Caring for your skin is not superficial. Your skin is not only a reflection of your overall health, but, indeed, the health of your skin contributes to overall health, and likely, your heart health. The popular idiom, “Beauty is more than skin deep” takes on new meaning when we consider how skin that is well cared for is not only beautiful, but as research studies teach us, skin that is well cared for can reduce inflammation throughout the body. As I described in my 2017 and 2019 PubMed listed papers, even the microbiota on the skin can influence overall health. In another post, I’ll be discussing the skin’s microbiome and how some of the products I have formulated facilitate a normal set of microbiota and can remediate dysbiosis of the skin. While we all understand that the appearance of the skin can be indicative of deep-rooted health issues, we now understand that poor skin health can be a contributing factor to inflammatory diseases throughout the body. The appearance of the skin is a biomarker for what may be happening throughout the body. Have you ever noticed that someone going through a particularly stressful event in life often has a haggard look? Stress is causing cortisol release in the body, affecting the skin through a decreased production and proper construction of collagen fibers. For you fellow geeks out there reading this, cortisol decreases collagen synthesis both by its direct effect on collagen polypeptide-chain synthesis and by decreasing the activities of enzymes involved in post-translational modifications. Stress also reduces the ability of mesenchymal stem cells to repair tissues, including the repair of collagen. This is why I recommend Neogenesis’ Skin Serum and Recovery, both of which use the molecules that are repair signals from mesenchymal stem cells, for people with compromised skin. These negative factors observed in the skin are potentially occurring throughout the body. It’s part of the reason why “stress is a killer.” Although heart health may be foremost to our thinking this past February, during what the CDC calls American Heart Month, skin health should also remain part of our thinking. Based on emerging evidence, many think the two are more intertwined than previously thought.

Chronic inflammation is a critical factor in almost all diseases, including cardiovascular disease. And given skin inflammation can induce general inflammation in the body, heart disease may be exacerbated by inflammation in the skin. Studies have found that more severe skin conditions, such as eczema and psoriasis, are associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, likely associated with inflammation in the body. But as the 2019 study at UCSF found, skin problems don’t have to be severe to potentially lead to cardiovascular issues. Simply degrading the outer layer of the skin, the stratum corneum of the epidermis, can lead to skin inflammation and then to systemic inflammation. Stratum corneum provides a barrier to the outside world, and all the toxic insults from the world, and simple skin barrier degradation associated with age has been found to increase circulating blood markers of inflammation, so-called inflammatory cytokines that can easily be assayed from a small blood sample. Measures of these inflammatory cytokines in the blood are an important means by which scientists can measure overall inflammation in the body, and are predictive of overall health, including our health status as we age. The term inflammaging is used to describe this field of study. The common and most debilitating age-related health issues, such as heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and dementia, are also associated with an increase in these markers of inflammation.

So, what do we do to restore barrier function in the skin? The aforementioned 2019 study, found that using barrier repair moisturizers, that included three types of lipids, could reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines in the blood, and the skin. I developed a topical product to restore the skin’s natural barrier without using artificial barrier products such as petrolatum. Yes, as the name implies, such products are derived from petroleum and they don’t build a normal stratum corneum replete with natural barrier formation. My product, called NeoGenesis Barrier Renewal Cream, has no petrolatum, and uses three types of skin-identical lipids, called 1. free fatty acids, 2. cholesterol, and 3. ceramide, including the lipids stearic acid and linoleic acid. These ingredients help to build the stratum corneum and once again provide a natural barrier to toxic insults, and to retain the skin’s moisture. Inflammation is thus reduced, both in the skin and in the rest of the body.

I also recommend using a gentle cleanser so as not to strip away your skin barrier lipids, and use warm or cold, but not hot water, to further reduce stripping of the barrier. Harsh cleansers and hot water can lead to xerosis, the scientific term for dry skin. This, of course, can lead to skin inflammation, and hence, systemic inflammation. To sum up, healthy skin is beautiful skin, and beautiful skin with a healthy barrier means less overall inflammation and a more healthy body.

