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It’s pretty common to be frustrated by aging skin, especially if years of skin problems seem to have accelerated the process. Between common skin treatments and medications, the matrix of collagen for skin can become damaged.
The loss of skin hydration (aka. Increased skin dryness) and overall skin barrier damage only make things worse!
And this doesn’t take into account possible decades of sun exposure (and damage) along with poor diet choices and more that can all play a role in aging.
What can you do to support your skin?
My guest today – Dr. Barbara Paldus – joins us to explore natural strategies to support skin barrier repair, helping your matrix of collagen for skin health and reducing skin inflammation.
Dr. Barbara Paldus founded Codex Labs, developing biotech solutions for nearly every skin condition, approaching skincare from the inside out with a focus on the skin-gut-brain axis, which was inspired by her son's severe allergies to mainstream skincare products.
With a Stanford Ph.D., Barb began her founder journey at Picarro, inventing a leading greenhouse gas detection system, then at Finesse Solutions, advancing biotech equipment for vaccine production, and ultimately finding herself on the other side of two successful exits, holding over 50 U.S. patents.
Let’s dive in!
Or, listen on your favorite app: iTunes (Apple Podcasts) | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | Subscribe on Android
In This Episode:
- Surprising link between gut health + skin barrier function
- Why inflammation is more than a buzzword
- How genetics and filaggrin deficiencies play a role in eczema
- Skin turnover rate in babies vs adults
- What’s M3? (How it can help your skin barrier)
- The downside of overusing anti-aging products like retinoids and chemical peels.
- Tips to protect collagen for skin health so you can maintain hydration as you age
Quotes
“Inflammation isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a chemical process that, when unmanaged, can break down collagen, damage cells, and disrupt skin health.”
“About 60% of skin improvement can be achieved through gut health, but to get to 90%, you need the synergy of supplements and topicals working together.”
Links
Get 20% OFF your Codex Labs order
Healthy Skin Show ep. 355: Is It Just Bad Genes? (What Are The Causes Of Eczema + Psoriasis On Skin)
Healthy Skin Show ep. 001: How to Protect & Strengthen Your Skin Barrier
Healthy Skin Show ep. 095: Can Histidine Supplementation Help Leaky Skin & Eczema? [RESEARCH]
376: Natural Remedies to Build Collagen For Skin Health w/ Dr. Barbara Paldus {FULL TRANSCRIPT}
Jennifer Fugo, (00:16.445)
Barb, I am so excited to have you here to talk about collagen for skin, among other things. It was so great to meet you, a few months ago we were at a conference, and actually we ended up getting introduced because of Dr. Peter Lio, who's like one of the fan favorites from the Healthy Skin Show. And I think listeners would be most curious, what has really inspired you to be so fascinated and so passionate about chronic skin problems that you are doing all the things that we're going to talk about today, that I think are so amazing?
Barb Paldus (00:52.174)
Well, I'm actually an electrical engineer by training. And people may be wondering, what is an electrical engineer doing skincare and not making circuits or chips or building robots? And the answer is my son. And so as a mom, you can imagine, Jen, if your child has a problem, you will move heaven and earth to help them. And so it started when he was born, as a baby with contact dermatitis, just literally the day we brought him home, from diaper cream. And that evolved into triggering atopic dermatitis. And so I've spent the last 16 years managing the atopic march, trying to minimize corticosteroids, avoid biologics, and just keep him as healthy as possible. And that led actually to Codex Labs, ironically.
Jennifer Fugo, (01:36.869)
Interesting. And just out of curiosity, because obviously we like to hold space here for people who might need to use some conventional meds in order to help them manage their skin and whatnot, I'm a big you-do-you person, which can sometimes affect collagen for skin. And just out of curiosity, as a mom, and obviously you're really well-versed in looking at research and it sounds to me like you have also a very good mind for technical detail and whatnot. Was there something about what was happening to your son, and maybe more of the conventional side, that you had concerns about?
Barb Paldus (02:17.658)
I guess you could say I have a superpower which is also a massive weakness, which is I love to read the literature. So you get onto PubMed, you start reading papers, you start reading more papers, you start reading papers about the papers, about the papers, you know, you go four papers deep. And then you start talking to your doctor, and the doctor half the time has not seen the papers, or read the papers, or know the literature. And then as a scientist, my father was a very well known quantum chemist and he trained me about reading the literature, doing your background research, and then you come and you can't get answers. And so some of it was really about trying to find answers and not finding answers, and looking at data and not being convinced by everything I read. That doesn't mean that there isn't amazing research going on, it's simply that I don't think we really deeply understand a lot of things yet.
