531: Heal Skin From Within & Stop The Unknown Damage, Lindsey Baillie

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast! Today, we’re joined by holistic skincare expert Lindsey Baillie for a deep dive into the truth about skincare, nutrition, and the beauty industry. Lindsey reveals how conventional skincare practices can accelerate aging, why stress and diet play a crucial role in skin health, and how using the right ingredients can support your skin’s natural barrier. We also explore the impact of environmental pollution, the dangers of social media beauty standards, and the mental health connection to self-image. Whether you’re dealing with acne, rosacea, or just want healthier skin, this conversation will transform the way you think about skincare—inside and out.

Highlights:

• Lindsey Baillie shares her journey into holistic skincare, emphasizing skin health beyond beauty.
• The beauty industry often prioritizes aesthetics over genuine skin health.
• Conventional skin care practices, like excessive exfoliation and peels, can accelerate aging.
• Skincare should support the skin's natural barrier with physiological ingredients.
• Pollution and modern environmental factors significantly impact skin health.
• Stress management is the most crucial factor for healthy skin, followed by nutrition.
• A whole foods, plant-based diet reduces inflammation and improves skin conditions.
• Dairy and high-fat diets can trigger acne and skin inflammation.
• The skin reflects internal health—conditions like acne and rosacea can signal gut or hormonal imbalances.
• Social media and unrealistic beauty standards contribute to mental health struggles around skin appearance.
• Simple, balanced skincare routines focusing on hydration and barrier support are most effective.
• Green tea, chamomile, and aloe can provide natural skin benefits, but must be used appropriately.
• The mental and emotional aspects of skincare should be addressed alongside physical treatments.

Intro:

I graduated from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and became an integrative health coach, and it was a wonderful program, really transformative, life-changing program. About half the people that take this online course end up doing it just for their own personal transformation. So if you're someone who loves learning or you're sick of being sick and you want to learn about how to create holistic health in your life and you want to go deeper, especially with a community, you definitely want to check out the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

Right now, I want you to go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That's learntruehealth.com/coach. It's a brand new sample class that they're giving away for free. Check out the new sample class, even if you've paid attention to the old sample class. It's free. You're going to learn something. Might as well jump in and check it out. So go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That's learntruehealth.com/coach.

About half the people that take it either want to become a health coach or want to add these tools to their already existing repertoire. You will gain a set of tools that will deepen your ability to help people, to guide people, and coach them to better health. But if you don't want to work with people and you just want to dive in for your own personal benefit, that's cool too. It really is for both. Every aspect of your life will be enriched from this program, so I'm a big believer in it, and right now, you will get a huge savings.

The class starts in September, so you want to jump on it. If you're interested, check out the free sample class, learntruehealth.com/coach. If you want to dive in, make sure you contact them. You can do it online, and you can also call them in person. If you do it online, make sure that you use the coupon code LTH, because you're going to receive a very large discount. I negotiated the biggest discount that they give anyone for my wonderful listeners.

If September has come and gone, don't worry, because they start up new cohorts of students several times a year. Jump into the program, no matter when it is. When you're ready to sign up, they unlock the beginning of the course, so you begin your course no matter what. It is really a wonderful personal growth and transformation experience.

Be sure to go to learntruehealth.com/coach, check out the free sample class, and remember to use my coupon code LTH.

Thank you for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Enjoy today's interview.

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast, I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 531.

Ashley James (0:02:42.611)

I am so excited for today's guest. We have an amazing, amazing woman on the show, Lindsey Baillie. I always want to say doctor, start with like, Dr. Lindsey Baillie. Not yet. Not a doctor yet. Incredible to have worked with you.

Lindsey and I have gotten to know each other actually because of my podcast. She's an expert in the beauty industry, in holistic skincare.

I don't want to go too much into your bio because I want you to explain your journey, but I love what you do because you and I are both so passionate about holistic health. As we were just talking, I wish I'd hit record while we were just doing our pre-interview talk because we were discussing how the beauty industry is more. Holistic health is more than just physical health. There's mental health, there's emotional health, there's spiritual health. One of your passions is the mental health aspect of the beauty industry.

Of course, coming at it from a holistic standpoint, that when we heal the body on the inside, our outsides become more beautiful, and you do that with your clients.

Lindsey, welcome to the show.

Lindsey Baillie (0:03:52.605)

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. And don't worry, just get the passion picks right back up. So I'll go off about it again.

Ashley James (0:04:02.548)

Lindsey, your website is saltoftheearthskin.com. We're definitely talking about what you do because you work with people both in person and virtually around the world to help them overcome really difficult skin issues, really complex skin issues. That's kind of the plight of the holistic practitioner that you and I both have to deal with and naturopaths have to deal with. A lot of times, people come to us as a last resort.

They had some skin issues, and they went to the doctor, and the doctor gave them drug after drug or antibiotic, and things got progressively worse and worse. Then they go, well, I've exhausted all my, quote-unquote, traditional medical, which is just a modern, drug-based route of handling it. They also noticed that their gut health suffered as a result.

Their mental health suffers as a result, and the quality of their life suffers as a result, and they don't necessarily see that it's all connected. Then they start to seek holistic advice because they're sick of the side effects of the drugs. The MD has failed them. The drug-based medicine has failed them. Then they find you. They find holistic alternatives, quote-unquote alternatives, which is really helping the body come back into balance, supporting the body's ability to heal itself. Through working with you, they overcome, and their skin becomes healthy, but that's the end result because you help them to heal, help their body heal, and come back into balance on the inside.

Did I paint the picture correctly about what you do?

Lindsey Baillie (0:05:44.636)

Absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. There are so many correlations to how we care for the skin and how we approach nutrition and just our general health as a whole. So you go through all those routes. I have this issue, I'm going to go to the doctor, I'm going to go to the dermatologist. Through the drugs they give us or creams and everything they give us, we still haven't got to our goal. 

So, skin. My number one pet peeve about skin is that people look at it as just a mere instrument of beauty. It's a vanity thing. But what do we know about skin? Everything that happens on the inside of our body is going to come out on our skin. So we have to think of it as healthcare, but the beauty industry has absolutely kind of destroyed that image of what skin is. We're so obsessed with how we look.

