How Most Beauty Products Age You + The Fast Food Ingredients of Skincare
with Brian Vaszily
Dr. Wendy Myers
Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. On this show, we talk about everything related to toxins, heavy metals and chemicals and how they harm your health and the surprising health issues caused by these toxins. We talk about anti-aging, including skincare. There are a lot of toxins in skincare. We also talk about bioenergetics and more advanced topics in health that you’ll not find on other podcasts. Today on the show, we have Brian Vaszily. He’s going to be talking about how to quickly achieve your healthiest, youngest looking skin and the definitive do’s and don’ts of skincare.
The main takeaways on this show are that most conventional skincare products contain harmful chemicals that disrupt your hormones and even cause mystery illness, including rashes, fatigue, dizziness, brain fog, digestive issues, and skin issues, to name only a few. Think about it, you’re slathering this stuff on your body every single day for decades and especially for women that use a lot of different beauty products and cosmetics, that really adds up over time. We also talk about how most skincare and cosmetics use cheap artificial ingredients instead of effective natural ones. There are three companies that own the majority of skin care and beauty products you see on the market. They’re looking to save money and the silicone, which is found in all conventional beauty products, is the ingredient that is actually making your skin feel soft.
It’s not a physical change in your skin from the ingredients in the product. So we’ll touch on that and go into the common toxic ingredients that consumers should avoid, including any product that contains fragrance, perfume, petroleum jelly, formaldehyde, parabens, and phthalates. We talk about how only 11 chemicals are banned in the U.S. in cosmetics, which is just mind blowing, but 1,300 ingredients are banned in Europe. What is wrong with this picture? We talk about how men and women should avoid estrogenic chemicals that are found in almost all skin care products, if they contain the ingredients I just listed, in order to protect your hormones and your testosterone. If you’re slathering your body in petroleum, phthalates, and parabens, which are estrogenic, you’re going to lower your testosterone levels and grow man boobs. Nice bonus. So, if you’re looking for that, then use conventional skin care.
The average woman uses 12 products a day with 168 chemicals on average in them. That’s shocking. Our skin absorbs the majority of the ingredients directly into our bloodstream without the benefit of filtering from the liver. You get that benefit when you eat something, but if you put it directly on your skin, you don’t get that benefit. Brian owns Purity Woods Skincare. He offers 100 percent USDA organic skincare products free of toxic ingredients. We’ll touch on that. His age-defying cream contains maple leaf extract, estaxanthin, which is one of the highest antioxidant nutrients, vitamin C, rich botanicals like amla and camu camu. They’re very effective for anti-aging and promote the production of elastin and collagen. So, tune in if you want to learn about all the different toxic ingredients you should avoid. We’ll talk a lot about skin care and how to take care of your skin. We’ll talk about Brian’s Purity Woods skincare line, which I personally use and recommend. It’s a really good show today.
Our guest, Brian Vaszily has been a prominent leader, researcher and advocate in healthy aging and longevity for over 20 years. He’s a founder of the popular healthcare destination with over 500, 000 members, theartofantiaging.com, whose mission is to empower you with the most effective evidence-based natural solutions to avoid and overcome disease, live long and thrive. He’s the host of The Art of Anti Aging’s highly respected Healthy Aging Summits, which have impacted millions of lives. He’s the founder of Purity Woods, one of today’s fastest growing certified organic skincare and supplement companies. In his long career, Brian has interviewed, guided and worked closely with hundreds of other top MDs and researchers, focusing on different aspects of healthy aging. He’s renowned for his ability to provide you with the most important steps from these diverse areas of health in a clear and compelling manner as you’re about to hear. You can learn more about Brian’s work at puritywoods.com and theartofantiaging.com. Brian, thank you so much for joining the show.
Brian Vaszily
Oh, I’m so excited to be here and share some hopefully, very worthwhile influence. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, I know my audience loves when I talk about anti-aging and proper skincare and make suggestions. I really love what you’re doing in the anti-aging space. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the anti-aging space?
Brian Vaszily
That’s a long story that I’m gonna make nice and short for you. You could pretty much cut my life short down the middle. The first half was by all accounts rough. I’ve long ago dealt with all this trauma and all that. My father was a good man till around age nine. He became severely alcoholic and abusive. He didn’t deal with a lot of stuff in his life. I came from a rough neck neighborhood in Chicago, lost some friends to gangs and things like that. It was a rough early start to life to his credit. He did quit the alcohol finally, but then he spent about 10 years dying in hospital. So, at a very young age, teens and up to around the age of 20, when he finally did pass away, I saw a lot of things that people hear, some have experienced about how insensitive and not so organized, not so together our medical system is. You can see I’m being careful with my words, but it’s messed up and it was messed up.