And so to me, again as a scientist, that was a very uncomfortable place, and then it was like well if I do that is there is there going to be a consequence in ten years? Then you try to see if there are long-term studies, there aren't. At least at the time there weren't, 16 years ago. And so then you're like, okay well am I gonna screw up in the future by doing this in the present, and am I trying to find an easy way out as opposed to trying to manage a bigger system?
And that's when I started realizing, you know we started Codex, we were working on skin. And then we realized, oh, well with a lot of these problems, he developed acne, he developed ADHD. Are any of these related? Are there genetics at play, is there diet at play, is there lifestyle at play, is the anxiety he has at play? And so you start realizing no, no, we are incredibly complex systems and you can't ignore the gut, you can't ignore the brain, and you can't ignore the mental health, so then all of a sudden, as a scientist and an engineer, your brain explodes.
Jennifer Fugo, (04:16.435)
Yeah, and I can appreciate that because I've talked to, for example, Dr. Ian Myles, who shared on the Healthy Skin Show that the genetics, we can't really just blame these chronic skin issues on genetics, what was sort of previously being done and going, well, your parents.
Barb Paldus (04:38.574)
Yeah, you have a filaggrin deficiency, too bad.
Jennifer Fugo, (04:52.561)
Yeah, your parents gave you bad genes, you just have to learn how to manage. What have you kind of uncovered in terms of the genetics? Like, what do you think the importance of them maybe is, or could be, in terms of the skin? And how much should we really care about genetics in terms of things like eczema or psoriasis or what have you?
Barb Paldus (05:06.596)
So obviously some people have the filaggrin gene deficiency where they don't have enough copies and so their skin barrier is leaky. And that's a very direct relationship you can point. But a lot of people with eczema don't have that deficiency. So then how do you explain the eczema in them? The other thing with eczema is we don't know yet if it starts in the gut or if it starts in the skin. Is it a leaky skin barrier or is it a leaky gut barrier? What we do know is the permeability of our barriers, allowing allergens through, triggers IL-13, triggers cytokine, triggers Th2 response. Yes, that then leads to inflammation. So where we're looking at genetics is actually inflammatory response. How does your body manage inflammation? Because I think there will be a bigger commonality between, say, psoriasis, eczema, rosacea in the inflammatory response and how well your body can manage inflammation.
Jennifer Fugo, (06:02.579)
So I have a question for you, and if you don't know the answer, it's totally fine, but I thought I would ask. Since you've looked at a lot of this research on filaggrin, do you think that if you were to have, say you have a legitimate genetic predisposition to not being able to make an appropriate amount, or quantity, or quality, of filaggrin, would that be something that would show up earlier on in childhood versus adult-onset? Because it's a little hard for me to think, well, this person had this issue, if you had this from birth, and all of a sudden you're 45 and you develop eczema, I don't know that you should really worry so much about this. What do you think about that?
Barb Paldus (06:51.578)
So we don't have the data yet, so I can't say I know.
Jennifer Fugo, (06:53.427)
Fair enough.
Barb Paldus (07:02.842)
But my guess, were I to guess, an educated guess would be that the people who manifest eczema as babies, for example, like my son, do you have a filaggrin deficiency? And then people who manifest it later have a buildup of inflammation in their body. As we know, no one's diet is perfect. Nobody sleeps perfectly. We all get stressed. No one has a perfect exercise routine. We all get dehydrated from time to time. So we're accumulating. We're accumulating, basically, inflammation, which the biohackers in the longevity community are like, that causes aging, if we can stop inflammation, we'll live forever. That's a whole different discussion of can the human live more than 120 years or not.
Jennifer Fugo, (07:28.627)
Yeah.
Barb Paldus (07:32.968)
But from the skin disease perspective, I think we're kind of like a barrel and people fill themselves up with inflammation, and at some point the body can't handle that, and is that an allergy trigger? Is that a stress trigger? There's something in the body that then causes an inflammatory cascade and then everything goes bonkers.
Jennifer Fugo, (07:54.225)
I think it's an important reminder too, inflammation seems like this, like we're all like, inflammation is bad. But if you ask somebody who's not in science or health, if you ask them like, well, what is inflammation? They do not know. Because it's like this general term that we all kind of agree is bad. And so, I look at, and I've talked about this on different episodes, about cytokines. When you start to look at the drug companies, because obviously they're building medication to block, inhibit, et cetera, different pathways, the JAK-STAT pathway, IL-4, IL-13 for dupilamab, all these different things. It's not this mysterious cloud that floats through the air and somehow it causes inflammation, like that's kind of how it feels sometimes with a silent fire burning within. How do you, if you were to describe inflammation to someone, and especially somebody who's not in the medical field, how would you describe it?