We have to remember that the skin is our largest organ. It's an organ. It's healthcare. But just as confusing as it is for consumers to figure out how to take care of their skin, it's equally as confusing for us practitioners because we're marketed to just as much as you guys are. So it's really difficult to find the right person with the right tools.

It's not necessarily through the fault of the practitioner because, again, we're marketed to just as much as consumers. We're being sold the next great thing. It's like, ooh, I like this person. I like what they're saying. I'm going to use this, but why am I not getting the result with my clients that they're promising me? So it's a very, very interesting landscape out there.

Ashley James (0:07:26.372)

Let's go back. I'm curious to know what led you to become a holistic-minded aesthetician, a holistic-minded viewpoint of beauty care. You have so many licenses and certifications. Listeners can go to saltoftheearthskin.com/about, and we won't list off everything, but there are so many things that you have learned. I know you continue to learn and add to your tool belt.

It's interesting that out of everything you've learned, it's been your own research that has led to shaping what you do with your clients. I just happen to know a little bit from what we've talked about, but take us back, what happened that made you want to focus on holistic skincare instead of the conventional skincare approach?

Lindsey Baillie (0:08:33.648)

Yes, so how I started this journey as a whole was an accident, because, like most young people, I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I just jumped into the beauty industry. You put makeup on every day. Can I make a career out of that? Through everything that I've done, which you listed where listeners can find what I've done and what I've learned, skin was always at the forefront and I have a very curious mind. 

My dad raised me like that. We weren't allowed to be bored on road trips, driving through Montana or the Midwest and there's nothing there. I'm bored, met, hey, we're going to learn about cloud formations. We're going to learn about prairie grasses. So I have a very curious mind.

I became really interested in holistic health when I moved to the UK. We get curious. I have this curious mind. Why am I sick? Why is my skin doing this? What am I doing that is not working? Why isn't it working? My brain is always thinking of this Why. Luckily for me I was in a place that had that mindset. It’s very difficult here to do in the US but it’s really easy to do over in the UK and in the EU because that’s kind of their ethos.  

That's where the beginning of herbal apothecaries and everything happened. So I kind of went on that journey of discovery. And it just made me want to learn more about the skin.

Ashley James (0:09:58.568)

The US is sort of where that petroleum-based, drug-based medicine really took off. I don't know if it's exactly where it began, maybe, but I know that it is where it actually exploded. That's kind of what we're known for. Is drug-based medicine and that medical approach. We've been brainwashed for the last hundred years to believe that that is the only legitimate form of medicine, and that's how the AMA wants it. 

There's actually proof to this. I'm not just saying this because it's an opinion. There's proof to years and years and years of misconduct by the AMA where they went on PR campaigns to bash every other type of medicine, and they did it for a hundred years. So if everyone takes in the media first, it was written media, everyone read the newspaper, and then you go to your doctor, the AMA told the doctors what to tell you. Then it was the radio, and then it was television. 

For generations, we've just listened to and taken in what the AMA wanted us to, and that was to protect the interests of the pharmaceutical-based medical approach. They were threatened by natural medicine. It's just wild.

Then when you are living in this, the milieu is constantly being bombarded by this, like you said, the ethos of drug-based medicine. Then you go over to the UK where it's, wait a second, it's actually acceptable to start thinking about what herbs I could take and the way I'm eating, and that they just allow it more in their culture. It's interesting.

Lindsey Baillie (0:11:52.646)

Yes. Well, this is what I tell people because a question that's on everybody's mind is, okay, if these practices and these ingredients, these treatments and modalities are so harmful, why do all skin professionals do it? I'm a licensed aesthetics instructor. I can never say my profession name. It's a tongue twister. Most people can say anesthetist, but they can't say esthetician.

Really, I'm a corneal therapist as well, and I'll get into that in a moment, but it's what we're taught in schools. It's what we're taught about our profession. So I'm dual licensed in Washington state and in Idaho, and I've taught aesthetics. I really love teaching those basics—anatomy, the cells, just how the skin functions on its own, a little bit of cosmetic chemistry. That's my jam. That's what I love doing. But each state has their specific requirements on what they require to get your license to practice, even just to put cleansers and creams on somebody's face. There's always a level of safety and sanitation. 

So we're taught basics that have been taught forever since the beginning of licensing. I think it was in the seventies, I want to say. Sixties or seventies, it was called a beautician, and you could do whatever you wanted to do in that realm.

But we're taught a very specific way because the state is concerned about safety and sanitation, and it's not necessarily the correct way of caring for the skin. If you think, okay, I have to learn about safety and sanitation to clean my space, to use a modality, to use products, doesn't that mean that that might be harmful? If I have to learn if something is safe or not, could that possibly be harmful?

So it's kind of a bummer because you spend thousands of dollars to go to school to learn these things just so you can spend a few hundred dollars more to take your state boards and get your licensing. If you really want to help people with their skin in a true way and really understand it, you have to spend thousands of dollars more to get the proper education, but it's very difficult to find. So it's very frustrating. I would love to change that process one day.

But I can only do so much for now. All I can do is get the information out there in every way.

Ashley James (0:14:13.598)

So do you currently do that? Do you currently teach the proper way or the way that you've found to be the healthiest way?

Lindsey Baillie (0:14:22.204)I teach to my clients. I do have professionals reach out to me, and I've actually published a list of resources for professionals on my blog on my website so they have more of an idea of where they need to go to learn the proper information. I'm on substitute lists for schools, so I do love teaching, and if they need a substitute, I am happy to do that. I also am an educator for my skincare line and own my own skin clinic and run that. So, if I can.

Ashley James (0:14:53.410)

Okay, I want some clarification because I'm not in this world, a lot of my listeners are not in this world. So we're kind of guessing what you meant by what each state teaches you to do, you discovered is unsafe. Can you be more specific?

Lindsey Baillie (0:15:13.346)

Yes, absolutely. So every state governs this list. They govern the list of what you need to learn to hold a specific license. That's in healthcare, beauty, anything. So in most states, it's the basics, safety and sanitation, because we clean with hospital-grade disinfectant, learn how to use machines properly, learn how to wax correctly, how to apply products on a person's face in a safe manner. All states have that kind of basic requirement, but every single state has either extras or an absence of that information that they don't require to be taught. They are all at different hours that we have to learn. So each state determines how many hours you have to go to school to learn all the requirements that they have deemed that you have to have to hold that license, if that makes sense.