I saw them experimenting on him basically with various things and shoving every drug that seemed to be known to man in him. It was just a terrible experience. My mom was there with him the whole time, but it almost cost her life, just the stress of it all. So, at a young age, I witnessed all of that. I was still going through a lot of internal hardship myself. The real short story here is that the reason I’m sitting here today, even alive, is because of powerful women in my life, certainly my mother, then my sister, some really good friends, some good teachers who all just stepped up and kept me going in life. That’s the reason I’m sitting here thriving today. Aside from my own actions that I’ve taken for my life, I secondarily owe it to powerful women in my life. Early on, I was on the bad side, so to speak, out of college because I was a very young father myself. I had to take whatever job I could get. I ended up in the pharmaceutical industry very early on and there, because I was in communications at that stage, I worked a lot with very top executives in the pharma industry.
I saw, heard and experienced a lot of things. I could just say that everyone’s suspicions about the pharmaceutical industry are true. There are good people there. I’m not going to knock the whole thing and drugs have their place. Of course they’re way overused, but there’s a lot of corruption, a lot of nonsense going on in there. So, fortunately I was able to find my way out of that and found my way into the world of natural health very early on. I was behind for a long time in my life helping a lot of other very well-known doctors and researchers who a lot of people respect to become well known. Then I was at a crossroads in 2018 where I could have done a lot of things, but I was watching and I saw how a lot of messages in our society and myths had a severe impact on anyone getting older, but especially women. And this includes the powerful women in my life that saved my life, that changed my life.
I watched as even these powerful women were negatively impacted by this messaging out there that says that getting older equals becoming undesirable, incapable, doomed to suffering and disease, basically, as the joke goes over the hill. I saw my mother who was hitting her sixties at that time and then seventies, my sister hitting her fifties, my wife hitting her mid-forties, et cetera, and how they were impacted by this messaging. These powerful women and I said, that does not at all jive with reality. Now I had already been in natural health research and healthy aging research for two decades at that point. And I said, that’s the opposite of the truth. These ought to be the best years of anyone’s life. And certainly, these messages impact men too, but they really hit women hard and it can create a reality when people are thinking a certain way that this is the time I’m supposed to get old and become frail and become undesirable.
Long story short, I was at a crossroads and I’m like, I’m going to bring forward much like you do, evidence-based information to people to guide them on in a completely non-drug, non-surgery, non-toxic way how to live long and live well while living long so I could crush this nonsense myth out there. That’s basically the origin story of the art of anti-aging where I’m the founder and the host of the big events that we have over there. Then shortly after that came Purity Woods. Now that story is a little more initially selfish, I guess I’ll say, because again, I’m a research geek and I’ve been researching plants. I’ve been researching health from a completely natural perspective for decades. My wife and I both almost simultaneously started to notice at that point some pretty darn serious crows feet and other wrinkles on our faces because I’m in my 50s. At that point I was just hitting the 50s and I knew what I was looking for and I also knew what I wanted to avoid Wendy.
I wanted to avoid toxic products. I know that so many cosmetics today are just loaded with potentially toxic and darn well-known toxic ingredients. So, I’m like, I know I’m going to avoid that. I’m going to look for certified organic products and I knew exactly the right ingredients that I was looking for. Really long story short, I couldn’t find it.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, you don’t find that in any store. There’s no store. I couldn’t even find it online. There’s nowhere you’re finding organic ingredients.
Brian Vaszily
Right, and even online, I knew exactly what I was looking for and I couldn’t find. It’s available on the other side of the world in a few cases. I’m like, well, that’s not very convenient. So that’s the really short version of the story on Purity Woods. I’m like, all right, I was the first customer of the first product because I created it and I knew what I wanted. It helped me and my wife tremendously. That product today is still our number one bestseller at Purdue. I decided by the way that there’d be an injustice not to put this out to the world. It’s amazing. It really is, and that’s the age-defying dream cream today. That’s the first product we had over there. We’ve certainly expanded the line, not tremendously because I must note, it’s not easy to develop certified organic skin care products that really work and that are truly independently scrutinized and shown to be truly organic, but we have the right product mix. There you go. That’s a short medium version of the story for you.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Just to note, your Purity Woods skincare line is 100 percent USDA organic. I just want to correct myself. You can go into Whole Foods and find some products that have some organic ingredients, but there’s none that are 100 percent organic. They always have some weird ingredients in them for various reasons. You’ve taken a lot of different paths in your story. I totally identify with you talking about your father because my father had the same issues, major health issues, and that got me into natural health as well. He smoked for 40 years and was on 10 different medications and a steady 10-year decline. It’s just heartbreaking to watch that with your family member. That’s my origin story as well that got me on this path of trying in every area of my life to choose healthier ingredients. And for me, it started with food. And then after that, it was skin care. I was looking for really high-quality skin care.
