239. Dr. Shawana Vali: Healing Skin from the Inside Out, Collagen Degradation & Skin Aging

Your skin is screaming what your blood work is whispering. Dr. Shawana Vali transformed how I understand the visible signs of internal dysfunction, & it’s not what the beauty industry wants you to hear. Those wrinkles, breakouts, & pigmentation issues? They’re your body’s warning system telling you about adrenal fatigue, hormone imbalances, & inflammatory cascades happening deep in your tissues. Ready to look 5 years younger by treating the root cause instead of chasing symptoms? CLICK HERE TO BECOME GARYS VIP!: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg⁠⁠ Connect with Dr. Shawana Vali Website: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/467cGNl⁠⁠ YT: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3NuM9TU⁠⁠ IG: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4a6SMV5⁠⁠ TT: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4quCzij⁠⁠ FB: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4jN5ICM⁠⁠ LI: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4pPtqj8⁠⁠ Thank you to our partners H2TABS: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg⁠⁠ BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: ⁠⁠http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV⁠⁠ BAJA GOLD: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa⁠⁠ SNOOZE: LET’S GET TO SLEEP!: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4pt1T6V⁠⁠ COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4eULUKp⁠⁠ WHOOP: JOIN AND GET 1 FREE MONTH!: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW⁠⁠ AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD⁠⁠ A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: ⁠⁠http://bit.ly/4kek1ij⁠⁠ PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn⁠⁠ CARAWAY: “ULTIMATE” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC⁠⁠ HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/41HJg6S⁠⁠ RHO NUTRITION: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/44fFza0⁠⁠ GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4obIFDC⁠⁠ GENETIC METHYLATION TEST (UK ONLY): ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/48QJJrk⁠⁠ GENETIC TEST (USA ONLY): ⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9⁠⁠ Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YT: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8⁠⁠ Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3RQftU0⁠⁠ Connect with Gary Brecka IG: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs⁠⁠ TT: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf⁠⁠ FB: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/464VA1H⁠⁠ LI: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2⁠⁠ Website: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU⁠⁠ Merch: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1⁠⁠ Newsletter: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/47ejrws⁠⁠ Ask Gary: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG⁠⁠ Timestamps 00:00 Intro of Show 02:20 Healing the Skin from the Inside Out 06:41 Biomarkers for Accelerated Skin Aging 10:17 Link between Stress and Skin 12:51 Clean Movement in the Beauty Industry 18:04 Inflammatory Skin Conditions 19:13 What’s Causing Skin to Age Quickly? 24:55 Exosomes in Skincare Products 32:02 Collagen, Elastin, Fibrin Definitions 36:26 What Happens to Women’s Skin during Perimenopause? 43:37 Hormone Replacement Therapy and Peptides on Women 48:03 New Breed Skin Technology 54:05 Less is More for Skincare 1:04:09 What does it mean to you to be an Ultimate Human? The information provided here is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered as medical or clinical advice. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any health condition, and should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health objectives. The use of any information provided is solely at your own risk, and the provider of this information is not liable for any consequences arising from its use. Disclosure: Some links to certain products or services are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you remove all the things that you use for your acne and stuff like, leave it alone for a few weeks, your skin will wake up and you won't break out as much.

• 0:06Gary Brecka?

  You know the skin, you know what makes it youthful, what makes it healthy. But the vast majority of what you talked about was healing the skin from the inside out.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  It's easy for us to give you thick hair, perfect skin. But on the inside, we're actually coming first with mood, concentration, performance, sleep. We're all looking at you on the inside out rather than the outside in.

• 0:24Gary Brecka?

  When you walk into most cosmetic clinics, you can get lost in the programs that they're trying to offer you without really having a fundamental understanding of which one of these is actually going to give you real skin regeneration.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  The skin is one of the biggest organs and what it does every day, it repairs itself. Let it do the work. God's given it the cells for it to work. We just need to tweak it a little bit. I always say this to my patients, less is more.

• 0:48Gary Brecka?

  So what does a good basic skincare routine look like for you?

• 0:52Speaker 00

  I would go back to basics again and I would say.

• 1:07Gary Brecka?

  Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything, anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's podcast guest is a double board certified cosmetic dermatologist that I actually met when, for the first time, face to face, when we were in Saudi Arabia, speaking at a Xenos Health Summit. I was fascinated by her talk. She was already on my schedule, so I was excited about that. But watching her describe skincare as a dermatologist, as something that happens from the inside out, I found really fascinating. And the plan that she uses to approach her patients to restore healthy, youthful skin

• 1:51Gary Brecka?

  really didn't begin with the topical applications. It began with rebuilding from the inside out. So I'm really excited to unpack this. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Shawan Ali.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Thank you, Gary.

• 2:02Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you really did a great job in Saudi.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Well, I was put before you, so I couldn't let you down. Why had they put me before Gary, like the keen, why am I straight before Gary?

• 2:13Gary Brecka?

  It's better to go before me than after me, I guess.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 2:17Gary Brecka?

  But you know, what I found fascinating was the vast majority of your talk, and obviously as a double board certified cosmetic dermatologist, you know skincare. And you know the skin, you know what makes it youthful, what makes it healthy, how it grows, how it ages, and from a medical perspective. But the vast majority of what you talked about was healing the skin from the inside out, euthifying the skin from the inside out. So can we back up a little bit for the people that didn't have the benefit like I did of attending your talk, which I really found fascinating? And it's so incredible how much of what you do I not only do with my private clients, but I also deeply identify with.

• 3:00Gary Brecka?

  I just never really correlated it to all of these positive skincare outcomes. So I'd love to unpack, you know, what a typical consult with you is like? And where you start with somebody's skincare journey?

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:16Gary Brecka?

  You even talked about different personality profiles of people that come to see you. So yeah, I'd love to unpack that.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Well, we have the privilege of meeting all different types of people and different ethnicities, different types of personalities. So I think as practicing physicians, you need to be aware of everything and experienced in everything. I specialize in cosmetic dermatology, medical wellness, regenerative medicine, longevity. So we've always looked at everything inside out. We've never been like, oh, you've got some acne or you've got some rosacea. We've always been, what's the root cause?

• 3:41Gary Brecka?

  Whole person.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Whole person, where's the inflammation coming from? So we've always looked at you, you know, it's easy for us to give you thick hair, perfect skin, contour your body to suit your gender, ethnicity, your silhouette. But on the inside, we're actually coming first with mood, concentration, performance, sleep.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Libido, gut health, fertility, immune system, musculoskeletal. We're all looking at you on the inside out rather than the outside in.

• 4:04Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Because the problem I've got is if you've got an inflammatory skin condition and I'm just doing some laser and resurfacing you with some exosomes and some fun stuff on the outside autopsically, like you mentioned.

• 4:15Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  I'm not fixing the root cause. It's gonna come back. You're gonna be unhappy and you're like, she's not a very good doctor.

• 4:19Gary Brecka?

  Right. What are the major things in your opinion that cause skin to accelerate? It's I want to get specific.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:27Gary Brecka?

  Um, you know, conditions of skin like acne, wrinkles, what have you.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:30Gary Brecka?

  But what are some of the just the major offenders of healthy skin that we do to our bodies from the inside out?

• 4:37Speaker 00

  I think it's just general lifestyle things, right? So right now, we're all living multi hyphenate lives. We've got multiple roles. Our bodies weren't designed in that manner. So you're a man, you're you're supposed to be a hunter gatherer. I'm a woman, I'm supposed to be a protector provider. But yet we're both entrepreneurs. We're both burning the candle at both ends. We've got both got multiple businesses and multiple roles.

• 5:00Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  We're we're pushing our body to the limit that we've never pushed it. I need the ultimate human.

• 5:04Gary Brecka?

  Right, right.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  So so if our body hasn't caught up with what we're supposed to be doing, then physiologically, we have to look at you on the inside and optimize that. And that's why I always say, let's, when I take a consultation, the first thing I do is I diagnosing your skin is easy for me. Diagnosing what's happening on the outside is easy. And the first three questions I always ask is who referred you?

• 5:26Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Because for me, it's like, what kind of a set you're looking for, right?

• 5:29Gary Brecka?

  Ah.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Right, what kind of?

• 5:30Gary Brecka?

  And you could tell that from their friends?

• 5:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. But also, what kind of journey have you had? You know, did your friend refer you to me because you're perimenopause and so she? That we fix the inside first before we came on the outside.

• 5:40Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Then I ask, how old are you? If you're in your twenties, you've got social media pressure. You've got lifestyle pressures going on. You're trying to establish yourself. If you're in your thirties, you might have had just your babies and you want to return back your body. Or, you know, you might be starting a new role as in the C suite in your late thirties. If you're in your forties and fifties, you might start your next phase of life. You might have come out of a divorce. You might have, you know, the early nest, empty nest survivors. Something else is happening. So I need to know what stage of life you're in. And the third thing I always say is, what do you do? Like, what kind of psycho social pressures are on you? Explain to me what role do you have in society? What do you do? Are you a mother of four at home and you're running a small business as well?