Barb Paldus (09:12.068)
So I would say inflammation is a process in the body, and we have certain, for example, anti-inflammatory mechanisms. For example, catalase, SOD2, glutathione, these are basically antioxidant enzymes. And you can think of the body, with inflammation there's certain things, I think people understand free radicals. So free radicals are created in the body. And then they are these destructive things, and they can go and they can disrupt cell membranes, they can disrupt cells and then cell death, and can cause more, basically it can cause, for example, NKB or TNF alpha, depending on your genetics. So you can basically start getting a cascade going in the body. And if your body doesn't have the repair mechanisms and the scavenging mechanisms to get rid of the dead cells and stop the free radicals, then you get this kind of positive feedback loop that's bad. And you start, for example, destroying collagen in your skin, and you can start having this inflammation attack your organs. And so it's really basically a process of, it's a chemical process, I guess, that affects the health of cells in the body.
Jennifer Fugo, (10:28.793)
That's a good way to look at it. I think that, again, it's better than it being like, I remember when back in 2009 I was very interested in functional and integrative medicine, and I went through this program, and they're like, oh, it's like a silent fire burning within. And I'm like, really? We have a silent fire burning within? What does that mean? And it wasn't really until I went to grad school that all of a sudden I started to learn that there was something to that. It wasn't just this silent fire within that we don't want.
So I love that you shared some of those things and the antioxidants because you mentioned health hackers and aging, and I feel like from what I've seen with clients a lot of times too, they do feel like their body, but especially their skin, tends to age quite significantly. And sometimes that can be obviously triggered by conventional treatments, like topical steroids we know can deplete the collagen in the skin and mess with the collagen for skin benefits. Do you have any thoughts on this whole aging process and how that's mixed with inflammation triggering that? But also maybe a little bit, I don't know if you know anything about some of the treatments that could also contribute to this kind of aging process and how we can start to unwind some of that in terms of skin barrier repair?
Barb Paldus (11:52.324)
So aging obviously affects your skin barrier. Your skin barrier health affects your ability to retain water. The more porous the skin barrier, obviously the more inflammation you can get from pathogens or allergens coming in through your skin barrier, the more water, the more dehydration, that wrinkles up the skin. Then the skin reaches a point where it can't repair itself. And then there's also the whole SPF, UV, UV exposure, dark spots, melanation, hyperpigmentation in aging too. So there's kind of the two aspects, one is the skin barrier structure, the amount of collagen you have in your dermis, and then there's basically the color, the coloration or discoloration of the skin with aging. And also if you have inflammation or you have plaques, then sometimes the skin can't fully recover its color uniformity.
And so, yes, we have all kinds of treatment for that. We have retinoids, for example, derived from vitamin A, they're touted, they're kind of the hot thing right now, just to stimulate collagen production, the whole fine lines and wrinkles approach. They're also touted for texture and tone, so retinols, retinoids. But essentially, the overuse can also cause what we call burn, or retinol burn, and that goes back to the contact dermatitis. So also what people are now investigating is does the long-term use of these retinoids leave the skin more vulnerable to photodamage, which goes back to the discoloration and the melanation.
People also do, we hear a lot about chemical peels, which essentially remove the outer layer of the damaged skin cells. And so yes, you get the fresh young skin cells underneath, but we typically have a cycle, a skin turnover cycle. It's roughly four to six weeks for people between 30 and 40, it's more than six weeks for people over 50, babies turn their skin over in about a week. And if you're constantly stripping it, if you're going back to that esthetician every month and you're constantly stripping that outer layer, that outer layer also has a purpose. Those dead skin cells actually still protect us from the environment. And now you add laser treatments to that to prevent anti-aging and remove fine lines, wrinkles, and age spots. You start getting a lot of things that are happening to your skin. And can our skin, especially after the age of 30, 35, how fast can it actually recover from, I would call them aggressions, right?
Jennifer Fugo, (14:20.919)
Yeah, and I think the other challenge too is for those who've had rashes on their face, it's like you can't, or well, I also have found that some clients, whether they've had eczema or they've had psoriasis or perioral dermatitis or whatever, they tend to have more quote-unquote sensitive, reactive skin. They have to be really careful, and that's where a lot of these anti-aging products become problematic for skin barrier repair because they just can't tolerate them. They can't tolerate all of these procedures and such. But it sounds like what you're saying is that if somebody's in this boat where they've had issues with their skin on their face, especially, I would say skin and neck, right?
Barb Paldus (15:09.198)
That's right. That's right.