When I first started this journey 20 years ago, it was just almost non-existent. You just did not have organic skin care. I wanted to talk about all the years of research that you’ve done on toxins. So, let’s talk about what are some of the issues with topical cosmetics and personal care products are some of the worst offenders. I know that so many women out there are buying products from the department stores and from the clubhouse memberships and their drug store and they’re being sold this the marketing that they’re going to help with their wrinkles and anti-aging and it couldn’t be farther from the truth. So, what are the top products or the top ingredients rather that we need to be ignoring or avoiding?
Brian Vaszily
Well, it’s a really important question. My research has gone deep and wide at this point, 25 years in now at least. I call the issue with toxins in cosmetics and personal care the number one toxin issue today, not necessarily only the worst. It’s almost silly to rank the worst, the worst, because there are some really serious issues with toxins in drinking water, for example, and that’s terrible. There are serious issues with toxins in the air, especially inside our homes. Many of us have heard about that. I could dive into all that if you want to, but the reason that the toxins in cosmetics are such an important issue that does not nearly have the awareness it needs yet is because on average, let’s put it this way, women, use about 12 personal care slash cosmetic products daily, of which contain 168 on average different chemicals. So, that means day after day after day, women are using it to that extent. Men are not too far behind and they’re increasing their use of personal care products, by the way, but let’s just focus on women. Personal care products slash cosmetics a day, 168 different chemicals. It’s very important to remember and many people do not remember on a routine basis that the skin is an organ. It’s the body’s largest organ. It is the front line of your immune system. It does the hardest work to keep your body protected against all sorts of pathogens and other types of germs and all types of outside invaders.
The reason many people in medicine want a medication to work quickly, the reason they apply it to your skin is because your skin, well, in a sense, literally eats and it eats quickly. So, if you put a nicotine patch on, if you’re trying to quit smoking, it’s far more effective to get that nicotine in your system than it is even putting it in your mouth. What does that say? That says your skin eats and it eats the vast majority of the chemicals that you are feeding it day after day, that is168 different chemicals on average daily. What happens is, if the molecules of these different chemicals are small enough, they penetrate into your body. In other words, in a sense, eat, right? Some of them penetrate to one of the three down to the dermal level in your skin. Many of them penetrate all the way into your bloodstream. I would rather in many cases with a lot of these toxins, put it in my mouth, then put it on my skin because the difference is we have more, let’s call them levels of phlegm filters. When we put something in our mouth, it’s going to go through more filtration process, including the harsh juices inside of our digestive system for one, of course, liver. But, in this case, it goes straight into your bloodstream.
Many of these chemicals are shot around your body through your blood and it’s stored in your organs. So it’s like death by a thousand cuts. And the more that we research and understand this, the more there are strong connections being made to so many so-called mystery symptoms, Wendy, which means people don’t know why they have sinus issues. They don’t know why they have dizziness. They don’t know why they have digestive issues, weird rashes on their skin, even moodiness, pain, so many vision issues, so many different, seemingly unrelated issues may well be connected with the fact that we’re feeding ourselves day after day, year after year, decade after decade so many toxins from this seemingly innocent source called your cosmetics and personal care products.
What I remind people, if they take nothing else away from a conversation like this is, please remember you’re pushing your grocery cart down the cosmetics aisle. It’s a food aisle. It’s a food aisle. You consume that. I’ve seen that there is a vast, less awareness of this than the other issues I brought up 15, 20 years ago. I was having conversations about how processed food is really not good for you and a lot of people would say, oh, that’s quackery. What do you mean eat it organic? That’s foolish. They wouldn’t let it be on the shelves if processed food was so bad. Many people don’t sing that tune today and they’re no longer calling people who were calling that out 20 years ago, quacks. Still today, I’m sure you confront doctors who say, oh, come on, it’s not that bad. It is that bad. Again, there are in 1, 300 chemicals that have been banned or severely restricted from cosmetics and personal care products. How’s this? In the United States, 11.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I just heard this fanciful notion that our government was protecting us, and it’s the furthest thing from the truth.
Brian Vaszily
Oh my goodness. You couldn’t have said that better. Nobody’s watching this. Anybody here can literally take anything, create a product out of it, made of anything, honestly, and stick it on a shelf or put it on a website and say it, it does this, this, this, and this, and you can sell it. And until further notice, until somebody proves wrong, you can keep selling that thing. Now I’ll tell you, none of this, let’s stick with cosmetics here, none of the cosmetics companies are going to allow anything in a product that is immediately and easily traceable if you have an issue with it. In other words, of course, they’re not going to be putting a hydrochloric acid or something in there, which is easy to trace, but there are about 86, 000 chemicals total used in products that are found throughout your home. Of that, 1 percent have been tested for safety. That’s a lot of chemicals that have it.
