Dhru Purohit Show
Top Ways to Naturally Tighten the Skin from America’s Top Holistic Plastic Surgeon, Dr. Anthony Youn
Wed, 13 Nov 2024
This episode is brought to you by Birch Living, Momentous, and ARMRA. We all know there are key lifestyle habits that help us feel and look our best. But with the endless skincare products and trends, it’s tough to know what’s truly beneficial, worth the investment, and safe for a youthful glow. Today’s guest, America’s Holistic Plastic Surgeon, returns to the podcast for round two and helps us cut through the noise to find what’s worth adding to our busy routines. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Anthony Youn, America’s holistic board-certified plastic surgeon. Dr. Youn shares insights on how to prevent and address loose skin, along with top lifestyle factors, supplements, and practices to maintain skin elasticity. He also debunks popular social media myths about skincare. Dr. Youn discusses the research behind his skincare line and answers rapid-fire questions from the podcast community. If you’re looking for research-based answers to all your skin questions, this episode is for you. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Youn dive into: How to prevent loose skin or turkey neck (1:02) Tech neck from constantly looking at your phone (5:54) Options to address saggy skin (13:00) Radiofrequency micro-needling as the gold standard (16:50) Exercise and skin elasticity (26:30) Sauna's effect on the skin appearance and dry brushing (29:00) Why is collagen so essential and supplementation (40:50) Dietary trends that don’t make the cut (53:20) Dr. Youn's 2-minute skincare routine (01:01:50) Frownies and face tapes (1:07:35) How to avoid acne scarring (1:10:42) Why makeup wipes aren’t ideal (1:14:50) How do I know if my collagen levels are low (1:16:35) Relationship between caffeine and hydration (1:19:20) What should we be adding and removing from our diets (1:22:13) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. Youn’s Collagen Dr. Youn’s Skincare Products For more on Dr. Youn, follow him on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Apple Podcasts, and his website. This episode is brought to you by Birch Living, Momentous, and ARMRA. To get 25% off your Birch Living mattress plus two free eco-rest pillows, head over to birchliving.com/dhru today. Until November 24th, you can use code DHRU at checkout on livemomentous.com for 25% off all of our favorite supplements and receive a free gift of 5 nights of their best-selling Sleep packs for orders over $75. Get 15% off your first order of Armra Colostrum at tryarmra.com/DHRU or enter DHRU to get 15% off your first order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What natural solutions can help prevent turkey neck?
Dr. Anthony Yoon, you are America's number one holistic plastic surgeon, and you're dedicated to helping people look and feel amazing from the inside out. That's what's unique about you. Today, we have you back on the podcast to discuss and address some of the top questions we've had since your first appearance that went viral that have come in from our audience.
So number one, thank you for being here. And number two, if you're okay with it, we're just gonna jump right in. Let's do it. You've got questions, I've got answers. All right, let's go to the first one. This is probably one of the biggest topics for people in our audience that are around the 45 and 50 plus age range.
And it's around the idea of are there any natural solutions, best practices, lifestyle habits that can be incorporated to reduce the risk or the purveyance of turkey neck, the sagging area around the neck that starts to develop, especially as we age.
So there are definitely things you can do to help prevent it. Now, I'll tell you, Drew, unless you are really in the 0.1% of people who they hit the age of 60 and they still have a nice tight neckline, it is just genetics. It's gravity.
It's the fact that you're alive and what happens to the collagen of your skin that pretty much everybody, once you hit the age of 60, has got some type of looseness of their neck skin. Now, in some people, that happens much earlier, often due to lifestyle and genetics. And other people, yeah, I have seen some of my patients where at the age of 60, they still have fairly tight neck skin.
But for the vast majority of people, when you hit your mid-50s or so, you start really noticing that skin starting to loosen. And so the way I look at it is there are kind of three levels of treatment for it. The first one is going to be prevention. The second one is how do you treat it when it's fairly mild?
And then the third one is when you have a true turkey neck, which is what you described for me, there's different things to treat that for. And what we don't ever wanna do, especially for me as a plastic surgeon, is to give people false hope that, oh, you know, if you are 75 and you got loose skin hanging from your neck, oh, just eat this food and that skin's gonna magically tighten up.
You know, physically, that's just not possible, but there are definitely things to do. And so what I would start with is the younger age group. Let's say you're in your 30s, you're in your 40s. Overall, the neck skin is still nice and tight. You don't have that turkey neck. What can you do to help prevent that from happening? Well, it's going to be looking at the reason why our skin ages.