Jennifer Fugo, (15:10.475)
I constantly hear the dermatologists on TikTok being like, you gotta apply it everywhere, the sunscreen. And I'm like, oh my gosh, okay, I'm getting better, but I'm not there. But maybe we should really focus on that skin barrier function, skin barrier damage, and skin barrier repair you mentioned.
Barb Paldus (15:27.212)
You’re absolutely right, because that's skin hydration, that skin elasticity, depends on hydration, and dehydration means inflammation. So back to that word inflammation, which means back to the collagen breakdown. So if we really want to help our body preserve the collagen that we have, because it's really, really, really hard to rebuild the collagen once you've lost it, then you're trying to conserve what you have and not have it broken down, and so that then becomes an efficient delivery of antioxidants.
And then the question is, OK, well, which antioxidant, is vitamin C good enough? Then there's the whole debate in formulation of, is it actually stable in formulation? Three months after I buy it at Sephora, do I still have the same dose of vitamin C? Is it really effective? Do I need to be throwing it out every three months? If I leave it in my bathroom on the window, does that mean in a month the vitamin C is reacted inside the formulation? Are there more stable antioxidants? We hear about, astaxanthin, is that too much of an antioxidant? Is that even more reactive than vitamin C?
We've been working with a complex called M3, they’re three plants from Patagonia. We've been studying actually their mechanism of action on these enzymes, these antioxidant enzymes, because what we want to do ultimately is we want to support the body's natural enzymes. So these things like catalase, SOD2, and glutathione. And what we've seen is with the right formulation, with a good enough amount of glycerin as a penetration enhancer, we can drive it all the way to the dermal-epidermal junction. We can see the rehydration, we can actually see the inflammation reduction. We did actual studies where we took skin plugs to actually see how far deep it went, and we measured the amount of enzyme and the enzyme support. We also burned people with UV lamps and then took skin plugs to see if they helped them recover. And so you can really see, then, the mechanism of action of the antioxidant. And then we see, we were all excited that we were able to rebuild collagen by 2%.
The more important thing was that we could re-densify skin, looking at it with an echo-sonogram. So it's kind of like when you're looking at your baby in your tummy, with your echo-sonogram it's skin density, and you can, in fact, re-densify skin by about 30%. And so you can say, okay, well I've reverse-aged by 20 years. But ultimately, to be honest, it's really hard to increase collagen by more than 2 to 5%. It's really hard to re-densify skin, it's really hard to thicken skin. So I think it's more of protecting what we have and slowing down the aging.
Jennifer Fugo, (18:03.063)
And I just wanted to help everybody clarify too, you said, so this is an M3?
Barb Paldus (18:09.856)
Antioxidants, so it's three plants. We call it M3 because we don't want to say maqui, matico, and muerta every single time.
Jennifer Fugo, (18:19.149)
Fair enough. Okay.
Barb Paldus (18:39.79)
They're three plants from Patagonia. They're actually, we work with the Mapuche indigenous peoples in Patagonia, they've been eating these plants. And so that's why actually we ended up also creating a supplement around these plants because they're phenomenal antioxidants, and we're now studying their effects on gut inflammation. I mean, we're not going to say, it's Buddleja globosa and Aristotelia chilensis and Eugenia malinae. Like everybody will be like, what? M3 people can remember.
Jennifer Fugo, (18:48.163)
Fair enough, M3. All right, so we got it, M3. So right now, it sounds like you're saying they work topically, but you can consume them orally and they work?
Barb Paldus (19:01.114)
Yes, yes. So actually the way that they're used by the indigenous people is that they're consumed, and they're always consumed together. And we were the first kind of group to take that combination of the three plants and apply it to skin, and to study its effects on the skin. We started that work in 2020. So we're five years into it now, five years into clinical studies and things like that. And so we've also been looking at the composition. So these are complex antioxidants. So they're anthocyanins, they're flavonoids, they're flavonols, triterpenoids, et cetera. So we're trying to understand kind of what the main actives are in here with the antioxidant effect.
We've also studied various ratios. And Jen, you're going to laugh at this, but the indigenous peoples told us this is the ratio that we eat it in. And we were like, OK, that's great. And then as scientists were like, now we're going to try all the other ratios, we're going to design an experiment. Their ratio, in fact, activates, if you look at the antioxidant capacity. So these are things like, for example, FRAP, fluorescence recovery after photobleaching, to see how it diffuses through cell membrane or ABTS, which is kind of total antioxidant capacity for ABTS radicals, et cetera, or ORAC, for proxyl radicals. Their ratio optimizes it, and it's like three times more potent in their ratio than any other ratio we tried. So we went back, hat in hand, going, we are so sorry we doubted you. And the healer there, it's all women, the knowledge goes from woman to woman, she's like, well, you really think, we've been using this for 1,200 years, you really think we haven't run all of your experiments?