Out of all those 86, 000, there’s about 10, 000 chemicals that are commonly used in cosmetics and personal care products. A very minute amount has even been tested and when they talk about testing, they’re not talking about long term testing. They’re not even talking about midterm testing. They’re talking about short term safety testing. In other words, buyers beware. It’s a wild west and that is putting it in a very not hypey term. Believe me, folks, it is a wild west and it’s totally buyer beware of all of this. So, Wendy, when you ask me, what is the worst? Well, again, 10, 000 different chemicals were used. It’s very difficult. I’ve been doing this for decades and it’s very difficult to remember even the top 100. That’s why we’ll get to some, we’ll call them cheats or things to look for, but there are some standouts that are really commonly used that I can easily identify for everyone here. The very first thing I’ll tell you, again, let’s get the USDA certified organic and why I insisted on that and Purity Woods in a moment because that’s one of the cheats is to look for the most trusted, independent of company certifications out there.
Let’s jump back for a moment because that doesn’t exist when I’m picking up a product in, I call it the grocery aisle, cosmetic products aisle, or if I’m looking online, one thing I look for right away, and I’m sure you do too, is fragrance. If fragrance is on a label or the generic term might sometimes be scent or they get all French and fancy on you and they might call it parfum. Those three things mean the same thing. But when I see the fragrance, I put the product back. And there’s a reason for that because fragrance, first of all has been found containing or from dozens to hundreds of different chemicals, many of them endocrine or hormone disruptors, many of them potential and in some cases known carcinogens, and the companies that make this do not have to disclose anything that they tuck under that phrase. The reason is because it’s a trade secret how they get back to you. Fake smell and it’s a fake smell that we so associate with clean or pretty or whatever the fake strawberry the fake musk, whatever the smell is, they don’t have to tell you what’s in there. So automatically for me
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s a nope not taking that and the problem is most women buy products based on smell so we tend to buy products that smell good shampoo or what have you and without really thinking anything about what that’s doing to our hormones or our health
Brian Vaszily
Oh, and again, well said, because it’s wreaking havoc. In most cases that’s what it’s doing. And it’s not the only product problem. There are other chemicals that they are required to disclose to you. Now, some common sense dictates when you look and you see a lot of unpronounceable long words, it’s generally a signal that it’s probably not something you want to buy and put inside your body. What comes to mind? Well, we might have heard of phthalates. That’s a horrible ingredient that you simply do not want to feed your body. Again, endocrine disruption, other issues with that. One of the worst that is just shocking to me is that it’s not just allowed, but so widely used is formaldehyde and variants on formaldehyde.
It is a known, not a potential, not a suspected, it is a known carcinogen and it’s allowed and it’s heavily used. In so many cosmetics, including a lot of the anti-aging Asian creams and moisturizers that women and men are putting on their face. And I’m like, how is that possible? Another interesting one is Tre Laan, and it’s interesting because there was a big ruckus in the media back in 2016. It was in hand sanitizer and it was causing potential issues. Finally, that’s one of the 11 banned chemicals. So finally, they banned it, but they only banned it from hand sanitizers. It’s very common in anti-aging creams and moisturizers and other products that we’re putting in very sensitive parts of our face. Like, how do you ban it from knowing it’s not good for you at all, just when you’re washing your hands, but you keep it inside of other cosmetics and it’s allowed and widely used.
Now I can run down a list for you here of so many different chemicals, but it is very difficult to try to go that route and look one by one by one, is that good? Is that bad? So again, the major cheat is to look for independent, and I stress independent, certifications that can make you feel very comfortable that it’s low to no issues. And again, you pointed out at the very start, there are very few certified organic out there because it’s not easy to do while you’re finding really effective ingredients. That’s why we don’t have 45 different products in our lineup. We have about seven, but they’re fantastic. And they utilize the best ingredients out there for their various purposes. But yeah, that’s the story with toxins. This is such a major contributor to so many issues out there today.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I want to touch on phthalate because that’s something that won’t always be not always directly on the ingredient list but that’s going to help take that color. It’s going to hold the color in the product if it’s a pink or blue or whatever, and it’ll take that perfume and it’ll keep it in your hair or keep it on your skin or in your sheets in the case of laundry detergent. So, if that smell from your shampoo is still in your hair, that’s the phthalates doing that. That’s absolutely not what you want. And then there are the parabens that are all the preservatives. Those are in everything, especially, you think about it, these products at the department store. They are sitting on the shelf for years because the parabens in them can just keep those preservatives. So, you want to look for things with rosemary, vitamin E, things like that on the label.