Ashley James (0:16:09.222)

But you'd mentioned something about what they teach is not necessarily the healthiest thing. Can you be more specific about that?

Lindsey Baillie (14:55.766)

Yes. Most modalities that are taught in schools are to remove the skin. So we have, exfoliate to some degree, whether that's with a product or that's with a derma planing blade or microdermabrasion machine or chemical peels. I have to tell you that's the most horrible, horrible thing you can do for your skin. But again, when we're thinking of the realm, the state is thinking about safety and sanitation. It makes sense that they require you to learn that but it's not healthy for the skin.

Ashley James (0:16:49.180)

My mom used to send me to an esthetician, and this was in the late 90s. I was in high school. I actually didn't have bad skin. I was so grateful. Yes, well, no, but teenager. I was really grateful that we ate enough healthy food at home. I mean, that was my rebellion phase, so I was eating junk when I was at school, but at home, we ate super healthy. I was really grateful I didn't have outbreaks.

My mom was super into this microdermabrasion where they would take it, they'd basically shave our face with this razor, not a man's razor. It's a different kind. Then they'd apply this acid that made my face look like Saran wrap afterward. My face was wet and had no texture. I was a teenager.

My mom would send me there once a month because she did it and thought it was super cool. I remember looking at the bill and seeing that it was 120 or something. At the time, that was a lot of money for the 90s. I felt so guilty that my mom was paying for that when I didn't really need it that I stopped going. I just remember thinking this is weird. It tingled. It burned. It felt really weird to have someone shaving that peach fuzz off my face, the whole thing. I didn't really see a benefit. I didn't have bad skin to begin with. I was a teenager with no problems. Then I just ended up looking like I had wet Saran wrap on my face for a few days.

Lindsey Baillie (0:18:31.786)

Yes, that's your intuition. So many people have that intuition and they ignore it because they say, this is the expert, they know what they're doing. But then why is my face burning and stinging, and why do I not feel good about this? That's your intuition saying this is not a good thing for the skin. So many people ignore that.

In the 90s, that's when we were peeling crazy, laser crazy. We wanted just the smooth skin. Now that trend has come back. So you say that kind of wet Saran wrap look, that trend has come back, and we call it glass skin.

Yes, we don't want glass skin. Skin is supposed to have texture. Some people do have visible pores. Pore size is genetic. It's supposed to have a normal-looking skin texture. We're not supposed to have that baby smooth, super glowy, perfect skin. Social media has ruined that for us. We think that is normal.

Ashley James (0:19:27.322)

Did you ever watch the show Emily in Paris on Netflix? Okay, it's super funny. So just go watch it when you need to binge on something and just chill.

This latest season actually has this feature where they're doing this product demonstration in a really ritzy mall in Paris, and it turns out that it's just repurposed KY jelly. They're walking around, saying, you can get glass skin, look how beautiful you are. They're all walking around, their faces are super wet. Then they look it up, and it turns out the product used to be a personal lubricant, and then it failed as a personal lubricant. The marketing failed, so they just turned it into a glass skin moisturizer.

I thought that was hilarious, but it's not really healthy to apply a bunch of petroleum products anyway. Tell me, what's the downside to doing this kind of glass skin procedure where people are doing peels and the shaving of the peach fuzz and then the peels? What's the downside? Is it damaging our skin over time? Are we absorbing these chemicals? Is it having a negative effect on other systems of the body?

Lindsey Baillie (0:20:44.868)

All of the above. The funny thing is that people go in to get these treatments and procedures done because they want to chase that eternal youth. They want to have that young-looking skin. But what's actually happening is you're aging your skin faster.

To understand what that means is to understand the skin cell life cycle. This is something that I teach my clients because when you can understand how skin is actually made, we can understand what might not be good and what might be harmful to our skin over time.

So when we think of the skin, I want you to think of it like a house. The roof tiles are going to be the surface of the skin. The bricks of the house are going to be our skin cells. The mortar between the bricks is going to be the lipids between the skin cells. The flooring is the deeper layer of the cells. The plumbing and the electricity of the house is going to be your blood vessels, your lymphatic system. The foundation, how it's built, is going to be dependent on nutrition and fluid intake.

When we're thinking of how skin is made, number one, what happens in this kind of bottom layer of your epidermis—and I'll go through some more layers of the skin too—but your epidermis is that top part of your skin, and it has five layers within itself. In that bottom layer of the epidermis, there's a mother stem cell that produces a baby daughter cell, which is called a keratinocyte, which is your skin cell.

As the cell matures and migrates to the surface, it kind of goes through life stages like we do as humans. It starts out as a baby, there's a toddler phase, preteen, teen, and then it's an adult, and then it passes away just like we do.

As the cell migrates to the top of the skin, it starts to dry out and flatten and squeeze out these beautiful lipids from our cell membrane, which are ceramides that are formed to create our acid mantle or our skin microbiome.

In healthy skin, that mature cell will naturally fall off and desquamate. That's what we call exfoliation, basically, desquamation. This whole process takes about 28 to 45 days, depending on the health of the skin cells and the age of the person. The cellular life cycle is about 14 to 28 plus days. Once it reaches that top layer called the stratum corneum, that's when it starts to desquamate. It takes about five to seven days to naturally fall off.

By removing the skin over and over and over, unnecessarily, it's like we're pushing our 12-year-old out into the world and saying, hey, I need you to go away. You're bothering me. You go out in the world and learn how to be an adult, but this kid isn't ready yet.

That's what's happening with our skin cells. We're pushing it out of the house way too early.

When we keep doing that, the whole skin cell turnover, that life cycle, we just form poorer cells and poorer cells. That's what leads to skin problems. But it's this vicious cycle that we get stuck in because if we don't do these procedures, then my skin looks bad, or I have pigmentation, or I get acne, or my peach fuzz comes back. So I have to do it. But you're stuck in this hamster wheel that's actually aging you faster. That's what we're taught in school to get our license, unfortunately.

Ashley James (0:24:09.033)

So you said the entire thing takes between 28 and 45 days. So from the birth of the baby cell at the bottom layers, stem cell kind of layer, to sloughing off naturally is 28 to 45 days.