I’m always excited to hear about new technologies that help people, especially during times of ill health. Today I send kudos to fellow San Diego entrepreneur,  Cooler Heads founder and CEO Kate Dilligan, who has brought a device to the market that helps chemo patients retain their hair during treatment. Essentially this portable device is applied over the scalp during chemo treatments to cool the scalp, thereby constricting blood vessels, resulting in reduced flow of the chemo drugs to the hair follicles. The hair follicles are largely spared the treatment and the follicle maintains its hair growth cycle. Brilliant!

Hair is an important part of self, and loosing one’s hair, especially so rapidly as happens during chemo treatment, is especially devasting to people. During any disease and treatment of disease, maintaining positive emotions is an important means of helping to regain one’s health. Further, hair loss is associated with inflammation, and inflammation in the skin (in this case the scalp) is associated with systemic inflammation. Many diseases, especially chronic diseases are associated with inflammation. Cooler Heads therefore, beyond promoting positive emotions, may be helping to control systemic inflammation during a time when the body is under tremendous insult and inflammation needs to be minimized.

At the San Diego-based company that I cofounded, NeoGenesis, we too are reducing hair loss during chemo treatment and helping to reduce inflammation. Our approach is different and complementary to how Cooler Heads solves the problem. Our approach uses the molecules that human adult stem cells derived from the skin (including the scalp) normally release into the skin. The approach we use is conceptually what I call, Systems Therapeutics for Physiological Renormalization.” Basically, we use multiple molecule types, called a system therapeutic, to restore the compromised tissue (scalp) to the normal physiological state. Normal tissue function is largely restored and inflammation is reduced. Hair growth can be restored for most people who use our technology. Our technology at NeoGenesis is also being successfully used to treat dermatitis associated with chemo and irradiation, and importantly, to prevent it from happening. If our stem cell released molecules are used before and during chemo and radiation treatment, most patients will prevent or greatly reduce the associated dermatitis. If our technology is used once the dermatitis has manifested, the condition can be greatly remediated. For the hair loss associated with chemo, I’m hoping to see whether the two technologies from Cooler Heads and NeoGenesis work together in a synergistic manner.

Beef Fat Reduces Barrier Function, Increases Inflammation, and is Loaded With Toxins

Another social media craze is to slather tallow, beef fat, on your face. Some will say, oh, it’s from grass fed animals, so it’s OK. Before I discuss how suboptimal it is to smear beef fat on your face, let’s dispel the notion that grass fed is good. First, because of deregulation in the cattle industry, one has no idea if the slaughtered animal was raised in the USA and actually fed grass. The beef is likely coming from a highly deregulated, often highly corrupt country, where the animal was fed whatever was cheaply available. And that ain’t grass in the field. While the EU has banned all hormones in beef, most countries, including the USA, have not. If you’ve ever tasted 100% grass fed beef, you’ll know that it doesn’t taste very good. Most beef is given a diet of corn and grain and shot-up with hormones and antibiotics to make it fat and tasty. So-called grass fed beef is usually given corn and grains before being slaughtered, and hormones and antibiotics can be given to “grass fed” animals. Before I stopped eating meat, I tasted purely grass fed beef and it was horrible. Rarely is meat purely grass fed and not given hormones and antibiotics. Estrogen is one such hormone- can you say Cancer? Further, of those animals that are fed grasses before they’re given their finishing diet of grains and corn, each pound of grass-fed beef may produce 500 percent more greenhouse gases than grain-fed beef. This alone is a great reason to stop eating or using beef. The industry is unethical, and spends huge sums of money, including on social media, to fool you.

Now for those who are thinking of slathering dead animals on your face – namely the TikTok fashion of the day – smearing beef fat on your face. Once the animal has been killed, tallow is made from the boiled carcasses of slaughtered cows, from which the fatty product is then derived. Basically the producers skim off the fat from the boiled carcass, yielding suet (fat surrounding the visceral organs) and other fatty tissues. That’s what is to be slathered on the face – boiled carcass. Toxins accumulate in the fat of animals. Dioxins are one of many, and they accumulate in the fatty tissues of humans exposed to animal fat. So animal toxins applied to the skin will likely result in dioxins and other toxins and hormones to accumulate in the skin’s hypodermis, as well as in the epidermis and dermis.