• 6:18Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Are you a CEO of a hedge fund that you have to like stay up eighteen hours a day but all the time? And then the key thing is, we don't move to, let's look at your skin. Gary, the next thing we move to is, let's talk about your mood, sleep, energy, immune system, gut health, libido. We go to the inside immediately.

• 6:33Gary Brecka?

  Love that.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Before we even look on the outside.

• 6:35Gary Brecka?

  Now, are these, do you do that by, so first you obviously do the consult, you get a profile of what the person is like, at which stage of life they're in, but after that, what kinds of testing, because you can't just say mood, mood, hormones, libido, I mean, we need data, right? So where do you get that data? What kind of lab tests are you running? And what do you think are key markers to be looking at that might be markers that would indicate that you have accelerated skin aging?

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. So my patients are seeking me out aesthetically on the outside because they might have fine lines and wrinkles, folds in their face that they don't suddenly like, loss of definition. They might find that their hair is thinning, they've got receding hairline. They might find that they've got mid abdominal weight gain, which they didn't normally have. So the metabolism's changed, right? They might find, you know, aesthetically, they've got some cellulite, some stretch marks, they're unhappy in certain places, they're not always taut and tight as they used to be.

• 7:25Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  So their body has changed aesthetically on the outside.

• 7:29Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  But they haven't identified why it's changed from the inside out.

• 7:32Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  So in terms of markers, we do subjective screening first.

• 7:37Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  And then we, and subjective screening, you can pick up the clinical symptomology quite quickly in terms of storytelling. Is it adrenal fatigue with estrogen dominance? Is it adrenal fatigue with testosterone deficiency? Is it dopamine fatigue? Are you perimenopausal? Is this andropause? Is this dysfunctional gut dysbiosis? Is this just poor sleep or disrupted sleep?

• 7:56Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  So on your wellness screening, we clinically pick up the storytelling, but also you've already given me signs and symptoms in your past medical history. You've already told me in those three pivotal questions, what's happening in your life? I'm recently divorced, I'm dating the world, I'm also a CEO of a hedge fund. Like, you've already given me a few key things. And then when I'm asking you about your past surgical history, past medical history and past non-surgical history, like the aesthetic stuff.

• 8:20Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  You've already told me if you're a virgin or non-virgin, I like injectables. I actually have only done one laser in my whole life.

• 8:26Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  So I already know where to move the needle with you.

• 8:28Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  And also in that, we ask you quick medical, your wellness question, like, you do IVs? Have you taken NAD? Have you tried peptides? So you've already told me, are you a biohacker or you're not?

• 8:39Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  So all those questions I've already got, I've got there before I get to that clinical storytelling.

• 8:44Gary Brecka?

  Great.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  If I want diagnosis, if I want objective diagnosis and quantifiable, now my men are driven by data, right?

• 8:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  If I want objective quantifiable diagnostics, I can run tests, I can do your saliva test, I can do your DHA, I can do your hormone panel testing. I can do all the fun stuff.

• 9:00Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  If I clinically already explain to you what's going on. And then I'm trying to learn, are you a virgin or non virgin when it comes to treatment modalities?

• 9:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Am I fixing you on the inside first or am I coming on the outside? Do you understand me and do you understand the storytelling?

• 9:15Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  We don't even treat you on the first day.

• 9:18Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  We won't treat you on the first day, we send you home with an interactive treatment plan. We phase it, phase one, two, three. Because say you're, say you're a twenty two year old female with a bit of acne on the outside, right? And you come in, you're like.

• 9:30Gary Brecka?

  Common.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you're like, Dr. Valley, this is what I look like on Instagram.

• 9:35Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:36Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  And you're like, I want to look like this. I want my jaw like this.

• 9:39Gary Brecka?

  Without the filter.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  I want this to be like this, I want my acne to be fixed. Also, my body, it's a bit like I face tune it with the apps. And I'm like, are you sleeping?

• 9:48Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Do you have anxiety? Do you suffer from panic attacks? What's your mood like? Oh, I used to have depression, I used to be on an SSRI, I'm not on one anymore. I don't, you know, I am overthinking the middle of the night, I do check my in, like my notifications, da, da, da, da.

• 10:00Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  So we're like, let's think, let's rewire you first, on the inside first, let's work on the inflammatory cause of your acne first. Before we come on the outside and start contouring you unnecessarily.

• 10:11Gary Brecka?

  Now, this, how big of a role does stress play in this? Because you're getting to people's lifestyle choices and a lot of us live very stressful lives. You know, we're constantly on the go, but we're also constantly engaged and entertained. We're also always immersed in something. And that puts a lot of stress on us, right? Not just to perform, but to look the way that everyone looks on Instagram, to perform at what everyone expects us, the level they expect us to perform. And, and we talk about, you know, stress being so detrimental, but what is it about stress? What is the link between stress and the skin?

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Right, okay, so. We can generically call it stress.

• 10:50Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  But what stress does is it causes something called oxidative stress, so free radical damage.

• 10:55Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  It causes breakdown of collagen. Okay, so glycation, breakdown of collagen, turns around and gives you fine lines, wrinkles, open pores, oiliness. It can inflame your acne, rization, pigmentation. But if we go back to cellular cause pathophysiologically on a cellular level.

• 11:10Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  You've got the beauty layer of the skin, which is the epidermis. You've got the medical layer of the skin, which is the reticular dermis. In the reticular dermis, you've got these great things called building blocks called fibroblasts. They produce collagen, elastin, hyaluronic acid, gags, all the good stuff, stays in the medical layer of the skin.

• 11:24Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  By the age of twenty one, this is degradating. This is already going down with a gift from God.

• 11:30Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  You're already aging.

• 11:31Gary Brecka?

  It's a gift that we don't ever want to open.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  It's a gift that we don't want, right? So you've already got that. On top of it, you've got a pigment called melanin.

• 11:37Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  Which some of us will get pinky purply and some of us will get brown pigmentation. So that comes up with sun trigger, hormonal trigger, environmental trigger. So all these things, when you've got oxidative stress and free radical damage going on, this gets enlightened and inflamed.

• 11:52Gary Brecka?

  Cause this is in the deep layers of the skin.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Deep layer. So then if you've got fibroblasts, the building blocks breaking down, that means you're gonna get the collagen breaking down. You're gonna get the good stuff, the like the robust, the architecture of the skin breaking down. So you're gonna get the laxity. You're gonna get the fold. You're gonna get the fine lines and wrinkles. You're gonna look dull. Your skin's not gonna be glowy, right? Things aren't gonna be as tight and taut as they used to be.

• 12:16Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  But then also on the beauty layer, there's something called epidermal cellular turnover. God's given us the best organ, like the human body is the best organ, we both say it.

• 12:25Gary Brecka?

  Right, no doubt.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  But the skin is one of the biggest organs and what it does every day, it renewals and turns over. It repairs itself.

• 12:33Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  But when the beauty layer is a bit broken, then that doesn't happen either. So then suddenly you're exposed to environmental toxins coming in. Ah. Causing more inflammation.

• 12:43Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  So that's what happens.

• 12:45Gary Brecka?

  You know, I I very often refer to the skin not as a barrier, but as a gateway.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:50Gary Brecka?

  Because it doesn't just keep things out, it lets certain things in.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:54Gary Brecka?

  And there's a big, uh, you know, discussion going on right now about the types of things that we apply to our skin. Phthalates, parabens, uh, you know, toxic chemicals that we find in cosmetics and and skincare products. And what kind of damage have you seen over your career? And what do you, how do you advise your patients? To go out and select cosmetics, skincare products, makeup, lotions, because I think we sort of go through the process of our day and we don't realize the amount of toxins that we piled on. I was actually at a lecture, this was probably two or three years, two years ago. And this, this woman was walking through a standard day for a female

• 13:38Gary Brecka?

  from brushing her teeth first thing out of getting out of bed to removing nail polish at night before she went to bed. And the number of toxins that were applied to the skin, the nails, the hair, the sprays, the, the things that we're applying to look better and supposedly feel better. As she broke these things down, I was astounded. It was like 180, 190 different chemical compounds in a very average day.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 14:06Gary Brecka?

  Especially for a woman. So what are some must avoids? And, you know, what do these toxins do? What are some of the toxins and what do they do to our skin? And what do they do in the, in the female body to the hormonal system?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So firstly, you're lucky you're not a woman. So you're not going through.

• 14:24Gary Brecka?

  Thank you, God.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. You're not going through all the pressures that we have to go through. But the pressures are coming your way. Don't worry.

• 14:30Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I know. Trust me, I know.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  But here's the thing. So the key thing here is education. I'm quite privileged because we've been educated a certain, with a certain knowledge. So I can look at ingredients and say, this is going to work on my skin and this is not going to work on my skin. This ingredient is going to sit on the beauty layer and do nothing apart from cause a barrier.

• 14:48Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Or it's going to go down to the medical layer of skin and it's going to up regulate the good stuff.

• 14:53Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Or it's going to cause free radical damage and down regulate the good stuff.

• 14:56Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  So that's the key thing here. Anything that's available over the counter sits on the epidermis.

• 15:03Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  If it's available here, go to the medical, you need a prescription normally.

• 15:07Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  For it to work in the reticulodermis, you need a prescription. Does that make sense?

• 15:11Gary Brecka?