If someone has major skin issues and they're doing all these procedures and they want a total reboot, do you tell them, give me 45 days minimum? What do you tell them?

Lindsey Baillie (0:24:42.673)

Everybody's timeline is going to be different. So there's never a black-and-white answer with this. It all depends on what's the age of the person, how long they have been doing this treatment or using these particular ingredients.

Then it's going to take a while. Usually, I tell people, I see most people my age. I'm 39. So around that perimenopause, menopause age, and we've done all the things to our skin.

It can take up to a year to get your skin to learn how to function again on its own because it's kind of in phases. So it's basically trust me, trust the process, ask me questions. I will teach you and give you information along the way. If you need scientific studies, I'll send them to you because I want you to understand this process as much as I understand it because it's your skin, you're living with it.

Ashley James (0:25:35.749)

It's like the exact same process of health coaching. Trust me. Trust the process. Just do what I say.

Lindsey Baillie (0:25:43.755)

Exactly. Exactly. It's difficult. It's difficult for some people because we're always looking for that quick fix. We want it to be easy. I'm preaching to the choir. I'm my own problem too, but it takes a lot of work to do the healthy thing.

Once you get through those steps and you go through that hard work and it becomes easy and you see the results, you're like, wow, why didn't I do this in the first place? But it's really hard to find skin care practitioners that practice that way.

Ashley James (0:26:11.891)

I found that when I “took care” of my skin more, and I always leaned towards the healthiest choices I could find—more organic, less chemicals, cruelty-free, vegan, no chemicals, just those kinds of skincare products—but still, back when I had more routine around my own skincare, I just found that my skin would be super dry.

Cleanse in the shower, exfoliate, and then you get in the shower, and my skin feels like it's in the desert. It would just feel uncomfortably tight and dry. Then I'm like, why did I just take off all my natural oils to then replace them with something synthetic—not synthetic, but not of my body, exogenous—an exogenous oil or cream to put on my skin when I just took off what my body made?

My body made sebum for a reason, made my own moisturizing layer, and I just stripped it in the shower. So I stopped doing all that. I stopped doing this skincare routine, and a few times a week, I'll put on a very light moisturizer. But other than that, I don't use a cleanser on my face. I just wash my face with water.

I get compliments that I look much younger than I am. I felt like it's almost a very lazy approach to skincare. I'm like, I just look at myself in the mirror, I'm like, looks good to me, feels good to me, let's just keep going. The less I do, the better my skin and the healthier my skin looks. Have you found that?

Lindsey Baillie (0:27:53.227)

Absolutely. So you say it's the lazy approach because we've been taught that we have to do all these things all the time. So it's simple. It's like eating. It's very simple. If you eat whole foods, it's easy. It doesn't have to be complicated, but we've made it a complicated thing.

Just hearing that from you, it sounds like I don't know if you know your skin type or if you've been told your skin type, which most people have been told the wrong skin type because we actually learned the wrong skin types in school. Surprise, surprise. It sounds like you weren't using ingredients that were for your particular skin. That's a very common thing.

It's always interesting for me to hear people talk about their story and how they feel about their skin and what they use because we adhere that so much to a product, a cleanser, or I did this and I use this.

But really, we need to be thinking about ingredients. There's so much misinformation in the marketing. We focus so much on labels—cruelty-free, vegan, organic, synthetic, lab-created—all those terms that are very misused. The most important thing that I tell people is more important than the origin of the ingredient is, is it physiological?

So is the body going to recognize it? Does the skin recognize it? Will it use it? Because we can put whatever on our skin, and the body is going to use it how it sees fit or not. So we have to think in terms of ingredients.

Ashley James (0:29:26.563)

Okay, I'm so sorry to interrupt, but this really is, I think, how most people think it, so I just want clarification. We believe the skin, I mean, to some extent, we feel, as women, our face is impenetrable. Maybe we're placing a moisturizer on top, and maybe it sort of plumps up the very top layer of skin, but, I don't think we think in terms of does the skin eat what we put on or absorb. When I say eat, I mean absorb and use as raw building blocks, use the things we put on our face as nutrients. Is that how skin works? If you put on certain ingredients on your face, does the skin actually absorb and use it?

Lindsey Baillie (0:30:17.369)

Yes, the skin, that's how skin works. It absorbs what we put on it. But what is the skin made of? That's what people don't think about, especially skin practitioners. We're so focused on what treatment can I do? What does this label say? What is this person's skin doing? I'm just going to match things, but we don't think of what makes up the skin, what's happening in our skin barrier, and can the body recognize it?

Where is this ingredient? Are there other things in there that the skin isn't going to recognize? We have to think of what's the exact recipe of the skin barrier. How can we match those ingredients? The skin barrier is made of things like triglycerides, squalene, nine different types of ceramides, sterols, and phospholipids.

If our skin is making these particular ingredients, why are we putting all this extra stuff on it? Shouldn't we feed the skin what it already makes so it can function normally? I wish we could just leave the skin alone. Some people can because of genetics. Genetics definitely does come into play with skin health, but our modern-day environment exposes us to so much. Even if you live in a really clean, mountainous area with not a lot of people around, pollutants and particulates in the air circle around the globe.

To some extent, because of how far we've progressed as a society, we're being exposed to something. So we've got to do a little something for the skin, but it doesn't have to be this super complicated thing. We're meeting the skin where it's at in that moment. What you're using now, once we heal that process, may not be what you use forever.

Especially as women, we're going through all of these hormonal changes. The skin is going to change. So we have to say, what is it doing right now? What does it need?

Ashley James (0:32:22.672)

That's interesting to think that pollution, because a lot of us don't see pollution. We are so privileged to live in a place where you and I live in a part of the United States where we call this the Pacific Northwest. It has some of the cleanest air in the world, and we're privileged. Yet we are still exposed to pollution.

I’d like to talk about pollution because a lot of people have been manipulated by politics to stop talking about pollution or even focusing on pollution and talk about climate change. Climate change is not the focus we should be looking at because climate change doesn't tell you about the immediate effects it's having on your body. I think it's more motivating. Also, there's so much political BS when it comes to climate change. I hate that subject because it divides us and does not have us take action. Really, we need something that's bipartisan to have both people go, let's not argue about some polar caps melting maybe 15 years from now, or 50 or 100 years. Let's talk about today. What is affecting your health today? Because we can all agree that pollution is a problem. Back in the 80s, they called it acid rain. They just kept coming up with different names for it.