Jennifer Fugo, (20:48.799)
Right, they already knew, they didn't need this amazing lab to sort it out. They didn't need technologically advanced equipment. They were like, we already know. And us, we’re like, no, no, no, we're gonna just double check. And they knew it, they nailed it.
Barb Paldus (21:06.426)
We're going to look at what cytokines, we're going to see the gene modulation, the gene expression, and then we come back and they're like, well, of course. And then they're like, but you really should be eating it. And so that's where we're now studying it, as I said, for Crohn's, for IBS, looking at basically can it help rebuild the gut barrier, et cetera. Plants are amazing. Ethnobotany is amazing to me.
Jennifer Fugo, (21:40.64)
So right now, these plants, M3, the M3, the three plants, those are currently in a topical skincare formula. And so could that formula be used for somebody who does have either very sensitive skin or more aged skin, where they're trying to maybe do more of an anti-aging thing?
Barb Paldus (21:45.656)
Exactly. So they're really for a damaged skin barrier. So whether that damaged skin barrier is caused through a skin condition, and we've tried to eliminate any allergens in the formulation for sensitive skin. The collection is called Antü. They're basically brown or slate-colored. And Antü is actually the sun god of the Mapuche, so we've tried to give them tribute by naming the collection after basically their sun god. That's what they wanted it to be called, so that's what we called it. And so I would say for menopausal skin it's great, for skin where you kind of see that ruggedness, reddishness from the skin barrier damage, and definitely for inflammatory skin conditions like, say, rosacea, it's great for rebuilding that skin barrier.
Jennifer Fugo, (22:55.84)
I love the fact that you're now looking at this from the other direction, the inside out. And I've talked a lot of times, I really do think that for conditions like eczema and psoriasis and all these different things, I really do think that obviously there is like an outside-in piece, but I do think there's a lot of inside-out work that can be done. So what's your thought on that?
Barb Paldus (23:22.468)
I think you're 100% right, and what we're finding, so we're now running supplement studies, and supplements for topicals and topical studies. And what's amazing to me is that about 60% of the solution can be gotten through the gut. So the supplement can actually get you 40 to 60% of the way there. We struggle to get more than a 40% improvement with a topical. And what's amazing to me is if you want to get to that 90-plus percent, you have to have the supplement in the topical. You can really start seeing those synergistic effects. So we just actually finished an eczema study and it had our histidine supplement with that M3 in it. So kind of reduce the gut inflammation, rebuild the gut barrier, and then the histidine is an amino acid that's used for skin barrier repair, so for natural moisturization factor and for filaggrin, for the manufacturing of filaggrin. So we're trying to give those people with the filaggrin gene deficiency as much filaggrin as possible, so that the one or two copies of the gene they do have can work into overdrive and repair their skin barrier. And so we can see like a 40 to 50% improvement with just the supplement, we can see a significant effect with the topical, and then roughly one plus one becomes three when you put them together.
Jennifer Fugo, (24:42.72)
Awesome. I think it's really helpful for people to hear this because sometimes, depending on where you are in your journey, this might be new information. You might be like, wait, what? It's hard because you go online and you see people say, oh just heal your gut, it'll fix everything. And then they try to do bone broth, all these different diets, they're like trying to cut out all these foods and they're like, I healed my gut, right? But I have this mess happening internally. And I'm like, you can't heal the gut barrier, you can't improve that, if the triggers are still present, contributing to inflammation that then does move out towards the skin and can impact skin barrier function and all sorts of things. So I love that you've shared that there is this synergistic effect. You do one, you do the other, and together they help. One plus one, in this instance, one plus one equals three rather than two. So it is really, really beneficial. So I love that you shared that.
Barb Paldus (25:47.162)
But, and you'll relate to this, they have to have a good diet, they have to be sleeping, they have to be at least moving, whether that's walking, some kind of exercise. And so I just want to kind of clarify for your listeners, if you're drinking alcohol, smoking, not sleeping, eating Doritos all day long, we can’t help you. That's kind of the thing. You have to work with a professional. You have to have good nutrition. That's essential, too.
Jennifer Fugo, (26:18.248)
Well, Barb, I really appreciate you being here. This was a really cool conversation, and I know that we will probably have plenty more to talk about some other time. But we'll put a link to all the different things we talked about today, obviously also to Codex Labs so that people can check out the different products and such. But I really deeply appreciate you for being here, and I hope we can have you come back sometime.
Barb Paldus (26:43.45)
What would be wonderful, Jen. Thanks for the opportunity.