Brian Vaszily
The isoparaben, propylparaben, and methylparabens are always on the label. So those are really easy to identify. But like you said, the phthalates are not necessarily, so it’s not going to say contains phthalates. I mean, they’re not going to brag about it. That’s where you have to be keen. Again, I’ve been doing this for decades and you have to be ultra trained and even if you are, I can’t identify everything. You’re talking about 10, 000 chemicals allowed to be used, 1300 plus banned elsewhere used here, who’s going to remember all that. That’s why it’s very difficult, but you’re right. We pointed out some of the most common ones such as parabens, but with phthalates, you’ve got to look for things on the labels, acronyms, DIDP. It’s very difficult in some cases. So, for me, I say just look for things that make sense to you and are not chemicals and that are natural.
Like you said, essential oils and extracts of plants as in the case with Purity Woods products, butters and things like that. They work and I will say this to people, there is a very false belief that they’re stepping down in terms of effectiveness. If they have to do this, that’s not true. Nature knows what it’s doing still far more than any human being in a lab coat, and the ingredients that nature has provided for us are truly amazing and they serve so many purposes. We know other purposes that they do inside our body when we eat them as food. There are also amazing nutrients in various ways for your skin. There are things like red maple leaf extract. This is not just hearsay. This is not just an anecdote. Look up University of Rhode Island study from 2018, and you will see that red maple leaf extracts were found to boost the elastin in your skin, probably better than anything else known out there today.
They contain unique compounds to do that. The more you dig into this, the more you realize, oh my God, sure, we’ve come a long way as human beings and with our science, but we hold no candle to what nature’s able to do with real ingredients. That’s, you know, no pun intended, but that really is the beauty of it in using these natural products. So, you’re not stepping down. You’re stepping up. When you talk about effect, I will give a little ground here. These products that are loaded with these chemicals, Wendy, they do work, but they work like fast food. What I mean is, yes, you’re going to put these horrible ingredients on your skin. And what’s going to happen is sometimes the very next day, you’re going to say, wow, my skin is smoother, and it’s true. In some cases, it’ll do that. Meanwhile, they’re sinking into your skin and causing all kinds of harm and issues, especially, by a cruel way as they bio accumulate in your body, but it’s like fast food. They start to wreak their havoc, their damage on you quite quickly, especially when it comes to the hormone aspect. Many of them are suspected again or known carcinogens, i. e. cancer. They are known or suspected neurotoxins, etc.
It’s like fast food. In the moment of fast food, many people get that pleasurable hit, that immediate result that they’re looking for. So tasty, I’m full, I feel great 20 minutes later, an hour later, a day later. Certainly over time, if you keep eating it, it’s going to have some really nasty effects on you. This is no different. This is just a smart way to go. If you don’t patronize or if you’re not a customer of Purity Woods, that’s okay with me. Again, I take pride in having the best of the best out there, but there are others now that are doing this as well and working hard to be certified and do it the right way. All I’m saying is, patronize. Is that the proper word I’m using there? I feel like patronizing is in a negative way, but be a customer and give these organizations that are trying hard to eliminate all this junk your business. Not only are you sending a message out there to the big giant corporations of the world that are in this industry but you’re of course helping your own health in a major way in some cases.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
The reason a lot of these face creams and things at the drugstore and department store feel so amazing is one simple ingredient, silicone. They have different grades of silicones in these products and they will literally fill in the little tiny lines and make them seem to disappear and they’ll feel very silky. You put them on your skin and you have this feeling like, oh my God, my skin feels so smooth and so soft. And the pricing of the product is based on the marketing budget of the company, but also the different grades of silicone in them. That’s essentially what you’re feeling. It’s just silicone. It’s not your actual skin that’s getting so soft. I just want to make that comment because that was really surprising to me. I had a friend that has a very large company, a cosmetics company in Australia, one of the largest ones. I worked with him for a little while and he designed products himself. And so I got the whole low down on all the secrets on the inside of the industry. He worked for OPI and it was really shocking that e silicones is all that you are enjoying
Brian Vaszily
It’s fake. It’s just like. Again, fast food is fake food. This is a fake result. So that’s why it’s like, Oh my God, it worked. No, it doesn’t work. One of the worst classes of ingredients that they put in these products are called penetrators, and there are different ones that I could geek out on you on, but what penetrators do is they take all these other ingredients and they suck those other horrible ingredients faster and deeper into your skin. And it’s like, Oh my God. So, your skin is fighting against all of these, honestly, in the range of 30 to 40 percent of all these ingredients we’re talking about here, the bad ingredients, they are derived from one place underground called petroleum. It’s just common sense, that’s not in this case, very common because you don’t know. The industry has brainwashed a lot of people. I don’t mean to offend anyone by saying that, but if we step back and we say, is petroleum meant to go inside of our body. Is it good or bad? There’s not a person out there who’s going to be like, it might be all right, it’s probably pretty good for it. No, we don’t eat petroleum. We don’t consume, and we’re not meant to consume petroleum. And if I said to somebody, okay, are you willing to take all these, your phthalates, put a significant load on your tongue and swallow it? Nope. Oh, heck no, I’m not.