Do not let yourself be swayed by politics at all. Think about pollution, microplastics. It's ridiculous. Microplastics are so damaging that they're actually trending. They're showing that sperm count is plummeting, that fertility is plummeting, and they're attributing it to the endocrine disruptors that are in everyday plastics, plastic bottles, all the plastic in the ocean. This is pollution. This is what I say about pollution. So it's in our food. And then, of course, we have 80,000 new man made chemicals in the last 40 years. Your mom, your grandma did not live with these. Your great-grandma, you are the generation that is being exposed to new chemicals that your body does not know how to process. 

When I say evolve, I mean, even if you are a creationist, within the confines of the creation model, our body evolves over generations to adapt to a new exposure. We can see that certain Europeans can digest milk better than the average person. Ten percent of the world is from this part of Europe that has been drinking milk for well over 5,000 years, and they adapted. Their body, their microbiome adapted to be able to take in cow's milk, and they don't have any adverse effects. Over 50% of the population is lactose intolerant and has immune problems, digestion problems from taking in cow's milk. This concept that we evolve over time based on our environment, based on our diet. When I say over time, I mean a matter of generations.

But you and I and every listener has not had a chance. Our liver hasn't adapted. We also haven't adapted our diet to be able to increase the antioxidants and give our body what it needs to even have a fighting chance. So we're accumulating toxins from our air, from our food, from our water. It's accumulating in our soil, it's accumulating in our waterways, and it's accumulating in our clothing. We absorb dyes from our synthetic dyes and microplastics and bestegens from our clothing, from the receipts that we touch. It just goes on and on and on. Processed food, don't get me started. 

Lindsey Baillie (0:36:17.986)

I know that actually has a huge effect on skin health. Nutrition is such a huge thing. But you say dyes and fragrances and things like that. That's the number one sensitizer for skin, and we put it in skincare. It's one of the worst things. Even essential oils aren't that great for the skin too because they're so concentrated, and you may not feel the effects or see the effects right now. But over time, you're slowly causing and building this irritation within your skin.

Then, if you don't know your genetic background, if you have histamine response in your family, if you have any sort of gene deficiencies, you're just contributing to problems later down the line, which is why we have so many incidences of dermatitis conditions as well. I love essential oils. Essential oils are especially great for aromatherapy. They're so great for aromatherapy, but we really don't think about what we put in products, and then we put it on our skin, and we don't think long term either. We are exposed to all these things that we have to think about now, but then with what we put on our skin, we have to be thinking long term with that as well.

Ashley James (0:37:26.392)

So what you're saying because of our environment, because we're exposed to all these chemicals, we don't see them. That's the problem. We don't, unless you are in LA and it's a bad smog day, which is crazy. Even San Diego, flying into San Diego this summer, you flew and you could see the layer of thick smog. I'm sure other cities have it too, but if you don't visually see it, you don't think about pollution. Pollution—we don't see it. We don't see the everyday pollution. They say that indoor air quality, once we close our windows for the winter, is 10 times worse than being outdoors in a city with cars going by.

Everything off-gases, and there are chemicals in our air. I did an interview a long time ago, somewhere in the fifties. You probably heard it, but it was a really cool interview with a woman who takes a machine, puts it in your living room, and it filters the air. Then she sends it to a lab, and it gives her a readout of every single man-made chemical that is just floating around in your space, in your home. 

She can tell you which brand of Mr. Clean is sitting underneath your sink. You didn't even use it while she was running the machine. It was just sitting underneath the sink in a bottle. It off-gases, and you're inhaling it. Everything under your sink that's in a plastic bottle—you are inhaling it, and your liver is processing it every single day. Not to mention what our carpets off-gas for 25 years and our mattresses. If you didn't buy an organic mattress, your couch and everything. So because of all this, we actually need to have a skincare routine because our skin is having to handle the stressor of pollution. But we need to know what our skin type is. We need to know what kind of things to put on our face that our body would actually want to have on our face to create healthier skin. Is that what you're saying?

Lindsey Baillie (0:39:36.533)

Absolutely. Then thinking of what is the state of my health? What is this thing? Where is it happening, why is it happening, and what can I do to help that process? I look at the skin in a 3D way. I'm looking at your skin all the way down to the cells. Let's say you come in and you have acne, and it's caused by you living in a big city and you're surrounded by pollution or even in our area where we have wildfires all the time.

Those particulates that are in the air from wildfires especially sit within the skin as well. I see so much acne in the summer when we have these wildfires because of all the particulates in the air, but I'm not looking at, okay, you have acne, let's treat it like acne—number one, why is this even happening? I've got to go through this whole history. We've got to dig deep, figure out what's the issue, why this is happening, where it is happening, and what we can do to help this. What kind of ingredients do you need for this? 

So there's some degree that you have to take care of your skin in our modern-day environment, especially depending on where you live. But it doesn't have to be as complicated as we're making it. Your professional that you go to has to understand what they're doing.

Ashley James (0:40:52.438)

I wanted the answer to be easier. 

Lindsey Baillie (0:40:55.517)

I know, I do too, trust me. Even though I love researching it, I want it to be easy too, but there's never a black and white answer.

Ashley James (0:41:03.653)

I just wanted you to tell us to wash our face with apple cider vinegar and then—

Lindsey Baillie (0:41:11.259)

No, don't do that, my gosh. Never put apple cider vinegar on your skin ever. You're corroding your skin.

Ashley James (0:41:16.735)

Okay, rub my skin with lemons. 

Lindsey Baillie (0:41:20.008)

No, don't do that either. It's an acid. That's what you just said is a prime example of our obsession about, okay, I'm going to use this whole food to put on my skin, but we have to think of the reaction that particular food is having. So take a lemon. That's a very common thing that I see dermatologists talk about on Instagram. I'm, no, no, I've got to jump in the comments and tell people not to do this and why because we have to think lemons are acidic. When you think of acidic, you think of chemical peels. You're essentially peeling your skin. I actually knew this in my head, but I did this by accident with my husband. 

