Dr. Mitchell Elliott Bender

It needs some minerals.

It needs copper, zinc, selenium.

You need that to make healthy skin, to make healthy hair.

So if you're vitamin deficient, if you're protein deficient, it can show up on the skin.

It could also show up in other organs too.

The other thing that's really hot right now in research of all systems is the microbiome, the population of bacteria in the colon and also on the skin.

And when you have an abnormal microbiome, it's called dysbiosis, D-Y-S-B-I-O-S-I-S, dysbiosis.

And people are looking at

the effect of that abnormal microbiome on the skin.

So for example, Stan talked about atopic dermatitis.

Atopic dermatitis, people with eczema are more prone towards infection with a bacteria called Staphylococcal aureus, and that can cause boils, infections, could be a really nasty bug.

People have looked at the microbiome of atopic eczema skin, and they find that they don't have the normal diverse species of bacteria on the skin.

And that abnormality lets the staphylococcal bacteria proliferate and cause boils, infections, and other kinds of problems.

And experimentally, people found that if you introduce normal harmless bacteria onto the skin,

and get the skin population, bacterial population more diverse, it begins to kind of crowd out the staphylococcus and the eczema gets better.

So the same thing, by the way, happens in the colon.

People are looking at dysbiosis in the colon.

There's a lot of research going on trying to figure out relationships between abnormal

bacterial colonization in the colon, and diseases.

So what you eat is very important for all kinds of reasons, cardiac, skin, just about every system.