  It makes a lot of sense.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  So everything you're applying topically, you know, and it used to be a lot of silicon based makeup and silicon gels that could hide the pores and stuff like that. And a lot of people have gone green in their environment and they've turned around and said, green formulation. We want to be natural. The problem you've got is some natural ingredients aren't going to give you the cellular change that you need to work on the fine lines, the open pores, the laxity, the inflammation, all that kind of fun stuff.

• 15:35Gary Brecka?

  Sure.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  So you've got to be careful on the ingredients that you're picking.

• 15:37Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  But what's good within the industry, especially the beauty industry, that they've taken the no nasties out. So there's been a massive movement in the beauty industry in the last decade that the no nasties list has been cleared out.

• 15:48Gary Brecka?

  That's good.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  And there has been a clean movement, especially with the likes of brands like Sephora and stuff like that, where they've come in with a clean list.

• 15:54Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  But then there's also a movement where doctors have come in and said, actually, these ingredients work really well in the medical layer of the skin, but if we can get it to penetrate without being broken down up here, then it's amazing.

• 16:07Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  If it just sits here, it doesn't do anything. I'll give you an example, hyaluronic acid.

• 16:10Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Right? Everyone talks about it. Hyaluronic acid naturally found in my body. Oh my god, let me put it in a serum.

• 16:15Gary Brecka?

  Thousand times it's weight water, you know.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  It's amazing, best marketing PR campaign there is. If you have an inflammatory skin condition, if you're acneic and you use hyaluronic acid, you're actually causing more dehydration. The molecule was too heavy to get down to the medical layer of the skin. It sits up here and it causes something called trans-epidermal water loss. It actually dehydrates your skin.

• 16:38Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Whereas beta glucan is tiny, tiny, tiny speck of hyaluronic acid. It can go all the way down to the medical layer of the skin and reduces inflammation. It's anti-inflammatory. So ingredients are key.

• 16:48Gary Brecka?

  Called beta glucan.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Beta glucan, yeah.

• 16:49Gary Brecka?

  Beta glucan.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Which is preferential, especially for my acne patients. My rosacea patients would turn around and say, my skin is so dry, I'm like, you're oily. My skin is so dry, I'm using all these emollients and moisturizers. Please stop using them.

• 17:01Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Please don't. You're definitely, you have an inflammatory skin condition. You have cellular turnover, which increases your aging faster. Inflammation causes cellular turnover that causes your cells to break down faster. If I take you and your twin sister, if you don't have acne and your twin sister has acne, she will age faster. She will see folds in her skin a lot more easily than you.

• 17:23Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  So when you have an inflammatory skin condition, we have to dry you up. We have to override your inflammation. So if you're using emollients and moisturizers, you're making my job much harder.

• 17:33Gary Brecka?

  Ah.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  So I think there's a massive. Key piece needed in education and where whoever you're going to your practitioner, your physician, your makeup artist, your beautician, they really need to understand skincare ingredients or makeup ingredients. Does, is this lipophilic? Does, is it lipid soluble?

• 17:49Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Is it hydrophilic? Is it water soluble? Does it actually get to the right endpoint to give us the change we want? Or is it just sitting there doing nothing?

• 17:58Gary Brecka?

  Listen, there's what I share on this podcast and then there's what I share with my inner circle. If you've been following me for a while, you know how I hold nothing back here. But my VIP community, that's where the real magic happens. Picture this, you're struggling with energy crashes, brain fog, or just feeling like you're not operating at your peak and you don't know where to get real answers. But here's what really sets this apart. You're not just getting my insights. When I have incredible guests on the podcast, VIP members get to submit questions for a private podcast segment. So that world renowned expert we just interviewed, you get exclusive access to their knowledge tailored to your specific situation. This section is under the private podcast section in the ultimate human community. And speaking of exclusive, you're getting my personal protocols.

• 18:42Gary Brecka?

  The exact tools I use for water fasting, gut optimization and morning routines that have taken me decades to perfect. This isn't theory, this is what works in the real world. The community launches challenges throughout the year where you get direct access to me and my network of experts. It's like having a personal health advisory board for less than a hundred dollars a month. Your health is your wealth and this investment pays dividends for life. Join the VIP community at theultimatehuman.com/vip and step into your ultimate potential. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Right. Yeah. Now, what are some, you referred to inflammatory skin conditions.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:18Gary Brecka?

  What are inflammatory skin conditions? You talking about sunburns or, uh, uh, are you talking about actual skin reactions like a topical dermatitis?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. So most skin conditions are inflammatory based and we, you know, this notion of inflammation is only happened in the last five years where everything's inflammatory based. Every condition.

• 19:37Gary Brecka?

  Such a buzzword.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  You know, everything in medicine is inflammation based now.

• 19:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Every diagnosis, but actually skin conditions are inflammatory based. Inflammation per se, just in a general. Term is cellular turnover, rapid fast and cellular turnover. That's all it is. So for me, when I'm looking at skin conditions, is this a skin condition with accelerated cellular turnover and damage? Or is it not? So things like pigmentation, acne, rosacea, eczema, psoriasis, despite it having environmental genetic autoimmune predisposition. There's also inflammatory predisposition. So I have to understand what aspect or modality am I working on? Am I working on the sebum? Am I working on the inflammation? Am I working on the oiliness? What am I working on before I can give you a treatment plan?

• 20:22Gary Brecka?

  Sure.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:23Gary Brecka?

  And people that have, you you see that there are certain races like Latinos, African American, generally more olive and darker complected. Populations where they they have a blessing and a curse, right? More oily skin, which doesn't age, but it's probably more prone to different things like breakouts and acne and things like that. And you see that.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Or pigmentation.

• 20:44Gary Brecka?

  Or pig, yeah, or or or pigmentation. So it's not a one size fits all, because obviously you're treating lighter skin differently than you're treating. You're treating darker skin. But what are some of the lifestyle choices that people are, you know, doing every day that are accelerating their skin loss? I mean, or their skin age?

• 21:03Speaker 00

  I think in the world we work in, I think the the key things that we see is poor sleep. So sleep hygiene, disturbed sleep, not getting into deep, distorted sleep. That's causing, that's causing accelerated aging.

• 21:15Gary Brecka?

  Reach about this all the time.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  And you, exactly, you say it all the time, your body repairs itself at night, growth hormones produced at night, happy hormones produced at night, the microbiome, the gut microbiome and the skin microbiome is repaired at night, right? Then we've got cortisol, we've got stresses, daily stresses. We have more stresses now than we've ever had. We've just mentioned that at the beginning. So that's causing accelerated aging, your free radical damage, your glycation, all the fun stuff that's happening. So that's causing us accelerated aging. Then I always say this to my patients, less is more. I always say, did your grandmother have this? Like, does she have access?

• 21:47Gary Brecka?

  Fourteen stage skincare routine, yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  All right, your grandmother had Nivea. She didn't have eight to twelve steps, right?

• 21:53Gary Brecka?

  Exactly.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  So like, less is more, like. Sometimes you wanna, you wanna let the body, the human organ is so amazing, let it do the work. God's given it the cells for it to work. We just need to tweak it a little bit. So my thing is to distill things and remove things a little bit and say, no, take this away. You don't need this. No, an antibiotic will only fix the bacterial element in your acne. Ractate will only fix the sebum. It's not gonna fix the inflammation. It's not gonna fix the scarring. It's not gonna fix the cellular turnover.

• 22:22Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  There isn't a one pill for a magic cure.

• 22:26Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  And it's actually educating that patient in that way.

• 22:28Gary Brecka?

  Now, where do you fall on sun exposure? Because, you know, I'm, I, I,

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Gary, look at me.

• 22:34Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Like, come on, I think I've answered your question. I'm a vampire.

• 22:40Gary Brecka?

  Well, I hope you're taking vitamin D three then, okay? Okay, good. You know, I, I've always been a fan of morning sunlight because there's no UVA and UVB rays. And I tell people if they wanna get sunlight, first forty five minutes of the day is a great time to just get out.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Blue light is less as well, right?

• 22:54Gary Brecka?

  Yes, and the blue light is less as well. And, you know, it's the UVA and UVBs that really kind of damage our skin, but it's still okay to be out in sunlight first thing in the morning. I, I actually make a practice of it. You know, I just expose my skin to sunlight in the morning. You can tell I don't get a lot of sun. I'm not, I'm not red and I'm certainly not tan. I'm, I'm, I'm a white boy like you're a white girl. But, so where do you fall on, on sun exposure? And even more importantly, where do you fall on sunscreen? Because, you know, a lot of sunscreens, I mean, there've been, what, eighteen brands or so pulled from the market in the last twelve years? For having some kind of indirect cause, either it's skin cancer or some kind of a,

• 23:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:33Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, carcinogen.

• 23:35Gary Brecka?

  So where do you fall in that realm of sun exposure and, and sunscreen?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Well, the first thing I say to my patients is this skin has to match this skin, which has to match this skin. If you're gonna have a Birkin bag here and you're gonna go like, Allah, to the sun, and you're gonna sit there and like, get the sun rays in.

• 23:49Gary Brecka?

  Birkin bag?