When I first started out, thought I'm going to create my own mask back bar. I'm going to have herbal powders. I'm going to do all this. I combined grapefruit powder, lemon powder, probably orange in there, all the citrus fruits. I thought this will be a nice enzymatic exfoliation for my husband. 

His skin literally peeled, and I was, well, that makes sense because it's acidic. It's an acid, and that's a base of a lot of chemical peels too. It's acids, and it's removing his skin, and he didn't need his skin removed. I'm like, whoopsies. Thank goodness it was you and not a client.

We don't think of these things. You have to think of the different chemical constituents of herbal ingredients too. The fact that plants come with their own defense mechanisms as well to protect themselves from being eaten by predators. It's how they've survived this long. How is that going to react within the skin? There’s just a particular constituent that's in that plant or that herbal ingredient that matches the skin, or do I need the whole thing?

Ashley James (0:43:12.793)

Thank you to husbands for being our guinea pigs. My husband is also my guinea pig for many, many things holistic, but you know what? Through the years he has been more open-minded, and now he kind of gets excited when I introduce him to new things, unless it involves vegetables. I know that's funny because he's vegan. He chooses to be vegan, but he always complains when I put a lot of vegetables on his rice and beans or potatoes. I'm like, no, you can't be the vegan that doesn't like vegetables.

Lindsey Baillie (0:43:44.129)

It doesn't make sense. That's my husband too. Why do I need this other thing? Then the next day if he doesn't do it, it's well, what can I do for this? I'm like, oh my goodness, I tried to give you the thing, but you didn't want another thing. So you just tell me when you want a thing and I'll help you. He looks amazing. He looks five years younger than his peers. He constantly will show me pictures of men his age and he'll be like, “How old does this guy look?” I'm like, “I don't know, maybe late 40s, early 50s”. My husband's 41 and he's like, “No, he's my age”. I'm like, “You don't look like that.” He's like, “I know, I look younger. I have healthy skin. So thank you”. “You're welcome”.

Ashley James (0:44:24.423)

Okay, so what do you have your husband do for his skin?

Lindsey Baillie (0:44:28.029)

Basics, he cleanses. I've made him a customized cleanser. He uses his toner for his skin type, and he uses his moisturizer. That's it. Men are very lucky because they have that 24-hour hormonal cycle, so they don't go through all the changes that we do. Women can have a little bit more tricky skin, and we tend to experiment a lot, which can damage the skin, and men just kind of are like, whatever. So it can be easier to take care of male skin, but he actually will experiment on his own, which is super fun. He's going to kill me for telling this story, but I tell it to everybody. So he's a blue-collar worker. He's a tradesman. He wears his work boots. It destroys his feet. I mean, it looks like he has an athlete's foot, but he doesn't have an athlete's foot. It's just so moist in his boots that his skin literally falls apart.

He listens to what I say about ingredients and stuff and kind of knows the products that have the ingredient in it. He grabbed a couple things and just started putting them on his feet. He came to me two weeks later and said, “Look at my feet”. I'm like, “Wow, they look like they're normal. They're not falling apart like they normally do” He's like, “Well, I use this and this, and my feet are better. I'm like, “Wow, that's incredible when you're using the right things and taking care of your skin with the right ingredients, what can happen and so quickly”. He always says, “Do you want me to let my feet get bad again so we can take pictures?” I'm like, “Yes, but also no, I don't because I don't want you to make your skin bad again”.

Ashley James (0:46:04.637)

We've talked a lot about what you can put on your skin. Well, we haven't actually talked about what you shouldn't put on your skin. We haven't talked a lot about what you should put on your skin because we have this dilemma, which is we don't know your skin type, your age, what your needs are, where your health's at, what your skin challenges are, and all these things need to come up for us to really know what to put on the skin. 

Again, I know it can't be a blanket for everyone, but what's the safest ingredients? You're like, okay, without knowing your skin type, without knowing your age or any of your skin challenges, what's really the safest, healthiest thing people could put on their skin?

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Lindsey Baillie (0:49:18.585)

The safest healthy ingredients that you can put on your skin are the ones that your skin already makes. So those are going to be your triglycerides, your squalene, ceramides, cholesterol, things like glycerin. I can get you a list because it's so many things that nobody is going to remember this. I just know it because it's literally in my head. So I can get you a list that you can share with your listeners too.

Ashley James (0:49:47.461)

Yes, I mean, you can. You can also say it because this is transcribed. But if you want to talk about some of your favorites, I know there's this fad that keeps coming back, let's put tallow on our skin. Let's take rendered duck fat. I don't know. I mean, I would love the smell of my skin all day. But people will take tallow, which is rendered beef fat. That's typically the droppings of a roast. After they've cooked the roast and all the fat that accumulates, they will take those and render it and then rub it on their skin or butter. Let's put ghee on our skin. Let's put butter on our skin. Is it okay to take animal fat? You just talked about cholesterol and triglycerides and those are the natural things the body makes. So is it a good idea to take beef fat and smear it on our face?

Lindsey Baillie (0:50:44.906)

No, it's a terrible idea, but it's very popular. So I listed a long list of ingredients, right? So we're just putting a singular ingredient on there. So our skin is making up these very specific ingredients and we're only giving it one of those. 

So what happens when we just put one ingredient of the whole recipe, it tips the scale and can cause issues. Some people can see improvement if they have things like eczema, psoriasis and things like that because there's a deficiency in those skin conditions. And by putting something that's high in omega -6 fatty acids on there will correct that. 

But then if you keep doing that and keep giving your skin an abundance of that one ingredient, you're going to tip the scales the other way. And that issue is either going to get worse or we're going to have another issue. So it's all about what makes up the skin barrier. It needs all of those ingredients together not just one thing that would be like, I know broccoli is good for me. I'm just going to eat broccoli forever. Well, we need a lot more variety of nutrients or the body can function. And that's going to cause some different issues in the body. It's the same with skin.

Ashley James (0:52:01.238)

So we talked a lot about putting stuff on skin. That's actually pretty interesting that the skin can actually take the ingredients. We want it to be in balance with what the skin already makes to protect the skin, to put it on the skin. But we haven't gone deeper than the skin. Your training and your certification is skin deep, but your research is far from it. Let’s talk about diet. 