It really just boils down to common sense that has been obliterated by mega marketing, really, in this case. People do forget that skin is an organ. I call it a double whammy, by the way, because your skin has already got a hard enough job keeping out all the other pathogens and, and potential invaders out there already. And now it’s working double time. You’re making it work double time because it does not want petroleum-based products and silicone. It does not want that and it’s like this is not good. So now it’s working over-time and a case can be made and the case has been made that you are putting your immune system at a compromised position by doing that. There’s just every reason not to use these products. They don’t work as well as the truly great natural ones do. So many reasons.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Speaking of petroleum, I remember reading an article in Consumers Reports, not the best place to get skincare recommendations, but I was reading about what’s the best moisturizer. And so, of course they only tested the major brands and so the number one moisturizer was the Vaseline Intensive Care Moisturizer. Why is that? Because it’s full of petroleum jelly. So, after you take your shower, you slather your entire body in this petroleum jelly. It creates this barrier where your skin can’t breathe, your skin gets clogged, your pores get clogged with this stuff. You technically have a moisture barrier, but there’s a very high price to pay for that. So, anytime you see petroleum jelly, you need to run for the hills. Chopra right now is saying, do not put petroleum jelly on your skin. It’s viral right now. It’s just the last thing you want to be putting on your body.
Brian Vaszily
If people understood where so many of these artificial ingredients are sourced from, many of them sourced from petroleum and then the other sources, it would just be pure common sense to everybody like there’s no way that belongs to me, meaning inside of me, period, end of story, you know?
So thanks to you in this case getting that message out there to people and then everyone listening, just casually sharing it with others. I’ve been around for decades now in this space, I guess we’ll say, and it’s where food was 20 years ago, where you still had a lot of resistance. I’ve gotten into arguments with dermatologists and I’m like, okay, are you willing to say that 168 different chemicals is okay? Are you willing to say it’s okay to put petroleum-based products basically inside your body? We agree that the skin absorbs many of these things, right? There’s sometimes 68 percent of what’s in these products. I’ve heard that figure is absorbed into your skin and they agree with everything else. When in a corner like that, they’re not willing to say, because again, if we all used anti-aging creams just one day in our life or a deodorant under arms, another serious problem with these deodorants, if we use them once in our life or once every once in a while, I wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation with you. It’s the fact that we use these things day after day, decade after decade, and it is the bioaccumulation of these thousands of chemicals inside our body.
Everybody remembers high school what happens when any two chemicals are combined, they create a third different entity. What happens when a bunch of chemicals are combined? They create something else, but guess what? We have no clue what those things are when we’re putting all these different horrible chemicals together and what they’re doing. I have seen in anecdotal cases and then in research when people decide just as an experiment to always back off using any cosmetics and personal care for two, three weeks. All of a sudden, a lot of these mystery symptoms I talked about earlier can seem to subside. I’m not promising this to anybody, but don’t be surprised if you have any symptoms and if you choose to take measures like that. Yes, you might smell with no deodorant, but there are, of course, natural choices you can make. Don’t be surprised to see a lot of these symptoms go away. And of course, symptoms are what? Symptoms are pointing to something deeper and worse that could happen or is happening inside of your body. So, that’s why I call it the worst because it is a high-volume issue and it’s still for what it deserves, one of the least known.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You mentioned the dermatologist having resistance and I have a couple of thoughts about that because I’ve been to a lot of different dermatologists looking for this and that and peels and lasers and all that, whatever I can do. It’s just amazing to me that they don’t know what the bleep they’re talking about when it comes to skincare. I have never once been to a dermatologist and nothing they sell in their offices is good. It’s all garbage. It’s all full of crap and it may perform, it might have some nice actives, it might have some glycolic acid or what have you, but it really is mind blowing the complete lack of thinking about how these ingredients might be harmful to your body in other ways. It has always continued to shock me with some of the recommendations that I’ve had from dermatologists, even for just simple skincare or sunscreen recommendations as well that are super toxic chemical-based sunscreens. So, let’s talk more about your Purity Woods, age-defying dream cream, and let’s talk about some of the ingredients that you mentioned: the red maple leaf. What are some of the other ingredients in it that are really beneficial?
Brian Vaszily
Well, thanks for the question. So again, that’s, that’s still the, you know, our number one bestseller. And I said, that was the original product that I created for myself and my wife originally. I’d known about other aspects with maple leaf extracts as well, by the way, they’re outstanding. Again, this is a research based for age spots as well. I get passionate about this because there’s so many other aspects to trees. That’s part of the reason we called it Purity Woods. It is because there’s a lot of amazing ingredients. Now, we all know this from medicine and how so many things that they use in medicine are originally derived right from real trees and plants out there, such as in the jungles, et cetera. I could talk about half an hour to you just about the power of maple trees and other aspects, but I won’t, but it’s amazing. This is one reason the native Americans really worship these trees. There are various things that the maple leaf extracts do, and they are in many of our top sellers right now, including the age-defying dream cream.