• 23:49Speaker 00

  You're creating, you're gonna cause wrinkling, fine lines, wrinkle, pigmentation. You're gonna get that crocodile Birkin you've always wanted. You don't need to be put on a wait. But you're not gonna, you're not gonna be put on a waitlist.

• 23:58Gary Brecka?

  Just put a handle on it, yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  That's what I say. I'm like, are you gonna make a Birkin bag out of your decolletage, right? So the key thing, the problem with sun is exactly, Causes inflammation, it causes a cascade of glycation, oxidative stress, cellular turnover, aging, all the things we've said before, fine lines, wrinkles. It deflates you, it can age you. Your skin is like an organ, it holds everything in place. If I'm burning it, it's burning it down.

• 24:22Gary Brecka?

  Burning is terrible.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Literally, it goes down here. The other key thing we need to remember is you mentioned Latinos versus Caucasians or Afro-Caribbeans versus Caucasians. We've got, and I'm Indian African, by the way, as pale as I am.

• 24:33Gary Brecka?

  Indian?

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Indian African.

• 24:34Gary Brecka?

  African.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, as pale as I am.

• 24:36Gary Brecka?

  Practiced in London, lived part-time in the Middle East.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Everywhere around the world.

• 24:41Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you've got all the bases covered.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Basically. But here's the thing, right? I have melanin in me. So if you and I went into the sun, you'd burn quite quickly, I wouldn't. I have a protective melanin in me. So Afro-Caribbean skin, and remember there's twenty-eight different types of collagen. Right? So we've got, all of us have different types. We have collagen one in three.

• 24:58Gary Brecka?

  I'm only aware of nine, but wow, there's twenty-eight.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  So there's one in three that we really work on in aesthetics, that we really up-regulate, that gives you your strength, your volume, the tightness, right? And then there's four, seven, and fourteen that work on the anchors between the beauty layer of the skin and the medical layer of the skin to hold it in place. But Afro-Caribbean people have different distribution to Caucasian people. African people have more melanin, so they're protected from the sun.

• 25:21Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Whereas you're not. If you, if the UV damages your cells, you get the aging, you get the glycation, you get the fine lines and wrinkles, you get the sunburn, right? But then, on the other hand, Afro-Caribbean skin pigments easily, it keloids easily. So I think God's been fair to all of us, right? Yeah, he's been fair in his distribution. Sun protection is key, whether you're indoor, outdoor. I wear SPF all the time. Now, there's different types of SPF, SPF thirty, I wear SPF fifty. And I also wear sunblock, especially in heat like this. So, you know, I do tend to put the sunblock, especially on the tips of my nose.

• 25:56Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  Zinc oxide base.

• 25:57Gary Brecka?

  Yes, I'm a big fan of zinc oxide.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  Blocks it completely. Has the industry come out with something better? Not yet.

• 26:03Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Are we waiting for it? Watch them wait.

• 26:05Gary Brecka?

  Right, but the non nano zinc doesn't actually absorb into the bloodstream, which I'm a big fan of because you know, if you are going to wear sunblock, it should be exactly that, a sunblock. It shouldn't be something that actually passes into the bloodstream and starts our, you know, to disrupt our hormones. And there is a lot of links between different herbins and phthalates and fragrances and, and things that actually do.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Hormone disruptors.

• 26:30Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that are, that are hormone disruptors. And so when you talk about getting into this reticular layer of the skin and actually feeding the fibroblasts or helping the fibroblasts do their job.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:43Gary Brecka?

  One of the things I've heard you talk about that I am an enormous fan of are exosomes. Because these are, these are little vesicles. They're, they're about the size of a virus. They're about one eight hundredth the size of a cell. They do penetrate deeply just because of their micron size. Some of them carry high molecular weight, high ionic acid. Some carry growth factors. So these, I'm starting to see slowly, and I think you even have a skincare line that contains exosomes. And why did you choose exosomes? And for somebody that's not familiar with what they are, how do they work in the skin? Why should it be something they consider in a skincare routine?

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I want to step back a little bit.

• 27:22Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, step as far back as you want.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  You're not in my industry. You're not someone who's seeking me out.

• 27:26Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  So in terms of estate treatments or treating things, you've got virgin and non virgin.

• 27:31Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  So virgin treatments are things you might be comfortable with. You don't want needles near your face. You don't want anything external put into you, right? And that could be things like prescription gray skincare with great formulation, vitamin A, your retinoids, your exosomes, your epigenetic formulations. It could be lasers, ablated, non ablated lasers. It can be skin tightening modalities, radiofrequency ultrasound. This is all you're comfortable with because you're not putting a needle in your face.

• 27:54Gary Brecka?

  Right. And those are looking to do the same thing to provide either micro damage to that layer so that when it repairs, it repairs itself in a healthier way, right? I would probably call that a hormetic stress, like micro trauma, which in a controlled environment done by someone like yourself that understands what they're doing can be a good thing.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:13Gary Brecka?

  I also know people that have over derma rollered themselves.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  With scarring and stuff like that.

• 28:17Gary Brecka?

  And gotten scarring, yeah, because those those needles puncture on the way in, they kind of tear on the way out with a lot of those rollers.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Don't do that.

• 28:26Gary Brecka?

  Okay, good. Yeah, you know, because we Sage and I, when we first started our our business, we we had a girl working with us, beautiful, early twenties.

• 28:37Gary Brecka?

  And she discovered derma rolling, and I'm not kidding you, in three years, she had completely destroyed her skin.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:43Gary Brecka?

  It looked absolutely terrible, and she was actually developing these scars.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:48Gary Brecka?

  But I want to go back to some of these topicals. I mean, you have a skincare line, but I want to go back to some of these topicals and what exosomes are doing in the skin.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:56Gary Brecka?

  And why these biologics.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  So I'm going to come to the biologics.

• 28:59Gary Brecka?

  Oh, yeah, no, you took a step back. So let's go.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  So you've got you've got the virgin style treatments, and then you've got the non virgin style treatments. And on the virgin, as like you said, it's a controlled inflammation, it upregulates the medical layer of the skin, it tightens you, it cleans up any pigmentation, stuff like that. It works on different modalities. Then you've got non virgin, where we might do intradermal exosomes. Where we might inject hyaluronic acid mixed with exosomes, where we might accept biologics such as PRF, PRP, your own growth factors. Or we might use bio stimulants such as PLLA or calcium hydroxyapatite to regenerate the dermis or even the bone on the periosteal level to tighten you. So these are non virgin, because I'm using a foreign body into you, right? So when it came to skincare and skincare formulation, you are, there are only certain things that are licensed of a certain prescription strength that we were allowed to use.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  But the key thing is here, when you're looking at an ingredient, you want to look at bioavailability. Does this amount actually get to the endpoint? Or does it go to perspasm metabolism, does it just sit on my skin? Does it actually get to that cell we're talking about, the fibroblast or the melanin? Or the keratin side? What cell does it get to and how much of the bioavailability actually gets there? And then what does it actually do? What was the outcome of it? And I think that's the key thing. I can name exosomes to you there, exocelio vesicles, they're pretty, you know, I love them, you love them.

• 30:14Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  We love them in longevity medicine intravenously. We love them in our hair, intrascapularly to get hair growth from the effluvium phase, the shedding phase.

• 30:23Gary Brecka?

  You're talking about exosomes.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Exosomes, right? We love them in derm need to cellular regeneration and grow, right? But what exosomes in formulations do is they create, they give signals to different cells to give you the output that you want.

• 30:34Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  So they can take growth factors, DNA, mRNA, RNA, and they can say, okay, produce more collagen.

• 30:40Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Make more fiber.

• 30:41Gary Brecka?

  They can literally send this signal to the wow, that's fantastic.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  And that's why, and that's why it's really, it's gonna be, they're not going anywhere, as you can tell. And that's why it's really important in epigenetic skincare that if you are using exome formulation, that the bioavailability is actually there.

• 30:56Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. Now, also, the, and by bioavailability, you mean that that exosome is still viable to, enough to perform its function, right? They're not really living things, but they can also be inert because they're destroyed by heat or, or, or what have you.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Or their delivery system is inept, yeah.

• 31:12Gary Brecka?

  You know, and, and I hear the terms collagen, elastin and fibrin.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:16Gary Brecka?

  You know, um, obviously, these are all involved in the scaffolding of the skin, the structure of the skin. What, for, for someone that's not familiar, you know, what is the difference between collagen, elastin and fibrin in the skin? And are there different ways to stimulate each of them? And why are they each important in having youthful looking skin?

• 31:35Speaker 00

  I think collagen's the main player.

• 31:37Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Okay, so you've got the building blocks of fiber loss and collagen's actually the main player.

• 31:41Gary Brecka?

  It's a protein, right?

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and in the dermis, it's collagen fiber one. About eighty percent of your dermis is collagen fiber one, right?

• 31:47Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  There's one in three, but it's more one than anything. And then fibrin and elastin, fibrin helps give your fiber, in terms of the fibers. So if I stimulate fibrin, you can actually get fibrosis as well. It can go the, the other way.

• 32:01Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Right? And then elastin is that, you know, that tensile? Do you want it to be loose and lax or do you want it to be tight? And you actually want things to bounce back. You want it to be tense up, but you want it to bounce back. With age, you get the laxity, it's not going back up. So, can you remember those days when you used to put on weight and lose weight?