Lindsey Baillie (0:52:34.456)

Diet and nutrition, what you put in your body, is so important for skin. But the topical ingredients, I always say that's the third thing you should think about. That's the last thing if you really want to heal your skin. Number one, you have to take care of your stress. Because you can be eating all the right things, you could be using all the right products, you could be drinking all the water in the world, but if you're stressed, it's going to show up on your skin. Nutrition is actually second.

So I'll tell my clients, I mean, they go hand in hand, but really get your stress under control. Because you can do all those things, but if you're stressed, acne is a big one that I see, which leads to skin picking and other issues, all because we're so obsessed with looking at our skin all the time, any little blemish and everything. So I've actually turned people away when they're like, I can't afford to do all of this at once.

First, go to therapy and work on how you're eating. Then, once you get that under control, come see me, and we'll work on the topical aspect. But nutrition is so important. It's half the battle, it’s what you put in your body.

Ashley James (0:53:46.929)

So give me the list of what's the worst kind of stuff you can eat for skin health and what's the best?

Lindsey Baillie (0:53:57.605)

Best whole foods plant-based. Even if you do eat meat, which I know some people do because right now we're kind of obsessed with this quote, ancestral way of eating—high fat, high meat, high dairy—that actually causes inflammation in the skin. Some people, because they have a good genetic background, are not really affected by that on the skin. Of course, we know what's going on internally. There's internal inflammation happening.

But if you especially have things like rosacea, acne, high amounts of dairy and animal products, and gluten as well, that is going to activate something called IGF-1, insulin growth factor one, that triggers the inflammation cascade. That presents itself differently in different people. Whether that's the degree of redness that they see on their skin, which is inflammation, or acne, or if they genetically do have rosacea, what the degree of that is going to happen.

That's a big hurdle for some of my clients that see me because they come in for skin, they want products, and they want treatments. But now you're telling me that I have to eat differently? I don't think I can do that. So that's a big hurdle. So getting that inflammation. Fried food, processed food. 

Ashley James (0:55:15.881)

This is based from an integrative health coach standpoint, not an esthetician standpoint. So I'd love your feedback. But I think fried food would be the number one. If you had to rate it, I think fried food would be, because of what you're consuming. Typically, you're going to be consuming—most fried food is gluten.

By the way, probably not organic, non-GMO. So you've got high chemicals from GMO crops, glyphosate, which is Roundup. The process of frying—nowadays, people don't fry in animal fats anymore, which, although frying anything isn't healthy, frying in oil and seed oils is even unhealthier.

It causes acrylamides and heterocyclic amines, cancer-causing compounds that are free radical bullets being shot through your skin, damaging your DNA, damaging your cells, and your body has to run around trying to repair it. Why would we do that to our skin? If you can smell fries, you're actually being exposed to it, and your skin is being exposed to it.

Just go to McDonald's, hang out at McDonald's, and look at the skin of the fry cook. Just go around and look at the skin of people who have to stand by the fryer. It's not pretty. Plus, they probably also eat that way. Fried food decreases our lifespan by something like 10 years.

There was a great book and a great interview—Dr. Joel Fuhrman wrote the book Fast Food Genocide. Amazing read. This is echoed by many other doctors I've interviewed. My mentor, Dr. Joel Wallach, I've had him on the show twice, talks about the dangers of fried food.

If that's the one thing that you immediately cut out—fried food and seed oils—because of the pro-inflammatory nature and the cell degradation that occurs from that food, why are we eating food that destroys the health of the cell immediately upon contact.

Lindsey Baillie (0:57:43.176)

That's happening internally. We always think of all those things that you said—mitochondrial health, DNA damage, cell health—we are thinking about that internally, but we forget we have skin cells. The same thing that's happening on the inside is happening to our skin cells as well.

Ashley James (0:58:00.512)

We also have skin on the inside of our body. That's something I always wonder because they say in holistic medicine that the skin we see—the smiling face, the skin we see on your face—is a representation of your internal health. It's a mirror. Your skin is a mirror to what's going on inside. There's epithelial tissue on the inside of the body. Every single artery, on the inside of the artery, is a type of skin.

There's skin within us. I just wonder if you have that eczema, that psoriasis, that rosacea, that acne, that inflammation showing on the outside, is it also occurring on the inside?

Lindsey Baillie (0:58:44.438)

Absolutely. It's definitely related to nutrition, but a lot of those have to do with hormones and genetics as well. Acne definitely can be genetic, and it's controlled by hormones as well. Things like rosacea, eczema, and other dermatitis conditions, yes, they can be caused by nutrition, absolutely, and topical products, but then there's also a gene deficiency that you're working with too. So that means everything that you put inside your body is even more important than somebody who just kind of has balanced skin and doesn't have any issues.

Ashley James (0:59:24.644)

My husband, and I've told this on the show before, and he gives me permission to talk about his health stuff. He had such bad adult acne from when he was a teenager, all the way up until when I met him, that he had to wear t-shirts to go swimming. He would never be topless out there. He's a really big guy, he's six foot seven.

He's just a really tall guy. He stands out already, and he didn't want to draw any more attention to himself with, look at that guy's back, looks like a pizza. It was really bad. It was deep. It didn't look like acne. It looked like deep fissures, deep psoriasis, what do we call it? When the acne is really deep and it is cystic acne. I mean, not to get graphic, but it would explode.

The shirt, as he wore the shirt, there'd be stains on it. I just want to paint the picture of how bad it was. Okay. So, not knowing that diet—because he grew up just going to an MD once a year, maybe, not knowing that diet played a role in anything. He had really no observation about what he ate and attributed it to his health. He says he was a typical guy, typical man. He was just a typical guy doing what he does. Typical American, not thinking that what you put in your mouth affects your health.

Until he met me. We together cleaned up our diet, and I got him to quit dairy and processed food. Yes, I got him to quit sugar. He was highly, highly, highly addicted to ice cream. So he was getting the dairy and the sugar. 

He pretty much gave up dairy and sugar at the same time. Within three days of zero dairy, zero sugar, but the thing is he didn't eat sugar every day. It was once a week he would buy a thing of ice cream and eat it over the weekend. But Monday through Friday, he wasn't really doing sugar. It was more a ton of dairy in his coffee and cheese. It was cheese and stuff in his coffee. That was it. But every day he was doing dairy, and then once a week he was doing sugar.