People have been asking me are these tallow products on the market good? I always teach my students to ask a fundamental question when asking if something is good. One of the fundamental questions to ask is, Compared to What? Is smearing beef fat on your face better than smearing chlorine on your face. Yes it is. Is smearing beef fat on your skin better than smearing Crisco? Yes and no. Crisco is comedogenic and the people selling beef fat say it’s not comedogenic. I’ll give them the benefit of doubt. But beef fat, because it’s high in oleic acid just like olive oil, has been shown to disrupt the skin barrier and actually cause more irritation versus plant oils that are high in linoleic acid. And some beef fat products also contain olive oil – a double whammy to the skin’s barrier function. Now let’s ask if beef fat is better than using NeoGenesis Barrier Renewal Cream? The clear answer is no. Here’s why. While beef fat disrupts the skin’s barrier, Barrier Renewal Cream (BRC) uses a balance of human skin identical lipids that have been scientifically, clinically, and real world-use proven to restore the skin’s barrier. The lipids used in the BRC include linoleic acid, stearic acid, ceramides, cholesterol, and other free fatty acids known to optimally restore barrier function. Products such as BRC not only restore barrier function and reduce inflammation in the skin, they also reduce inflammation systemically – throughout the body. So please don’t use beef fat fat on your skin. Rather, use a product that is formulated using scientific evidence, finding safe and effective results, leading to better barrier formation and reduced inflammation.

On my Google News feed this morning was an article in sheknows entitled, “Jennifer Aniston’s Fave $22 Face Cream is Actually Just As Good As La Mer’s $200 Version.”

So I decided to see what Jennifer is using and recommending. The product is Mario Badescu Seaweed Night Cream. The featured ingredient in this product is Fucus vesiculosus, or bladderwrack. This is a brown seaweed that contains variable amounts of iodine, up to 600 mg/g. The ingredient has positive effects in the skin, unless you’re sensitive to iodine. However, there are number of harmful ingredients in this product of which people need to be aware. If you’re interested in this topic of toxic, inflammatory skin care ingredients, I encourage you to read my recent published article on the subject and an interview I did to explain my new means of therapeutic development that renormalizes physiology and reduces inflammation.

The Seaweed product is full of toxic ingredients and probably digested animal hide (hydrolyzed elastin and collagen). This is the same Mario Badescu who was apparently selling creams that contained steroids – steroids are drugs with possible adverse side effects, and Mario Badescu didn’t list these drugs on the labels of their cosmetics. They didn’t like this in Korea either. Seriously, trusting a company that intentionally adds drugs to their cosmetic products without listing the drug ingredients should be a huge, tall red flag for anyone thinking to slather these Badescu ingredients on their skin.

Here are some of the questionable ingredients (that we know are listed) in the Seaweed Night Cream:

diazolidinyl urea: EWG=5, high for Allergies & Immunotoxicity
methylparaben and propylparaben: these are endocrine disruptors
hydrolyzed collagen and elastin: this is likely removed from dead animal hide
parfum: EWG=8, high for Allergies & Immunotoxicity
ci 19140: EWG=6, moderate for Allergies & Immunotoxicity
ci 42090: EWG= 8, moderate for Cancer and high for use restrictions

EWG is the non-profit Environmental Work Group.