I’ll go with this route to give a summary version of the three of the most important components in a very general sense of achieving your healthiest, youngest looking skin. They are dressing the elastin and then the collagen. Those are the two primary proteins and yes, they can break down simply with age and then they can certainly be pushed to break down a lot faster by bad habits that many of us have or have had such as bad diets and overexposure to UV rays over the time. I’m 55 right now and I remember back in the day in the eighties, it was very common to put baby oil on our skin and suntan outside. Many of us are still paying the price for things like that for overdoing it on that front, and consuming other environmental toxins like elastin in your college and even more than just the natural process of aging does. The third, you brought up the big three moisture hydration and then there are still other components. There is some damage, antioxidant accidents or lack thereof, but let’s focus on those big three right now.
For the elastin, the superstar ingredient I mentioned are the maple leaf extracts for the collagen aspect. You obviously want to feed your body antioxidants, especially vitamin C. They do escalate your body’s own ability to create collagen. So, you’ll find ingredients that are sky high in vitamin C and other antioxidants in various of our products, including the age-defying dream cream. It has Amla, which is the Ayurvedic word, which is also Indian gooseberry. Same thing sky high. It’s a wonderful ingredient on many fronts. This is one you want to consume by mouth too, by the way, for different reasons, but it’s outstanding for your skin. The extract is a South American berry, really high. And that’s another one I can go on, but again, it’s got ingredients addressing those components. And then you brought it up, it does not have Vaseline. It has some of nature’s most powerful hydrators and moisturizers, and there is a slight difference between hydration and moisture. You want to moisturize your skin and then you do to some extent want to lock in that moisture. So there’s different ingredients that do that. But to your point, your skin should be able to breathe and not have a shield where it doesn’t let anything out, which is what Vaseline does.
In that sense, organic aloe vera is one of nature’s most amazing plants, period, for many different reasons. There’s organic sunflower oil, which handles more of the moisture and the vitamin E component. And I can go on. Now, one of the most amazing ingredients in here is that you’ll be hard pressed to find this in a lot of other products out there. Some of the other ones I mentioned too as well, Wendy, but one is astaxanthin. It really is one of the closest things to a fountain of youth type of ingredients out there. It comes from a variety of organic red sea algae. It’s the same thing that flamingos eat, make some pink salmon, and so this astaxanthin has unique properties, unique compounds that, and for compliance’s sake, I have to be careful what I say here that are incredibly effective at helping reverse the appearance of UV damaged skin. That said, they’re even better than that. That’s all I’ll say. Not only the appearance of, but I put the age-defying dream cream on my face in the morning. I put it on my face when I’m going outside because in my personal experience, it’s incredibly protective of sun damage, largely because of that ingredient called astaxanthin and its A S T A X A N T H I N. If anyone wants to go look it up themselves, this is a powerful ingredient and it’s another one of the superstars along with the maple leaf extracts and the vitamin C ingredients. There are several others that are outstanding, but those are really some of the superstars of the superstars in the age-defying dream cream.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I love that you have the food-based vitamin C because vitamin C is one of the most important actives that you can put on your skin for antioxidants and other reasons. I think it makes collagen. I believe I can facilitate that, but there’s a lot of vitamin C serums and things like that, but they have the ascorbic acid. They also go bad really quickly. They oxidize super fast. That’s why some of them will have two different bottles, the vitamin C and then the activator. And as soon as you open the bottle, it starts to go bad. There are a lot of problems with the most vitamin C on the market, especially the ascorbic acid. It’s much better for your body and skin to have the food base and the omelet you mentioned, that’s the food source that has the highest source of vitamin C after rosebuds or rose petals and things like that.
All those antioxidants also protect from toxins that are landing on your skin. Our number one source of exposure to toxins is the air and that lands on our skin, especially if you live in a city with lots of particulate matter. The antioxidants are super important to get rid of the oxidants that are landing on your skin as well.
Brian Vaszily
Yeah, a hundred percent. Regarding Amla or Indian Gooseberry, it’s funny because three of the most, um, and again, I don’t want to get too geeky on everyone here, but it’s not just a matter of the volume of vitamin C content, it’s the other compounds in these, and that’s what contributes to its ability to penetrate into your body. Almond is amazing for your skin in that regard, as is the camu camu fruit, fun to say. Wonderful. Amazing. By the way, it’s very sour, but if you ate this camu camu berry. It’s super outstanding for your health. It blows away a lot of the other superfoods like goji berries and everything like that, simply because it’s so sky high in vitamin C and other antioxidants. I could geek out all day on talking about all these wonderful ingredients. That goes to my point, it’s just like when we look at this and we’re like these ingredients that are out there are so much more potent for, in this case, helping reverse the appearance of wrinkles and age spots and skin that looks saggy. They’re way better than any of these artificial horrible ingredients.