And five things is what I typically focus on is nutrient depletion. collagen degradation, oxidation or free radicals, chronic inflammation, and a buildup of cellular waste. And so one of the things you can do, and we talked about this on the last podcast, is eating a diet that is going to basically counteract those signs of aging.
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Chapter 2: What is tech neck and how does it affect skin?
Give us the spectrum of options of devices, supplements, anything else all the way up to when do you need to potentially, if somebody is considering it, use a more invasive solution for addressing sagging skin. Could you walk us through that?
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Chapter 3: What are the best treatments for saggy skin?
Um, and so infrared saunas and people think, Oh, I'm doing an infrared sauna. I'm going to make my skin look younger. I don't know. I haven't seen any science to show that all the studies I've seen have all focused on red light therapy, once again, which is going to be much more superficial, it's going to be more impacting the skin.
But now there are also some saunas, I think that are incorporating both they're doing red light and infrared, that's going to be the ideal because now you're going to target that aging, both from a detoxification internal process, and as well as the external and and that's what I would do, you know, is that for me, the best thing is if you're in an infrared sauna, and you're wearing your red light device, then hey, there you go.
Now you're hitting it from both ways.
Habit stacking.
You got it. Well, it's like one of the things I do when I wear my red light device, you know, I've got a red light mask and I'll wear it and is that I will meditate during that time. And so there's a, you know, I'm a surgeon, so I'm always trying to find ways to optimize my time. So, you know, meditation while you're doing your red light therapy. Now you're killing two birds with one stone.
One of the things that you're great at is on your social media, which I love TikTok, Instagram, you'll take a lot of these things that are trending online and you'll talk about them and say like, Hey, is there any evidence? What do we know about it? And that doesn't mean if there's not evidence, it doesn't work. It's just, you're getting a chance to add your own commentary.
So one of the things that comes up every so often, I feel like it came up a lot when I was like 20 years ago, just getting into the space and I'm seeing it more recently is this idea of people using dry brushing for skin health. Can you comment on that? Explain to our listeners, what is dry brushing? And then what are your thoughts on whether or not it can improve the skin as a natural treatment?
I think dry brushing is great. So dry brushing basically is when you take a brush, usually it has, ideally you want organic bristles and it's got a long wooden handle. And you take it and essentially you brush your arms and your legs. You can do your back, you can do your chest.
And the idea is, you know, normally you think, oh, I should brush from the out in, but you want to go from the inside out. And the idea is twofold. By dry brushing, number one, you are going to exfoliate your skin. One of the reasons why our skin gets drier and flakier is that as we get older and rougher in texture is because we get a buildup of dead skin cells.
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Chapter 4: How does exercise influence skin elasticity?
And I do think that part of this is the loss of estrogen. And now there are even companies that are creating prescription estrogen creams for the face. And there are studies showing that estrogen creams on the face can help to improve the skin thickness.
And there are even studies that have looked at hormone replacement therapy and that also improving the thickness of skin in women as they get older as well.
Well, this feels like a great place just because we've talked about it so much. And please, if you want a deep dive on this, go back to our first interview with Dr. Yoon. We go deep, deep, deep into collagen as one of the main things. But just give us a little bit of a refresher. Why is collagen so important? And do collagen supplements work?
There's an asterisk there, which is do the right type of collagen supplements work? And what do you recommend?
Basically, collagen makes up about 70% to 80% of the thickness of our skin. It's a part of our skin that causes our skin to feel tight, to feel firm, and to essentially feel youthful. Like I mentioned earlier, we lose collagen in our skin starting in our mid-20s. Once again, women, when they hit menopause, man, that collagen really takes a dive. How do you then replenish collagen?
Collagen degradation, one of the main cause of aging of our skin. The first thing you want to do is you want to make sure you're getting sufficient amounts of protein in your diet. So then the question is, is how much protein? Does it matter what type of protein? Well, in general, you want to look at getting approximately 100%. grams a day of protein.
Now, obviously, that's going to be different if you're a larger male than if you're a smaller female. And in general, you want to look at a gram per ideal body weight pound of protein a day in general. Now, you know, once again, depending on, you know, your lifestyle and how you eat that you can vary that some people look at 30 grams per meal.
Some people find that to be easier, but in general, you do need to have sufficient amounts of protein because collagen is a protein. It's a large protein, and you do need to have those protein building blocks to help with collagen support and preventing that degradation.
Now, when you're looking at collagen supplements, those have been shown in many, many studies to help improve the thickness of collagen of the skin. People used to believe that the issue with collagen supplements and they would say, oh, they don't work because collagen is such a large protein, it gets broken down in your gut. And how do you even know it's going to get to your skin?