While the Le Mer product that is compared does not contain these toxic ingredients, I’ve formulated a better cream product that contains none of these toxic ingredients, and doesn’t use a petroleum-derived ingredient, petrolatum in Le Mer, to restore the skin’s barrier function. Rather the product I formulated uses skin-identical lipid ingredients, ceramide, cholesterol, and free fatty acids, that are used by the skin to naturally restore the skin’s barrier function. Scientists at UCSF found this combination to be optimal for barrier formation. Without proper barrier function the skin becomes dehydrated, inflamed, and susceptible to environmental toxins, allergens, and pathogens. An inflammatory immune response results in the skin, and importantly, that inflammatory response is translated systemically to the rest of the body. Systemic inflammation underlies most, if not all, diseases. So skin inflammation can be a contributor to systemic inflammation and many diseases. Critical to your health, especially as we age, is caring for our skin and not using toxic ingredients in our skin care products – especially if the toxic ingredients are in leave-on products that are used daily. Jennifer Aniston is a beautiful lady, seems like a nice person, and she is a good actress – so I hope she stops using the Seaweed Night Cream, and if she doesn’t want to use our superior NeoGenesis Barrier Renewal Cream for some reason, the Le Mer is better than the Badescu product.

Seaweed Night Cream Ingredients: aqua (water, eau), glycerin, isopropyl myristate, stearic acid, propylene glycol, cetyl alcohol, fucus vesiculosus (bladderwrack) extract, hydrolyzed elastin, collagen, sodium hyaluronate, glyceryl acrylate/acrylic acid copolymer, carbomer, parfum (fragrance), sodium chloride, phenoxyethanol, potassium sorbate, methylparaben, propylparaben, sodium benzoate, triethanolamine, diazolidinyl urea, mica, titanium dioxide, caprylyl glycol, hexylene glycol, benzyl alcohol, benzyl salicylate, linalool, citronellol, amyl cinnamal, hexyl cinnamal, geraniol, limonene, ci 19140 (yellow 5), ci 42090 (blue 1), ci 77288 (chromium oxide green)

Unlike AntAge, a company founded and lead by a physician who lost his medical license for incompetence and developed a pro-inflammatory skin care technology based on bone marrow stem cells, Neogenesis and Factor Five use skin derived mesenchymal stem cells that are anti-inflammatory and pro-healing. Like NeoGenesis’ exosome technology, developed by a scientist with many peer-reviewed PubMed listed publications, FactorFive was also developed by a scientist who knew not to use bone marrow stem cells for production of the molecules to be used in his products. Scientists developing products is much different from a non-scientist physician who lost his license to practice medicine developing a product.

But NeoGenesis uses another stem cell type from the skin that FactorFive doesn’t use, namely dermis derived fibroblasts. Therefore, Factor Five does not use the same conditioned media as NG. They use only the molecules secreted from adipose mesenchymal stem cells, and not fibroblasts as used by NG.

Why are fibroblasts important to the skin?

Scientists have looked at extracellular matrix (ECM) produced by fibroblasts in the dermal layer of the skin and observed dramatic changes in expression levels of many ECM proteins, particularly the protein HAPLN1 (Kauer et al, 2019). Fibroblasts have been shown to influence dermal regeneration by secreting many specific ECM components (Rouselle et a; 2019). The molecules that fibroblasts release are responsible for producing most of the matrix molecules needed to build the dermis, along with the instruction set proteins that direct how the matrix molecules are ordered to construct a normal matrix without scar formation.

The same structural changes that happen in our skin with aging and cause the appearance of wrinkles are also responsible for the increased risk of metastasis in older melanoma patients. With advancing age, the network of fibers that supports our skin loses the ‘basket weave’ organization that is characteristic of younger skin and becomes more unorganized and looser. As taught to me by one of my professors at Berkeley, Dr. Mina Bissell, Ph.D., in a tumor setting, we think of the ECM matrix as a barrier that helps contain the tumor cells by inhibiting their motility while favoring infiltration of immune cells into the tumor mass (Bissell, 2007). The infiltrating immune cells then kill the cancer. In older patients, due to the loss of HAPLN1, this barrier becomes less efficient. These age-related changes also negatively affect the way immune cells, such as T-cells, enter the tumor, inhibiting the ability of T-cells to attack the cancer. Given that NG uses the molecules from fibroblasts, including HAPLN-1 and Factor Five does not, NG is better at rebuilding the dermal matrix in a normal “basket weave’ structure resulting in better remediation of lines and wrinkles, and sagging that also leads to better immune function in the skin and the prevention of cancer.

