Dr. Annette Bosworth

Velvety skin is this Latin word, acanthosis nigricans, which is a fancy word that means the skin is darker and thicker.

So the places it usually happens is the back of the neck.

And you'll hear stories of, I tried to wash my neck.

It's dirty all the time.

It's not dirt.

It is the way the skin is under the curse of high insulin.

And you see it in teenagers all the time now.

They put on weight and their growth hormones are already doing that teenage thing.

Now you put high insulin in there and they have this dirty neck syndrome or on the creases of their elbow.

It's just darker here.

That is pathology.

That's not normal from high insulin.

Right.

So as my patients age, so most of my 55 year olds that have had high insulin, I will tell them, look at your toes.

They're supposed to have hair on them.

And when your body has had that high insulin state for a couple of decades now, it will start to say, we don't send resources to a couple of parts of the body anymore.

And the follicles in their toe disappear.

Or one of them.

Like, just stop growing hair on your toes.

And there's an ascending problem with this, where the toe starts, then it's the ankles, then it's up to the knees, and they don't have hair anywhere on their lower extremities.