• 32:18Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  And the skin never expanded.

• 32:19Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Or you used to, I don't know, if you, you know, if you body trained in weight and you, you, you debulk.

• 32:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, you would either, you would either get, you know, lots of guys would get those,

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Stretch marks.

• 32:28Gary Brecka?

  Stretch marks around their shoulders and their pecs and stuff because they, the muscle grew too fast.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 32:32Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  So I just say to patients, after the age of thirty five, be very careful of weight gain and loss or muscle gain and muscle loss.

• 32:41Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Because once you, after the age of thirty five, you've got, you've got significant fiber loss degradation and your fibrin elastin is not as strong as it used to be.

• 32:49Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  So it doesn't. Bounce back. Whereas with collagen, you can keep upregulating it with different treatments that I have.

• 32:55Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Most modalities in my industry work on collagen fibers, one in three. We don't really concentrate on fibrin elastin.

• 33:01Gary Brecka?

  Okay, so fibrin elastin, they're gonna be, they're, they're

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Secondary.

• 33:05Gary Brecka?

  Being lost at a, at a rate that's commensurate with aging, but the collagen can make up for that because you're gonna increase this protein. So what are some of the ways that you increase collagen in the skin? And then I want to get into some of the topical modalities that people use because I believe some of these are short-term benefit for long-term loss. You know, people are borrowing from their future, if you will, too much burning of the skin, scraping of the skin, and maybe you get this youthful rebound, but

• 33:34Speaker 00

  Temporarily.

• 33:35Gary Brecka?

  Temporarily.

• 33:37Gary Brecka?

  But then you're literally borrowing from your future. You know, we, we my, my wife has friends like this that were just laser and dermeabrasion and micronealing freaks and, and skin looked great for a period of time and now it really looks terrible and it's hard to get it back. If you want protein to build lean muscle, but without the caloric impact or need to cut, you need perfect amino. It's pure essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in a precise form and ratio that allows for near 100% utilization in building lean muscle and no caloric impact. So we build protein six times as much as weight, but without the excess body fat we normally get during bulking.

• 34:20Gary Brecka?

  This is the new era of protein supplementation and it's real. If you want to build lean muscle without having to cut, you need perfect amino. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  I think the first thing you said about me was the inside.

• 34:33Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  So for me, I mean, I don't diagnose collagen degradation because it doesn't present like that. You're, you're presenting with adrenal fatigue or you're presenting with other features, right? And then it's a byproduct of the stress that you're going through.

• 34:46Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  So I'm not focused on collagen, collagen, collagen. I'm focused on getting the inside correct first.

• 34:52Gary Brecka?

  I love that.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  So if we've got adrenal fatigue, then I'm working on that. Is it NAD? Is it peptide program? Can I move the needle?

• 34:59Gary Brecka?

  Well, you find some ways. That that people recover from adrenal fatigue because we do see women.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:03Gary Brecka?

  Whose cortisol is floored out.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:06Gary Brecka?

  They're just not producing.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  In my career.

• 35:09Gary Brecka?

  Have you really?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  I've had significant burnout twice in my career.

• 35:12Gary Brecka?

  So how did you get your cortisol back?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I've been completely flawed. I was issue dominant with adrenal fatigue.

• 35:17Gary Brecka?

  Oh dude, the worst.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  I had to go through, I had to go through rewiring myself. I had to do my routine NAD. I had to turn around. I went on peptide programs. I didn't just go on ACTH one three nine. And the adrenal fatigue ones, I went on semicon celline as well to optimize my mood and cognitive resilience.

• 35:33Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  So I went on those.

• 35:34Gary Brecka?

  Anti anxiolytic, that's a peptide, yeah.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  So I went on those and then I went on another microdose of estrogen as well.

• 35:41Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  But now I'm coming to perimenopause, so I'm now changing that up a little bit. So we work on the inside first before I'd work on the outside of your collagen degradation. On the outside, like I've said before, it's always virgin or non virgin tools. What are you happy with? In my industry, everything is inflammation based. It's me causing micro trauma.

• 35:57Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  To up regulate the cells to wake them up. So it's either that, but there's a new area of medicine which we spoke about in the Saudi conference called regenerative aesthetics.

• 36:05Gary Brecka?

  Love that.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  That's where your biologics come in. That's where your exosomes are coming in. That's where things like poly nucleotides are coming in. That's where profilo is coming in. That's where your bio stimulants have now come back again. They used to be out of a faddish fashion because like calcium hydroxyapatite or PLA used to grow your face. Uncontrolled bio stimulation. So you'd get that look.

• 36:24Gary Brecka?

  Oh wow.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  No, no, I haven't had any treatment. I promised you for two years and it's still growing.

• 36:28Gary Brecka?

  Still going.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  But they've changed the mechanism and action. They've told us to inject much deeper and over dilute and you know, they've changed the molecule, right? So they've worked on it to change the mechanism of action. So we've got different modalities now in terms of regenerative aesthetics and cellular regeneration. That are not focused on just micro trauma, but work on a biological front, on the front end, on the outside. But also on the inside, we've got regenerative modalities such as your exosomes, your mesenchymal stem cells, such as your peptides or just, just natural things like. Therapeutic plasma exchange or Ebu IV ozone.

• 37:00Gary Brecka?

  I love that you're saying all these things. It's great because you know, these toxins build up not just in our bloodstream and but in our tissues and our our skin is also a secondary route of waste elimination. Lots of waste is sort of excreted through the skin. And if you're full of toxins, they're going to come out that way. You know.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  And what happens? Do you remember the days when I don't do you do you must do intermittent fasting? You must be a pro. You do 24 hour fasting from.

• 37:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I did 24 72 sometimes.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  You're like a legend in fasting and you notice that your skin just glows.

• 37:30Gary Brecka?

  Oh, it's unbelievable. The whites of your eyes, ping, they're bright and your skin changes in three days. You know, which is fascinating to me.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  And that's why sometimes I say to patients, you know, you can't get access to me, but you can get access to my knowledge. You can go, you can go on intermittent fasting, you can go into autophagy, your body can start repairing itself, it can start reducing the inflammation on the inside. Your skin will start glowing and repairing itself.

• 37:51Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  You can do, you can do a detoxification, remove all these creams that you're putting in for the next seven days and you'll notice that your skin barrier function will start waking up again.

• 38:00Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  And your skin will start repairing itself. If you remove all the things that you use for your acne and stuff like, leave it alone for a few weeks, your skin will wake up.

• 38:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  And you won't break out as much.

• 38:10Gary Brecka?

  Stopping.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Even if you don't come and see me.

• 38:12Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you know, it's funny, I had, well, I have one teenager now, but I have one that just recently turned 21. Both of them struggled severely with, with acne. One went on a very short course of Accutane, we took him right off, but one of the interesting things, much to your point, was in both of their cases, when we applied the less is more theory, not over scrubbing their face, not always, not always using these facial cleansers and a lot of those are hard, benzoyl peroxide and all those pads. And yeah, the acids, you know, I found that it really inflamed the skin. They would go from having acne to really red and and inflamed acne, you could tell the skin was super, super irritated.

• 38:58Gary Brecka?

  But in both of their cases, both my youngest son and, and my youngest daughter, their skin changed dramatically when.

• 39:07Gary Brecka?

  We started skipping days washing it when they just used warm water, when they actually didn't use any, and they had a little bit of sun exposure, not a lot, but just a mild amount of sun exposure. It actually really started, and we focused on hydration and good nutrition. And internal. Yeah, internal, really started to change him. Well, my wife, who's been very public about this, you know, just recently went through menopause. Yeah. And on the way in, we noticed dramatic changes, mood, emotion,

• 39:41Gary Brecka?

  typical hot flashes, but also to her skin almost overnight. Yeah. And, you know, I've been deep down the rabbit hole of female hormones and their relationship to, you know, estrogen's relationship to skin elasticity. You know, and when these hormones floor out, the skin very rapidly loses its elasticity. But what was fascinating is after hormone therapy, her skin bounced right back. It was unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, I think menopause is like, if you could, if you could sort of design the perfect torture chamber for a woman. Yeah. You know, it's like weight gain, water retention, loss of skin elasticity, no libido, sleep disruption, brain fog and mood swings. There you go. Yeah.

• 40:26Gary Brecka?

  And by the way, we're going to toss in a little frozen shoulder. Cognitive decline. Cognitive decline. And we're gonna maybe toss in some frozen shoulder just to really complicate things. A couple of times as well, yeah. Exactly. Fun times. And, you know, as we really, I mean, when I got this test back on her, which is called a Dutch test. Yeah. It really gave me so much insight into how so much could go so wrong so fast. Because these things floor it out. And I really would implore women to, to really, if you're very menopausal, you're going through menopause, you know, get a functional medicine doctor to do a hormonal evaluation on you. So what have you seen with hormone replacement therapy in men and women? Yeah. And having? Effects on their skin.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. So my, so men, again, never come for, I look tired, can you, I've got folds, wrinkles, can you fix that? They don't come. Men come, my wife sent me to get refreshed.