Further, the FF Regenerative Serum contains PEG, Polysorbate 20, and Fragrance. These ingredients can be pro-inflammatory, causing allergic reactions and leading to more inflammation and degradation of the dermal matrix.

References

Bissell MJ (2007) Architecture Is the Message: The role of extracellular matrix and 3-D structure in tissue-specific gene expression and breast cancer. Pezcoller Found J. (29):2-17.

Kauer A et al (2019) Remodeling of the Collagen Matrix in Aging Skin Promotes Melanoma Metastasis and Affects Immune Cell Motility. AACR Cancer Discov (2019) 9 (1): 64–81

Rousselle, P et al (2019) Extracellular matrix contribution to skin wound re-epithelialization. Matrix Biol. 75–76, 12–26.

Dr. Greg Maguire developed the concept of the Systems Therapeutic for Physiological Renormalization while he was a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley. Working and learning about biotechnology in a laboratory at Berkeley where two scientists, Dr. Don Glaser and Dr. Kary Mullis, had won Nobel Prizes and started the world’s first biotech company (Cetus Corp), Maguire’s attention would be drawn from basic biology to biotechnology. While at Berkeley, Dr. Maguire was also influenced by a colleague, Dr. James Allison, a professor of immunology who was working to renormalize the immune system in cancerous tissues. Learning how to reengage T-cells in the adaptive immune system to attack and kill cancer cells led to Dr. Allison’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine. The current “checkpoint inhibitors” used to treat melanoma, for example, are a result of Dr. Allison’s work. This was very influential in Dr. Maguire’s approach to therapeutic development, and creating the concept of physiological renormalization. This way of thinking is in contradistinction to methodologies that, for example, knock-down the immune system such that one is now subject to infection, or hyperactivating the immune system to the point where the immune system attacks the self, destroying one’s own cells.

Maguire was later awarded a Fulbright Scholarship from the National Institutes of Health to more thoroughly develop the concepts of systems therapeutics while an associate professor in Japan. This was important because the scientific community in Japan traditionally places more value on a systems, non-reductionist, approach to healthcare and therapeutic development. In his non-reductionist approach, Maguire uses multiple molecules, instead of just one or a couple of molecules, to target multiple pathways underlying a disease or condition, not just one or a few pathways as used in previous therapeutic designs. The multiple molecules renormalize the multiple pathways and thus renormalize the physiology of the compromised tissue, such as the skin. Simply put, diseases and conditions of the skin have many unique abnormal pathways that underlie the condition, and each unique pathway must be renormalized using many molecules, each of which acts at one of the many abnormal pathways underlying the disease or condition. This new means of developing therapeutics has been accepted by the Medicinal Chemistry Section of the American Chemical Society, and has been published many times in peer reviewed, National Library of Medicine listed scientific journals. Dr. Maguire explains in his book, “Adult Stem Cell Released Molecules: A Paradigm Shift to Systems Therapeutics,” the origins and details of his approach to therapeutic development. One aspect of the Systems Therapeutics for Physiological Renormalization approach to skin care is the use of stem cell released molecules from adult stem cells derived from the skin. Dr. Maguire first developed this technology while a professor at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and has demonstrated the safety and efficacy of this approach, detailed some of the mechanisms of action, and published clinical studies of how well this technology works for skin conditions. In this blog, Dr. Maguire will be discussing how to best care for skin based on an analysis of the science and technology currently available for skin care therapeutics. You will come to understand that, for example, the choice of stem cell type to derive the molecules is critical; that tissue specific stem cells, first described by Dr. Elly Tanaka at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, are critical to optimal healing, where skin derived stem cells (SDSCs) are used to treat the skin; and that some stem cell types, such as bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) may be inflammatory and oncogenic because of recirculating inflammatory T-cells and cancer cells that interact with and negatively transform the BMSCs within the bone marrow. We shall see that stem cell released molecules from skin-derived stem cells are critical to optimal skin care, and that many other molecules in combination with stem cell released molecules provide optimal benefit to the skin, including for aged skin, wound healing, and various inflammatory skin conditions, including autoimmune conditions.