That’s not why these companies use these artificial, horrible ingredients. They use them because they’re cheap and much cheaper than these ingredients and that they were easily made by mass volume inside of their laboratories and their factories and stuff like that. But again, I just have to stress that nature really knows what it’s doing. I’ve been in this now, like I said, 25 plus years. The deeper I get, the more I’m just amazed at how nature even provides that? It sounds a little hokey, but it’s true. It’s like I’m more stunned than ever, not less at how much nature really provides in terms of solutions to things that we have.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
When you look at all the options in the department stores and the grocery stores and whatnot and the drug stores, most of those products are made by three companies. So, you have this illusion of choice, but they’re really the same ingredients with different marketing, different grades of ingredients, that foster the price point and the price points are just marketed to different people on the marketing spectrum. It’s just a big racket. That is all it is. So, you have to go away from that, get on the internet and find people like you to get really good, high- quality products that actually perform. That’s why I love your product. I use it myself. I’ve been using it for a couple of years and I don’t use it every single night. I have a little collection of things that I’d like to use, but I’ve come back to your product again and again. I do use it a few times a week and I absolutely love it. It absolutely does perform and I like to put it on before I go out in the sun as well when I go on my little walks because I do notice it does have that sun protective effect and I want to put something with high ORAC or high antioxidant value on it on my skin before I’m going on the sun because I don’t really like to put sunscreen on my face. So, that’s what I use instead.
If you guys want to try out the dream cream, you can go to purity woods.com/detox and get a special discount there. I highly recommend that. You will not be disappointed. It smells great. I love the texture of it and it has so many ingredients that are shown in the clinical research to really, truly help improve your skin and they don’t harm your health as well.
Brian Vaszily
Wendy, I was going to compliment your skin. I was waiting until the end because of course, I watch these things and so it’s nice to hear that the Dream Cream helped contribute to that. You have great skin.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Oh, thank you. I have very good lighting, but just amusing natural lighting, but yeah, I’m 52 and I’ve been taking care of my skin for a long time, but always looking to gain that edge, like whatever I can use to up my game. I don’t find good products very often that I want to add to my regime. Like I said, I love the Purity Woods products or Bar None. They are very good and of high quality. I spent my entire life using the really bad products and using the Lubriderm and using all the stuff from the drugstore thinking I was doing all these amazing things for my skin, but I really paid my price and hormone dysfunction and a lot of other side effects from using all these products.
As women, we use so many different products every single day with our makeup and our skincare and I see my daughter doing it. She wants to rub lotion all over her whole body every single night after the shower and I did that for two decades and I don’t think women realize how much that adds up to many of the symptoms that we’re experiencing today. So, by doing this show, I want to help people make those distinctions and make better choices. That’s why I love having people like you on the show to really help and give people specific recommendations that they need to find products they might have a hard time finding otherwise. So, thanks so much for the work that you do.
Brian Vaszily
I appreciate that and I appreciate the opportunity. It’s important that everyone shares this type of information with other people. They need to know, they deserve to know this. And you’re right, it hits you and your health in various ways, but it is really wreaking havoc on people’s hormones and because women use so many of these products, it’s women’s hormones. You don’t need that. You don’t need to do that. And like I said, whether it’s Purity Woods products or any other good conscientious companies out there, please, I’m going to use the word patronize those organizations that are trying to do that. It’s good for you and it sends the message to, like you said, the big giants out there that we don’t want that garbage anymore.
Dr. Wendy Myers
For any guys who are listening, if you enjoy your testosterone, you do not want to be putting all these chemicals we mentioned on your body. They are primarily estrogenic, including petroleum. You do not want to be putting something on your body every single day that contains estrogen-mimicking chemicals. You’re destroying your testosterone. You’re destroying your libido by doing that. Women as well, we have plenty of testosterone. It’s just one example where these products are wreaking havoc on our hormones. Again, please go to puritywoods.com/detox. You guys have a very special discount just for my audience. Again, I really thank you for that and highly recommend it. So check it out. Brian, thanks so much for coming on the Myers Detox Podcast. I really appreciate all the knowledge you’ve shared with us today.
Brian Vaszily
Thank you. I love what you do. So, thank you.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Everyone, thanks so much for tuning into the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and like I said, I love doing this show because I want to help you upgrade your life one show at a time, giving you all those tips and all the recommendations that I make on this show to help you dramatically improve your life. It’s those small steps you take every day that lead to big changes. So, thanks for tuning in every week.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
