 months for alopecia areata in particular. And it does seem to help dramatically. We have some before and afters. We didn't put it in this, in this particular deck, but we have some before and afters on those that are actually quite compelling. So if you have Alp Shariata, I would absolutely use it right on there.

Email us. We might be able to get those pictures for you.

Yeah, regular mail pattern bonus. I don't think, I don't think it would impact that.

Yeah. Okay. Why? Oh, yeah, we had some questions. All right. Before we. Hold on. We've put. We had an issue with our website this week when we were trying to make a coupon for you guys. We wanted to, whenever we do something like this, give you guys a deal for coming on the webinar. So we put all the products on this page right there that I just put in the chat. Those are all Probiotics and the Sieve and the Sieve bundle with the Serene Skin and everything is marked down 10%. Our website broke and we couldn't make a coupon and it was causing some sort of catastrophic tech error when we tried to create a coupon. So Marianne, about five minutes before this started, did a rush job and changed the prices on all of those products. So you don't need a coupon. You can just go there and everything is 10% off. So if you're interested in trying Sieve or the bundle with Serene Skin, which is the Probiotic, or any of the Probiotics that are in our shop, everything is right there in that link. Everyone give a high five to Marianne. That was very fast and good. And so I had some questions on that, so I wanted to. I always forget that. It's so funny. Like so many webinars, like the thing is, like, get them to the pitch and then pitch them the things. And half the time I forget to even post the link to the products that we're talking about. I'm not a very good salesperson. I just started using Sieve. Is it possible that a Skin might, skin might get worse before it gets better or have some sort of reaction to a new thing.

Yeah, we've seen that in a very small percentage of people. In fact, someone had very recently just texted me about it. So there's this concept on the skin called purging. Right. And some people will undergo it's. And it's similar to kind of the Herc. Herxheimer. Herxheimer reaction that people get in the gut. A die off response, if you will. So we found like one of the people I was working with who is, who has acne on the skin and she's a mom of three. She put it on. The first two days it looked like she had more redness and more acne. Acne. And she was like, oh no, what's happening in my, in my. Is my skin rejecting this? And I said, no, just you could stick with it, you know, and if it's hormonal acne, then maybe there's a cycle issue going on. But if it's not, then, then just stick with it for a couple more days and see what happens. And then sure enough, by the fourth or fifth day, it all dramatically reduced and now she's super happy and I think she just ordered a couple more. More for it. So there are, there is a small percentage of people that may go through a purge like that, but it normally should last no more than a couple days.

Okay.

It shouldn't cause. Sorry. I want to make, make sure that people understand. It shouldn't cause like irritation on the skin. Like, it shouldn't cause like, oh, it's itchy or, or, you know, so if that's the case, then maybe there's some component of it that your skin is sensitive to and it's irritating the skin. The purge would be where it just kind of, it looks like more redness or more, you know, tiny little lesions that show up and then it goes away after a couple days. And then your skin will look actually even better than it started.

Okay, that makes sense. I have a couple questions about Serene Skin, which is the probiotic that you formulated with Microbiome labs. There's a lot of vitamin K in it. It. Why? And then the second question is, we've talked a ton about how changing the biome and the environment on the skin on the outside affects the whole health of the skin. But obviously taking the probiotic, the Serene Skin with the vitamin K and the spores, doesn't work in that manner. So, like, why the specific spore strains that are in that with the K and why is the kid there?

Yeah. So serene skin was developed predominantly for acne. That was the. The two main trials we did. And the K is there to reduce the hyperpigmentation that may occur for some people when the lesion goes away. Right. So some, some people who are. Who have a high propensity for hyperpigmentation if they have a lot of acne lesions and then the lesions go away, they are left with dark spots. And so we have some empirical data showing the vitamin K can dramatically reduce hyperpigmentation at higher doses and over I think like a you know, 12 week period. And so we put the vitamin K in there for those individuals that would hyperpigment on the skin as their lesions go away. Why those specific strains? So the main thing is that a. We wanted to stop. Stop inflammation leaky gut. So that's why the subtilis indicates coagulants and claws are there. And then but number two we wanted to increase carotenoids in the skin that's through the indicus. And then we wanted to increase the production of short chain fatty acids. And that's the, the other spores that are in the formulation because we wanted to get more acetate to areas like the. The skin on the face case because acetate has an anti inflammatory effect peripheral to the gut. So in all other areas away from the gut. So we wanted to increase acetate production as well. So we're basically kind of providing tools to the bottom layers of the skin that are really good for the overall skin functionality and oh and it pairs really well if you have inflammatory conditions on the skin and especially you know severe acne or any of that. That, that combination of serene skin with SI works quite well.