• 41:20Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  So men never come to me because I've got wrinkles on my face or folds here.

• 41:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, we're, we're fine with it.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  You're, you're quite chilled, friend.

• 41:27Gary Brecka?

  We throw some Jergens, you know, two ninety-nine CBS lotion on.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Moisturizer. I'm like, I don't care what I pour on my face. But it's the wife that pushes the man.

• 41:35Gary Brecka?

  It's so true.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  And then when you take the history from, and like I said, we always do inside out. And then I'll find out you're wide and tired, you're running on empty, you're not sleeping, you've got loss of libido, you've got mid abdominal weight gain, you don't have that drive that you used to have. And I'm like, okay, let's do a testosterone test. We've got a little bit of testosterone deficiency. Are we in andropause? Do we even have adrenal fatigue on top? Are we just in andropause?

• 41:58Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  So what happens in men is that the testosterone declines over a long time.

• 42:02Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  And then with the collagen and with, in terms of skin, you notice you get the bony resource. You get loss of definition of your jawline. You suddenly don't have that sharp jawline you used to have.

• 42:12Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  You also get folds and wrinkles in your face. That doesn't really bother you because, you know, men should look like they've lived.

• 42:18Gary Brecka?

  Right, right.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  Doesn't really bother you, but you look a bit weathered, right? You might get recession of your hairline and you get the mid abdominal weight gain. And like men, again, are always metric driven. If I change you on the inside, outside is five minutes, you're like, done. You're like, thank you. Goodbye, I'm off. And, and, and I've got different modalities. Again, is it virgin, non-virgin? Do I stick to just peptides? Do I stick to IBNAD, simple stuff? Do I do TP, EBU, all that kind of fun stuff? Or do I go on testosterone replacement therapy? Are you ready for that?

• 42:46Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  My women will literally take the pencil and they will consult themselves.

• 42:52Gary Brecka?

  I need this, I've got this mole, I've got this spot.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  I literally woke up this morning, and this is a classic line in perimenopause. I woke up this morning and my, like, my jowls were here. They weren't there yesterday, and they're suddenly down here. I suddenly look like I've aged ten years overnight.

• 43:08Gary Brecka?

  This is what happens at this age.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  So women, they'll take their pencil and they'll mark it all down. And I just sit back and relax. And, you know, I check my, my, my WhatsApps.

• 43:17Gary Brecka?

  You feel like I've been here before.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Like here's your charge for the consultation.

• 43:20Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  You've diagnosed yourself. But the good thing about women is they'll tell you everything and the picture's a lot easier. And they're very transparent.

• 43:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  The picture's a lot easier. So again, on the inside, are they sleeping? What's their mood like? So we can diagnose perimenopause just on clinical symptomology, like you mentioned, with those symptoms, yeah? And they already had that in clinic because they've spoken to their friends. We talk to each other all day long.

• 43:40Gary Brecka?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Women just, they're, they're, they're flat out with their friends.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  And they'll come in, yeah, they'll come in going, I'm perimenopausal, right? And you're like, you're thirty eight, I'm perimenopausal. It starts early in doctors. Well, didn't you not know? You're like, okay, no, not a problem.

• 43:53Gary Brecka?

  It can start as early as thirty eight.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you not know? I was like, okay, cool, not a problem. Eastern decline in women just happens overnight over the cliff.

• 43:59Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  And it just drops by thirty, forty percent overnight. Collagen degradation happens, fine lines, wrinkles, open pores, ointers, more inflamed conditions. So say you had moderate rosacea, you just drank a glass of wine in your thirties. Now in your forties, you're noticing broken capillaries, skin thickening, you've got pores, your face looks a little bit grubbier, the solveness is there. It doesn't look as bright as it used to be, right?

• 44:21Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  So you're noticing changes that you didn't see before. Your skin's thinner, the ceramides have gone because the estrogen drives the ceramides, the ceramides have gone. So you're feeling dry everywhere. You've got hair thinning. So this is what's happening. And then suddenly you're getting the middle of the way gain. You are not eating at all, but you're still putting on weight. Your metabolism is.

• 44:37Gary Brecka?

  Yes, retaining water.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  You're retaining water. So women will come in and again, it's, do you want to say the virgine or non-virgine? Some of my women are still not HRT ready. They're not bioidentical hormone replacement ready either. So I have to still, I just have to use the tools I have, whether it's peptides, NADs, whatever it is, just to optimize their mood, get them to sleep with a delta sleep induced peptide. What is it that I can do in a natural way that they're comfortable with?

• 45:01Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  And on the outside, it's easy. I've got loads of modalities to thicken their skin, tighten their skin, you know, do they want to buy a stimulant to lift on the bony level? So they get jawline definition back. Do you want, do they want an ablative laser with exosomes to continue regeneration?

• 45:13Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  But if I can convince them to go on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy or HRT, a lot of women are now going on it much younger because of positive outcomes.

• 45:23Gary Brecka?

  I think so many women are suffering unnecessarily because they have this fear of getting on. On bio-identical hormone therapy and I've seen miracles happen for women that are suffering overnight. My wife being one of them and I'm a big fan and I've been deep down the rabbit hole in the research. And some of the studies that linked, you know, hormone therapy to breast cancer actually debunked that link. And the very same study, just after it was carried on for a longer period of time. I think it was the Women's Health Initiative was the big one that really got a lot of publicity. Yeah, it's been debunked by the Women's Health Initiative. So, you know, if you, if you are listening to this podcast and you're one of those women, you know, don't be scared of seeing a functional medicine doctor and getting on bio-identical hormone therapy. Yeah, because it can be, so you've mentioned peptides a number of times.

• 46:07Gary Brecka?

  What are some of your favorites for skin? I mean, like the GHKCU copper peptides, do you like BBC? What are your, what are your go-tos?

• 46:14Speaker 00

  I don't really, I don't use peptides for skin because I've got so many different modalities already.

• 46:19Gary Brecka?

  Gotcha.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  So I don't really need to use peptides. I've got better things that can work for it.

• 46:22Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  But GHKCU is a popular one, thymosin B is a popular one. You can, you can do subdermal injections or you can just microneedle it in. It's up to you how you want to take it. For me, I use peptides for the internal stuff.

• 46:33Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  I don't use peptides for skin. I don't use peptides for hair either. I use exosomes for hair because the cellular regeneration is much stronger. Right? So the outcome is there for my patient because if, if I promise you something, I don't deliver, game over.

• 46:47Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Like again, I'm the worst doctor in the world.

• 46:49Gary Brecka?

  Especially in dermatology.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I'm the worst doctor in the world. So your reputation matters, but also you have to do good by the patient. So I have to say, these are the modalities you've got. If it was my hair and my hair follicle, this is what I would use.

• 47:00Gary Brecka?

  So I want to talk about the new breed skin technology.

• 47:05Gary Brecka?

  Tell me about that. How are you using that for your clients?

• 47:07Speaker 00

  So for me, like I've always mentioned, and probably for you as well, bioavailability is important. Formulation is important. And one thing I didn't understand, I'm a practicing doctor.

• 47:16Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  I'm derm, I'm a practicing doctor. But what I didn't understand is how one skincare brand can work on all of us the same way.

• 47:22Gary Brecka?

  I couldn't agree with you more.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  We're eight or nine billion different types of people. If we're doing personalized medicine, why are we not doing a personalized approach? So then when I was looking at formulation, I'm like, what do I like in practice? That is prescription grade strength.

• 47:35Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  And can I get it over the counter? So I was like, okay, most of the skin products. Still on the beauty layer, so it's not even going where we need it to go.

• 47:41Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  How do I get my twelve favorite ingredients to go to the medical of the skin without you needing a prescription?

• 47:48Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  And then how does it treat open pores, ointers, fine lines, wrinkles, pigmentation, rosacea, acne, all the common things we suffer from, right? Inflammation, but it works on you differently to me because we're different ages, we're different sexes, we have different skin conditions.

• 48:04Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  So then I wanted an epigenetic formulation, so I took the twelve prescription additives. I shrink wrapped it in Japanese technology. I spent about seven years in with lab and formulation and clinical trials and studies. And we proved that it goes to medical leather skin, the particular dermis.

• 48:20Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  And it upregulates your fibroblast or your melanin or your inflammatory cytokines or whatever it needs to differently to mine.

• 48:27Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  If my problem is pigmentation and yours is rosacea, it acts on you differently to me.

• 48:32Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Regardless of gender.

• 48:33Gary Brecka?

  By uses cell signaling or something.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Cell signaling, epigenetics, formulation, that kind of thing.

• 48:38Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  So we've done that in our paste molecule biometric adaptive complex twelve, so that's in our adaptive skincare.

• 48:45Gary Brecka?

  Okay, and that's why you call it adaptive skincare.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Adaptive, because it adapts to you.

• 48:49Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  And then the reason why we call it Newbury Skin Technologies is because I wanted something fun, you know, like Rihanna Fenty, I wanted something fun. I wanted to be just as cool.

• 48:57Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, well, you are pretty cool. I mean, look at your boots.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. I got styled. And then on the other side, devices, over the counter devices, you know, your LED masks, your microcurrent devices, you know, does it actually lift and tighten?