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Chapter 5: Can sauna usage benefit skin health?
That's great. We'll make sure to link to all your products. We're going to talk about some other ones that you have as well, too, on the skincare side. But the collagen, we'll link to in the show notes if anybody wants to check it out. On that same topic, are there, you know, your top list of things that work? supplement wise for the skin and don't work. We know collagen is number one.
Is there anything else that you've seen that genuinely helps skin youthfulness and also obviously might also benefit other aspects of your health? Anything else you put as your second or third?
I think when you're looking at a direct impact on your skin, collagen, no question, is going to be number one. Number two, and that's going to be really so far above any of the other supplements. Now, I do take supplements every day. I think some of them can be very helpful. Right now, one of the supplements I'm taking is Nutrafol. This is actually a hair supplement.
And that, I do believe, has a direct impact on hair growth. And there are other ones, there's Viviscal is another brand, but Nutrafol is the one that's most popular. And that contains a multitude of things in it from vitamin C, vitamin D, it contains zinc, it contains biotin and many, many other things are in that.
So that's something, you know, if you've got a hair issue, I think you get a direct benefit from taking a hair loss supplement like a Nutrafol where you'll see that direct connection, correlation. Other than that, the connection between taking a supplement and skin improvement and quality is going to be more indirect.
For example, if I had to put a number two after collagen, it would probably be taking a daily probiotic. We do know that the microbiome is directly connected to the skin. There is a gut-skin axis. There are now some studies showing that if your microbiome is unhealthy, that that is has been correlated or connected to inflammatory disorders of the skin.
So eczema, rosacea, even acne, there are studies showing that these types of inflammatory skin disorders can have a direct connection to the health of your microbiome. And so, you know, I do believe that taking a daily probiotic can definitely be helpful as well as eating probiotic rich foods. So that would probably be my number two. Number three might be taking a omega-3 supplement.
That's going to be to reduce overall inflammation. I think that's great for reducing chronic inflammation. Are you going to see a specific improvement in your skin by taking omega-3 supplement? I don't know that that's necessarily the case. I haven't heard from my patients those types of direct connections that we have seen with
let's say a Nutrafol hair supplement or specific collagen supplements. But those would probably be the ones that I would put up there. I mean, I'm also a fan of taking a daily multivitamin, of taking an antioxidant supplements.
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Chapter 6: What is the role of dry brushing in skincare?
And I think overall with sun protection, there is in some circles, you know, this belief that you only get skin cancer if you have a poor lifestyle or you're eating a bunch of seed oils. And that I think has been fully debunked by medical science is that I think that when you look at let's say skin cancer and sun damage, it really is multifactorial.
So I do believe that that yes, if you are eating a diet rich in seed oils, that's inflammatory, are you going to have a potentially higher risk of getting skin cancer? By all means? Yeah, you know, I mean, it's bad for you. But But if you eat a diet like that and you get absolutely no sun exposure at all, you know, you probably are unlikely to get skin cancer.
If you combine getting a lot of sun with a horrible diet like that, then you're going to have the highest risk. And so really, I think you've got to look at everything as multifactorial. I think that traditional medicine has been guilty of focusing just on sun and not other factors that can cause skin cancer and even premature aging of the skin.
And then I think that some of our holistic health colleagues have been overly focused on just the diet being the main cause of it. And I think really what we have to look at, it is a true holistic approach to this. It's everything. All of this kind of contributes to it. And so we make our own decisions of the type of lifestyle we find that's going to benefit us the best.
So hopefully that answers that question.
Yeah, absolutely. We need to be sun smart, sun aware. And I believe there was a past guest, Dr. Alexis Cohen, who came on the podcast, who also shared some data about how if we don't get enough sun, how we also expose ourself for other cancers that are not skin based cancers that are there. People can go back to that episode. I'm not an expert on that.
She's a PhD researcher who's looked into that a bunch. So we want to be smart. We want to have a clean diet. We want to make sure we exercise, do all the basics, hydrate, which is obviously super important when it comes to skin health. And we want to be sun aware of its potential damages.
And then just to answer one other thing that I wanted to bring up, and I mentioned briefly before, a super hot topic is NAD. And so when people are looking at anti-aging, NAD supplement being a huge thing right now, there are people getting IV NAD. So basically NAD being an essential part of the body that will help to basically get energy from our cells.