Yeah we've got it in a bundle on that link and it's. It's. Everything is manually 10 percented. Judith is going to contact us. She wants to do before and after sphere study as over 80. So you will now have your first one.

Awesome.

Somebody asked and it was a good question and and we. I gotta go pretty soon I know we're over. I know Karan will just answer questions for infinity but I'm not going to take advantage of that. Where is was something like we you talked in the part one how that that there's people have different makeups of their skin and you talked about this a little in part one. But like the ingredients in civ. How is it that you know different skin types and different types of people like I don't know how. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.

So this, this applies to, to an individual and then also, also inter individuals or intra individuals. So even for you, right, a given individual, you've got different microbes on your face than you do, let's say, on your legs or your arms. And yet CIV can improve your skin microbiome on both regions. So then the question is always, well, how does it do that even though there are different microbes in these different regions? It does that because of the quorum sensing aspect that we talked about last time. Quorum sensing is the ability of microbes to read other microbial signatures, chemical signatures, and then they can communicate with other resident microbes with molecules. They can help the resident microbes. They can use the space that they garner to recruit the immune system to that area to defend against opportunistic growth and so on. And some of these, the spores can produce antimicrobials, antivirals, and all that themselves. And so they have a number of mechanisms to adjust, adjust what the microbiome looks like on different parts of the body. Now, you know, how would they have that knowledge? Well, we've been interacting with spores on our skin, you know, since the dawn of man. Right. These are ubiquitous in the environment. And so, you know, it's very normal to, to get dust and things like that settling on your skin, which contains a lot of bacillus endospores. The differences between individuals on the skin are actually less then you see the differences between individuals in the gut. Right. Michael and I could have less than 50% similarity in terms of types of species that we have in our gut microbiome, but our skin is probably going to be much closer together because the diversity of the skin microbiome is just not as high as it is on the gut. And certain geographic regions of the skin typically host very similar microbes. A lot of that is because most of us will pick up our skin microbes from our environment. Right. And, and even though we were all born of a unique mother and got a unique inoculum from mom, you know, later on when, through most of your life, you're interacting with the outside, and, and most of us have interacted with very similar outside, so we get very similar micro exposure on the skin.

Okay, I'll do like one or two more. Yes, the transcript will be available, but not, not tomorrow. It takes some time. So the, the recording will go out tomorrow morning, but the transcript will probably be on whatever day is the day after tomorrow. And I honestly don't know what day it is, so I can't tell you what that is, I'm at that point I have some questions about hypochlorous, which is hocl, which is used for cleaning and it's used for wound care and sanitation and all of that. We actually use it in our house. I have a, I have a generator for it and I have a bottle on the counter and I use it to clean stuff. Stuff and then structured hydrogen water, which I also drink hydrogen water. So I don't know if you know about either of those things, but there's a bunch of questions about them. So I'm just throwing it out there.

I mean, if it's an antimicrobial. Yeah, if it's an antimicrobial, it's probably going to kill microbes on the skin. So you do want to be careful of that. You don't want to kill too many microbes on the skin, you know, because it's can turn around and become more dysfunctional after the antimicrobial is gone and this microbes regrow. Right. So just in general with the skin, what you want to do is just as much as you can reduce the exposure to things that are true antimicrobials, whether it's in your personal care products or overuse of sanitizer, hand sanitizers and things like that with, with the hydrogen water. I mean, I think obviously most people drink the hydrogen water. No one's really bathing in it. It's probably too expensive for that. But if you did, I don't, I don't know if that would benefit or harm the skin microbiome. It doesn't seem like it would do anything negative to the skin microbiome.