• 49:12Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  How do I get my hands on you over the counter without you having to come to me? So I was like, well, microcurrent only goes to the beauty layer and the dermis. It doesn't go to the muscle, it doesn't go to the bone, it doesn't go to where we restructure, we age from the bone. Do you remember grandma used to have these big wide eyes?

• 49:30Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Pictures and now they're like tiny beady rhomboidy. And like the cartilage of the nose is growing, the ears are growing, the jawlines move forward or backwards, but the eyes are beady.

• 49:39Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  That's your skull resolving as you age.

• 49:42Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  So we age from the skull and everything else slips off.

• 49:45Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  And that's why you get the fat pads coming here.

• 49:47Gary Brecka?

  Never really thought about it that way.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then the balloon deflates, the skin deflates, so it doesn't hold it as much.

• 49:52Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  So you've got the periostein, the skull resurfacing and the balloon resurfacing. So in between, anything slips.

• 49:59Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  So I wanted a technology that doesn't need a transducer gel. That doesn't need, you don't need to be like, use my creams. Yeah, it doesn't need a current, it doesn't, and I don't need to be, you might not like my creams. So don't, yeah, don't use my creams.

• 50:11Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  But it's also, I wanted you to be able to take a technology that goes to the bone and it lifts and contours. It goes to the fat pads and repositions them. That goes to the lymph nodes and decongest you. That goes to the front talus muscle here. And releases tension and gets rid of headache or goes to the mastitis and your teeth grinding tension, it releases it. So this is called trans, it's more called oscillation, so it's vibration technology. So everyone's like, oh, you're basing it on a sex toy. I'm like, no, we did clinical studies and we made different sonic wave patterns to go to different anatomical planes to give you different outputs. So we made cutis, which gives you the perfect bone structure. But each sonic wave pattern gives you different outputs.

• 50:53Gary Brecka?

  What does this look like, like a handheld device?

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a handheld device. It looks a little bit like a sex toy.

• 50:57Gary Brecka?

  Oh, it does.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  But it's in a really cool charging case.

• 51:01Gary Brecka?

  Women are not scared of those, let's just be honest.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  But it's in beautiful colors, it's like your Hermes orange and your bone and you're like.

• 51:06Gary Brecka?

  Can you use it in public?

• 51:07Speaker 00

  You can use it in public and no one's gonna say anything to you.

• 51:10Gary Brecka?

  Okay, good.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  They'll be like, that looks cool.

• 51:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that's cool. She just whipped that thing out on a bus, so awesome.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Exactly, on the plane, you're deep puffing, it's great.

• 51:16Gary Brecka?

  You know I'm all about optimizing performance and lately I've been using the Ion weighted vest during my workouts and it's been a game changer. It isn't your average weighted vest. It's designed to fit like a second skin, activating your core, improving blood flow and even helping you with recovery while you train. What I love most is that the weight is perfectly distributed. It doesn't pull on your shoulders or throw off your alignment. Whether I'm doing strength training or cardio or just taking a walk, I'm burning more calories, building muscle and pushing my endurance even further. If you're serious about leveling up your training and unlocking your full potential, check out the Ion weighted vest at iongear.com. That's A I O N gear dot com.

• 51:58Gary Brecka?

  And you can use code ULTIMATE for 10% off and start training smarter today. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  But actually, but what it actually does, the studies show that it changes the cells. There's no point, it's not temporary. With use, you can re- it's like going to the gym and the muscle. And so it reposition, re-educates your cells. So what we've got is some, it's horseshoe shade and then it's got a connecting wire. And some people are really putting force and it's the connecting wire brace. You're like, dude, it's not gonna give, it's not gonna give you a facelift, just like calm down with the tension. Let the, let the device do its own work.

• 52:31Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  Lifts and contours your face, repositions the fat pack. It can relieve tension, it can depuff your face, depending on the protocol.

• 52:38Gary Brecka?

  And is this, um, is it using microcurrent or is it using sound wave?

• 52:42Speaker 00

  No, it's using sonic waves.

• 52:43Gary Brecka?

  Sonic wave.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  And it's called trans anatomical, so each anatomical plane oscillation technology.

• 52:49Gary Brecka?

  Ah, so, so some, you, you know, the different tissues respond to different wavelengths. So muscle's gonna respond differently than connective tissue than bone. So you actually provide different wavelengths to stimulate those different areas.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  And we base the muscles.

• 53:03Gary Brecka?

  Heard of somebody starting with skincare from the bone out, but that really makes a lot of sense. I never really thought about, you know, skull resorption. Cause you are having osteopenia, osteoporosis, these are, these are, you know, demineralization of the bone. Why would you not have it in the, in the skull? Makes perfect sense.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  But it's just like when we assess you in the face and you know, you want contour or anything like that. Some people want their lips done or they want their cheeks done, something like that. The first thing someone looks at is your eyes.

• 53:30Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Next thing is your teeth. Fix that first.

• 53:33Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  Forget your lips.

• 53:34Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Your cheeks, no one's looking at them.

• 53:37Gary Brecka?

  So true.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  So it's, it's, it's understanding and the reason why we went in and around is because of the journey that we've both been on. We understand internally what's happening pathophysiologically and histopathologically on each cell. That we can now understand what happens on the outside.

• 53:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:52Gary Brecka?

  And so is this used in conjunction with a skincare routine? Because I have seen as many as 14 steps in a skincare routine. And I'm like, how can anyone stick to that kind of program where you literally have 14 things? You have an enzyme cleanser, then you have a cleanser, then you have.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Killing me, Gary.

• 54:09Gary Brecka?

  Dermatology, you know, the, what do you call it? The, uh, what's the sandy things?

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Microdermabrasion.

• 54:14Gary Brecka?

  Microdermabrasion, exfoliation, that's the word I was looking for. Exfoliation, then you have something that you put on right after that, then you have a toner. So what is a good basic skincare routine look like?

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Okay, so let's go back to basics.

• 54:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, let's go back to basics.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Regardless of gender, and I always do this, regardless of gender, heritage, age. Regardless, and if they're like, you know, the twenty one year olds sitting in the room, there's sixteen year olds in the room, then there's me, there's you, right? Thirties, forties, fifties, whatever it is. Regardless of gender and ethnicity, there's something going on our skin for all of us, the same thing. There's only two things that are happening that we're synonymously feeling the same. We all have fibroblast degradation from the age of twenties, early twenties. Your collagen, elastin, your hyaluronic acid, your gags are all going down. That gives you fine lines, wrinkles, open pores, oiliness.

• 55:00Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Then all of us, regardless of ethnicity, have some form of pigmentation. So in me, it's gonna be brown, in you, it's gonna be pinky, purply, or vascular. So fair hair, fair skin, pinky, purply, vascular. Brown hair, darker skin types, brown. So if I'm only just treating those two things, I'm gonna, together with that, I'm gonna give you the perfect canvas. So that's just two creams.

• 55:20Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Obviously, they're my creams, but they're just two creams, right? With my patented formulation, but if I was gonna say to you that you're not gonna bother with my skincare, and you're gonna go and use two, three products, the only thing I would say to you is use an SPF, use a beta glucan based serum.

• 55:35Gary Brecka?

  Beta glucan based.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Beta glucan, and I'd actually say to you, wash your face with water. Yeah, that's why I would say to you. And if you can tolerate a retin A or retinol or something vitamin A derivative based, because that's the strongest ingredient, has a massive amount of studies. There wasn't anything that's been studied more in our industry.

• 55:52Gary Brecka?

  In retin?

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, retin A, retinol, retinal, whichever one you can tolerate, right? Once a week, twice a week, just to upregulate the fibroblast. And that's it, that's all I would start with.

• 56:02Gary Brecka?

  Really? So, so washing your face with water, applying one of these creams. So just wash and then apply the cream, there's not a multi step. You're not a big believer in taking those abrasive things and scrubbing off the layers of the skin.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  You just gave me the stories of not just your kids, but also one of your ex employees or colleagues.

• 56:21Gary Brecka?

  Oh, yeah, she, she derma rolled herself, it was terrible. I mean, she started at twenty four, by the time she was twenty, last time we saw her, she was twenty seven, maybe twenty eight years old. And, and there was a noticeable, you know, scarring on her skin. And she was actually going for laser to try to correct what she'd over derma rolled.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Because once you've done it, once you've damaged certain cells, you know, when you've got the stretch marks?

• 56:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Getting muscle, right? We can't get it back together. We can't get these borders back together. Have you ever seen anyone fix stretch marks properly? I mean, if we do CO2 blazer, if we do carb oxy therapy, even if you've got exosomes in there.

• 56:52Gary Brecka?

  Right, you can lighten them a little bit, yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  You can change the pigmentation, but that's about it. And you can bring the borders slightly together, but it doesn't go back to new basket ever. So, once you've damaged certain skin, it's really hard to bring back.

• 57:05Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  So you've got to be careful. And that's why I talk about the Birkin bag. Never, this skin is thin. The skin under the eye is super thin. The skin around this area is thin, and the next skin is thin. These are the areas you don't want to damage.