And so now a lot of people, very famously, Haley Bieber and Kendall Jenner Um, on, I think the Kardashian show we're getting IV, uh, NAD. And so is that something that could be potentially the fountain of youth? I, I find that that's very interesting. There still is, we're have limited human studies with it. Um, I myself have taken an NR supplement.
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Chapter 7: What options exist for addressing excess skin after weight loss?
I always appreciate people who have a deep knowledge in their space that are entering into the foray of entrepreneurship to create better solutions available for people. So you mentioned what you guys are up to with the collagen. And last time you were on the podcast, you talked about your very basic skincare routine that anybody can follow. I think it's called like a five minute skincare routine.
Two minutes, five years younger skincare routine. Yep, takes two minutes a day. And if you've got quote unquote average skin, we found that people after about two months looked upwards of five years younger, just four products.
Do you want to just recap that one really quickly? And then you can just mention some of the products that are part of that.
Yeah, so basically the two minutes, five years younger skincare routine, we tested it on people. It's the basic skincare routine that anybody can do. And if you do this, you're going to be way ahead basically of the average person. So every morning you cleanse your skin with a cleanser appropriate for your skin type.
Ideally, if you've got dry skin, then you want to go with a more milky or hydrating cleanser. If you've got oily skin, then a more foaming cleanser. After that, you want to apply an antioxidant serum like a vitamin C serum. Ideally, if you add vitamin E to it, so you add vitamin C and vitamin E together, they are synergistic together.
And that's going to help protect your skin throughout the day and help provide that cofactor for production of collagen. And then if you're going to be out, I do recommend a sunscreen, at least SPF 30. Once again, if you're going to be sitting in a basement all day and you want to put sunscreen on, then obviously that's up to you. That's all you have to do in the morning.
Cleanse, vitamin C serum, you're going to be out, throw that sunscreen on. At night, super important, you got to cleanse your skin. You have to get rid of the day's worth of dirt and grime and pollution and especially the makeup. If you wear makeup, then oftentimes a double cleanse can be appropriate. And what that means essentially is that you use an oil-based cleanser or a micellar water.
That's going to help clean the makeup and the oil off your face first and then do a regular cleanser after that. And then you want to apply... An anti-aging cream, we mentioned retinol earlier. That's the easiest one to find. Most people tolerate that.
It's usually pretty inexpensive and it has the most science backing it and its production of collagen, its improvement to fine lines and wrinkles, it reduces age spots, even can maybe reduce early pre-skin cancers as well. And so really that's it. At night, you cleanse your skin and apply a retinol or another anti-aging cream. And then one to three times a week, you want to exfoliate your skin.
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Chapter 8: How does menopause affect skin health?
misinformed, you know, or they are not presenting the information accurately to people who buy them. Because I think there is a belief that, oh, if I put tape on my wrinkles, they're going to splint the wrinkles and will cause them to become lighter as the years go by. And that is not necessarily true.
What is true is that, yes, you can use that as a splint to remind yourself not to make them deeper. And then essentially, you don't get the wrinkles as much. That's kind of the natural nature is Botox, essentially.
You know, listeners of my podcast know that I got into health and wellness because I struggled with acne really bad when I was younger. And I found out that my gut health was kind of messed up from years of antibiotics. And there was foods that were sort of making my gut in particular inflammatory in, in particular dairy. And dairy was a large source of driving an excess sugar inside of my diet.
When I kind of really removed the dairy, um, And the sugar from my diet, my acne, like pretty much in a couple months when I was 18, 19, completely cleared up. And that got me into this whole world of wellness.
Like me, a lot of my friends and people with darker skin complexions who have had any history of acne, they have these pitting scars that they're sort of left over with, even though they're an adult now, not a teenager, not struggling with acne. What are your recommendations for how to get rid of or address pitting scars?
They are some of the most difficult things to treat in all of dermatology and plastic surgery. I tell you, it's tough.
And so first thing I always tell parents, if you're listening and you've got kids and they're teenagers and their hormones are starting to go crazy and they're breaking out a lot, especially when you've got a lot of cystic acne, you really wanna see a dermatologist and get that taken care of right away.
Because I see so many people that come to see me as adults and they've got, just like you said, pitted acne, scarring, And it really can be very bothersome to people. And so the best treatment, number one, is to prevent that from happening. So if you've got a kid who's going through that, definitely have them see a dermatologist. Do what you need to do to prevent that from happening to them.
As far as treatment of it, it's really difficult. And the reason why is what you're dealing with is skin that is... that has a very uneven surface to it. You can get what are called ice pick acne scarring that are deep scars that are very small and deep. And some doctors will actually cut those ice pick acne scars out.
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