Okay. And I know there's more questions. I have a couple more in the email, but I have to go. It's been 80 minutes. I think what's going to happen happen is that we're going to have to periodically do skin webinars because there's so much I didn't. I honestly Mira joked about it after our last webinar when there was like 250 people on in the middle of the day during the week and we got a zillion questions and then our audience bought all the civ that existed and you guys went in back order and we couldn't get anymore. Yeah, I was like, I was kind of stunned by that because we've never done anything specifically on the skin before. I had no idea what a much wanted topic. And Mira said that I vastly underestimated the interest in skin from middle aged women who make up most of our audience. And I'm out of time, I'm out of touch, and I don't know, don't know anything about my audience. And I was like, oh, I guess that's the evidence. But there's been so much interest in not just, you know, the civ serum, which is, which is great and we're excited to be retailing it, but this, this topic of skin biome and leaky skin and, and skin aging and I guess maybe this is just me being a dude that I had no idea that it was such like an immensely like, lightning rod topic. And so we have tons of questions and tons of interest. So I'm looking into when I get back. Because right now life is chaos while we're traveling. But when I get back, we're going to see start trying to create some more skin related content. So there's more questions and this questions are popping up faster than we're answering them. So I think we just need to do occasional skin webinars. And you just switched from being the gut microbiome guy to the skin guy. So now you're the skin guy. And I think we're, I'll reach out, we'll give you a little bit longer break than from two weeks or whatever the last one was till now. But I think, I think we just need to do these occasional skin discussions because there's so much interest here and there's so many different aspects of it that can be talked about and questions that can be asked about and so many different conditions and so many different factors. And it seems like an infinite rabbit hole of the topic, almost as much as the gut, which makes sense because it's the second largest surface area that there is. So.

And the research is coming out hot and fast, which is great, you know, so the skin microbiome was slower to start in terms of the studies that, that were initiated. But, but the research is now really hot and, and people, like you said, are really, really in tune with, with what's happening with the skin microbiome and skin health in general. So skin health has a, has a, you know, dual effect because it has a cosmetic benefit. Benefit is we all want to look nice, right? We all want to look more youthful and so on. But then at the same time, it has a health benefit as well. So if you do it the right way, of course. So, yeah, I'm, I'm very excited to migrate from being the gut microbiome, the skin microbiome guy. I'm just going to migrate from biome to biome yeah.

And do you know. Do you know Dr. Mark Berhenny? He's on. He's a dentist. He's on, on. He's asked the dentist on Instagram. If you don't, I would highly recommend checking him out. He produces excellent, excellent, like functional dentistry content. And he just is releasing. I interviewed him for the Beyond Functional Medicine series that nobody here knows about yet but will be airing in March that I'm hosting for Health Means. And he just is releasing a microbiome, a mouth microbiome focused toothpaste.

Oh, awesome.

Good.

We needed a bad way.

I should probably put you in touch with him or I'll send you a link. He sent me a link today to the product. It launches on December 15th.

Oh, fantastic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he works with the people at. Is it Bristle Got or mouth biome testing and he said that's really good. So his name is Mark Burhenny. He's Ask the dentist on Instagram if you're on Instagram. He produces excellent content. Took me two years to get him to track him down to get an interview and we're recording it tomorrow. So I'm pretty excited. He lives around here. He's in Santa Rosa, I think.

I love the oral microbiome. It's a huge.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to get more mouth. My goals for 2024 are to get more skin. Skin focus on the site, more mouth focus, oral focus. Because there's so much there that's been ignored for a long time that contributes to tons of systemic. There's like autoimmune links, heart disease links, all kinds of things to like gut health and oral microbiome. And then I've gone down the rabbit hole of the whole circadian and light and quantum and all of that aspect. And I interviewed another awesome person for that event named Carrie Bennett, who teaches that stuff. And so we want to get the whole light, circadian, quantum health things which are cool because they're free. It's doing stuff with light and circadian and charging things in the body. And it's cool because it's on the quorum sensing level of weird. And I dig that. So, Kathy, the sale is only for two days, so jump on that link. Hi, Narmina. I will go have a wonderful evening. Thanks, Judy. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Karan. Thank you. Awesome. We will do a New Year's New Year new skin chat fairly soon. You're now the skin guy, so. So thanks, Karan.

Thank you, everyone. Bye. Bye.

Bye, everyone.