• 57:15Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, very true. So are there any different, I mean, are there any topical modalities that you think are a great practice? Are there any particular lasers that you're a huge fan of? Because I know there's CO2 lasers, there's ablation lasers, there's, there's class one, class two lasers. There's so much that when you walk into most cosmetic clinics, you can get paralysis of analysis. You can also get lost in the programs that they're trying to offer you.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:43Gary Brecka?

  Without really having a fundamental understanding of, okay, which one of these is going to borrow from my future? Which one of these is actually going to give me real skin regeneration?

• 57:52Speaker 00

  And changes.

• 57:52Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, and real changes.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  So I would go back to basics again, and I would say, let's first put you on a skin prescription grade skin program.

• 58:00Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  Let's re-educate the cells. You've had your skin your whole life, it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take me three to four months to give you good skin. And I always promise you 70% improvement, and we aim for 90.

• 58:10Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  So what we do is we re-educate, we, we might resurface you. We might use a partial ablate, if not full ablate. A full ablate laser such as CO2, I'd only do my 40s up.

• 58:20Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  Post like a facelift or something like that. But I'd do a non-ablate laser such as Fraxel, which is less damage. But I'd, I'd combine it with exosomes for regeneration, right?

• 58:30Gary Brecka?

  How would you apply the exosomes? Indubitably or topically?

• 58:33Speaker 00

  No, interdopically or interdermally, right?

• 58:35Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  One or the other. And then, because that will cause cellular regeneration.

• 58:38Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  So you either do micro needling like your colleague did, prescription micro needling, or you can do a partial laser such as a Fraxel, which is a baby laser, right? But not an ablate fully.

• 58:48Gary Brecka?

  Fraxel's a light laser, right?

• 58:49Speaker 00

  It's a light, it's not ablate, it's lighter version, not a CO2, you don't need that yet.

• 58:54Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  And then what happens, we put you in a prescription grade skin program, just creams. The next six to eight weeks, morning and evening, two minutes in the morning, a couple of minutes in the evening, you yourself, within four weeks, you're not wearing as much makeup, pores have gone away, the skin feels tighter, because we're working on the reticular dermis, we're getting your cells to start behaving again, start upregulating to regenerate again, right?

• 59:16Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  And if you need another, if you need another booster, we might do another booster.

• 59:19Gary Brecka?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  And the first phase of the skin changing, it takes skin cells six to eight weeks, the keratinocytes, eight weeks to change their behaviour, or up to twelve. So the first eight weeks is, I call transformation. And the second phase, and this is the most important phase, I call permanence. We want your skin to permanently behave like that for the next six to eight weeks. And in this programme, we increase the actives, so we might increase the dose of the retinol, we might increase the dose of the prescription grade actives, and they're just creams. By the end of it, you have perfect skin.

• 59:48Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  You turn around and you continue it. And say you started with inflammatory acne, you had some scarring, you had some breakouts. I say to you, you know what, in three to four months, you're gonna have, you're gonna tell me off and you're gonna complain about one or two spots, it's on your whole face. Because literally, if you can go on a cellular level and retrain the cells slowly, rather than attacking them and blasting them, because you don't wanna borrow from your future, in your own words.

• 1:00:10Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  You wanna re-educate them slowly, and you want them to behave in that way for the rest of their lives. And that's the key thing, slow and steady wins the race.

• 1:00:18Gary Brecka?

  I totally agree with that. Is there anything that you know of to actually increase the density of these fibroblasts?

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, so neocolagenesis, that's most.

• 1:00:29Gary Brecka?

  Neocolagenesis.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  Most modalities are based on something called neocolagenesis, i.e. new collagen formation, right? And what we call it, it's a fibroblast upregulator, that increases the density of the fibroblast.

• 1:00:43Gary Brecka?

  Perfect.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  If we're increasing the density of the fibroblasts, we're increasing everything else.

• 1:00:46Gary Brecka?

  And what increases the density, these?

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  So it depends, is it, we can do inflammatory based modalities, or we can do biologics, or we can do virgin or non-virgin, or we could just do prescription grade ingredients. It just depends what you're comfortable with.

• 1:00:57Gary Brecka?

  That's phenomenal. And then, just winding things out, you know, you, I won't take you deep down the rabbit hole of peptides, but I'm a huge fan of peptides, and we use them internally for lots of things.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  What do you use?

• 1:01:08Gary Brecka?

  BPC 157 for wound healing and repair, something called TB 500 for wound healing and repair. So like post-surgical recovery, anytime someone has like a knee, hip, shoulder, rotator cuff injury, low back, especially if it's chronic and persistent.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  And you do a subcut?

• 1:01:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, you can do it sub Q. BPC is probably one of the few peptides that's tolerated well orally because it's a gastric peptide. But we find the combination of those two works really well. GHKCU, copper peptide, NAD. I know you're a fan of NAD2, 50mg a day in sub Q injection or a transdermal patch. In full disclosure, I'm a partner in a peptide manufacturer called Peptool by Visalius Lab Sciences. And I chose these guys because they manufacture in a CGMP certified lab. They don't source ingredients from China. And the peptides really work. A lot of the overcounter peptides have all kinds of nasty

• 1:02:07Gary Brecka?

  things in them. Heavy metals, fillers, binders, and very often they're not even peptides. And it's hard for a consumer to know because, I mean, how are you going to evaluate whether or not this white capsule is, you know, Rice bran or a peptide, other than by the fact that it either worked for you or didn't work. But, you know, not being a dermatologist, but having seen the, I would say, the greatest shift in what we see by treating the inside showing up on the outside is when we balance hormones. You know, you see a noticeable youthful appearance in both men and women that get their hormones balanced. You know,

• 1:02:49Gary Brecka?

  when their estrogen dominant or progesterone is deficient, or their cortisol is floored out, or, like you said, stress and inflammation has just fatigued their adrenals. You know, we see it. You see it in the skin. They just look and feel tired. And in a few weeks, you know, they seem to really, really bounce back. So, Dr. Vali, first of all, I'm so appreciative that you came on the podcast. And it's so interesting that we We saw each other in Saudi and now we're here in the Middle East. I think this is one of the most fascinating regions of the world because they are growing so fast.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  And they're so hungry as well.

• 1:03:29Gary Brecka?

  So hungry.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Gary Brecka?

  And they're innovating and they're, it's like they want the brightest minds. They want the best food. They want the most educated population. They, you know, they're really thirsty for knowledge in this area of longevity, anti-aging. You must be a very popular human being walking around here. I saw you get mobbed after your, after your talk.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  You got mobbed too. We both got mobbed.

• 1:03:52Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, we sure did. So I wind down all of my podcasts before we go into the VIP and we have some questions for my VIP community by asking all my guests the same question. What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  For me? For me, I'm perimenopause at the moment. So for me.

• 1:04:14Gary Brecka?

  Full disclosure.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  Full disclosure. If you ask me in two weeks' time, it'd be a different answer, right? So for me at the moment.

• 1:04:19Gary Brecka?

  And you might be angry.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I might be completely different. For me, it's just contentment. For me, the ultimate human, because I've got access to everything. And like you're like, you're on a peptide stacking program. I'm on a peptide stacking program. I have access to everything. As soon as I see the first red flag of like, I mean, cause of overdrive, I know what to do. So I'm quite privileged in the industry to have that access.

• 1:04:38Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  So for me at the moment, it's just contentment. I want to get to that phase where the highs are high, but I don't feel it high and the lows are low, but I don't feel them low. I'm just streamlining and, you know, just getting through like content and happy.

• 1:04:50Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  What will be will be and what won't be, won't be.

• 1:04:53Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. You know, I think, I think there's a lot of genius in that, you know, letting go of the things that we can't control.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Gary Brecka?

  You know, I've focused a lot on that as I've gotten older or more mature, whatever you want to call it. You know, frustrating yourself with the things that you have no control over.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:05:10Gary Brecka?

  Is just, that's only on you, you know? But getting frustrated about the things you can control, it's, you know, a little different. But with so often, things just knock us off our stride during the day that we have zero control over. You know, I don't get frustrated in traffic anymore.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Gary Brecka?

  I'm just like. That's what it is, you know, so I'm gonna be late.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  I feel like, and especially because you're an entrepreneur like me, we go through such high highs and we go through such low lows that you have to get to a point where you're just like, nothing, nothing.

• 1:05:40Gary Brecka?

  Our emotion is so tied to our outside environment. How well did this meeting go? How bad did that meeting go? What are they saying about your social media?

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Was I validated? Was I not?

• 1:05:47Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  It is. And that's why I say I'm perimenopause at the moment. So ask me on another day. I'll give you a different answer.

• 1:05:53Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  It depends on my cognitive resilience.

• 1:05:57Gary Brecka?

  All right, Dr. Velli, we're gonna go into the VIP room. For those of you that are interested in becoming a VIP, you can head over to theultimatehuman.com/vip. This is the community that I am pouring myself into. We do private podcasts, we do live Q and As. I have a Gary AI in there that you can ask anything to. You can feed it your labs, you can feed it your genetic testing, you can ask it questions about supplementation, diet, lifestyle, travel hacks, anything you'd like. I think you'll find it fascinating to interact with the Gary AI. But for the rest of you guys, until next time, that's just science.