Within three days of cutting out the dairy and not going to sugar, 100% of his cystic acne went away. 100%. It was weird how fast it went away. Then for fun, he had a slice of pizza, and it came back. Then he stopped eating that again, and it went away. Once in a while, he'd test it, and he'd put milk in his coffee, and he'd come back and say, crap, okay, no, no dairy, no dairy.

This was a long time ago. This was many years ago, but to watch something that people suffer with for years—and he did, he suffered for years and years with it. It created embarrassment. There's a lot of emotions that I know we talked about at the beginning that we wanted to get into—a little bit of the mental health issue, not mental issue, but the mental health of the beauty industry, the mental health of our outward appearance.

He's not a vain person, but he was incredibly self-conscious his entire life because it started when he was a teenager, and it shaped whether he went to a party or not, whether he went to a function or not, because he didn't want people to see it. This is a guy who doesn't care about what he looks like, but at the same time, he felt very embarrassed and self-conscious.

Now, we take a woman who has cystic acne, and it's on her face or shoulders or somewhere people can see it. Take people who maybe do care about their appearance, or they work in an industry where it matters what they look like, or they're in the public space and it matters what they look like. There's a great mental health aspect of this. So when people come to you, how do you help them with that?

Lindsey Baillie (1:03:38.109)

I think creating that safe space to talk about it too. It's through education too because I said in the beginning, the number one thing is, okay, you're telling me all these things. So why does everybody else do all these things that aren't helping me? So getting that education out to them to help them understand why it's not necessarily the fault of the practitioner. It's literally just what we're taught, but holding space for them to talk about it.

I know there's a lot of other great practitioners that don't practice like I do, but they also hold that space for them to just talk about it and get it out to somebody who understands the skin is a huge thing. But the clients that come to me, they just want to know why. Why have I done all these things? Why is this happening? To finally get answers is a huge thing for them. I will literally tell people if you are on Instagram or Facebook or whatever social media and you're feeling bad about yourself because of what you're seeing, you need to unfollow that account. I don't care if you know them personally and they're good people to you. If they're talking about something that's affecting your mental health, you need to unfollow it.

You need to stop seeing it. Walk away from your phone. Stop looking at the mirror. Go outside. Go do something else. Go do something for somebody else because when we do for others, we stop obsessing about our looks. Not that that's a bad thing, but if you can do something for other people, that can kind of help combat that a little bit. It's such a big thing.

Ashley James (1:05:15.325)

Well, I think obsessing about anything is unhealthy. There's a difference between caring about your skin health because that's a part of your overall well-being, caring and being obsessed with. Being obsessed with is being in that vicious cycle of beating yourself up, guilt, and shame.

As we learned from an interview with Kristen Bowen a few years back, she works with dozens of people in groups, she’d group coaching sessions, and she'd find out that the people who wouldn't get results from the very results-based, evidence-based health changes they'd make—10 out of 10 people should have a positive change from what she was suggesting they do. But there'd be some people that did everything right and they wouldn't get results. She figured out that those people all the time, and this comes back to your point about stress, those people had high levels of guilt and shame.

Until they processed and released the guilt and shame, it was holding them back. Even though they were eating the right foods, doing all the right things, they still held onto their disease state because they were living in that obsession—whatever was creating the guilt and shame.

So like you said, get rid of the social media that triggers you, that triggers the negative feelings. Don't constantly expose yourself to things that bring up guilt and shame.

Lindsey Baillie (1:06:53.366)

Yes. Walk away from the mirror. Our culture has created this. Unfortunately, in the beauty industry and the skincare industry, it's made to be a fun thing to do all these harmful things. You have this issue. Well, we can just erase this, and we can do this while removing your skin and making it worse and injecting you with all these toxins, and we can change your face.

Most people have been led to believe that that's a normal way of caring for your skin because we've made it a fun thing, but it's not. It's super toxic physically, emotionally, and mentally, and we have to change the conversation around it. It's a big thing. 1:07:38.302

I look at that whole mental health aspect of this industry from a spiritual point of view as a Christian. One of my favorite quotes, and I'm going to put it on my landing page on my website because it's such a powerful thing. It's from St. Catherine of Siena, and she said, “What is it you want to change—your hair, your face, your body? Why? For God is in love with all those things, and he might weep when they are gone.”

When I found that, I just realized that this is such a spiritual problem. Talking about Botox and fillers and that whole realm is a very passionate thing of mine to give people that informed consent.

We all want to look our best. We all feel some sort of shame if we have that acne or we notice that we're getting these wrinkles, and that's a very alarming thing. I'm not immune to it either. I'll look at the mirror and say, ooh, what's that face? But talking myself to the education of that.

If you look at this other side of the industry that's saying, come over to this side, we have these quick fixes, let me just get my needle, let me just get this peel. If you look in somebody's eyes, there's a loss of spark in their eyes.

We've been obsessed with what we look like. We're looking at the skin as this instrument of beauty and validation. We have so much guilt and shame about it, and we're not realizing what the true root of the problem is.

Ashley James (1:09:16.778)

It's never good enough. You go down that path and it's just never good enough. And you know what? One day I will have laugh lines and I will have earned them.

Lindsey Baillie (1:09:25.899)

Yes. Amen. Yes. Because if you're not aging, you're dying, whether that's you're still physically here, but you might be spiritually dead inside.

Ashley James (1:09:35.775)

I can't wait to be this 90-year-old with the crazy white or gray hair, platinum hair, whatever, and the beautiful laugh lines. I'm just going to let my passion shine, and I'm excited to be that woman one day.

Right now, I'm so happy that I do almost nothing to my skin and my diet. I guess I'm managing my stress because my skin looks great.

Lindsey Baillie (1:10:06.117)

You're taking care of yourself in a healthy way.

Ashley James (1:10:09.993)

I am. I focus so much on sleep optimization and nutrition that it comes through. My skin used to be oily and dry back in the day, but like I said, the more I used products, it just got worse. When I stopped using products, it kind of just got better. I like that minimalistic approach.

Is there anything in the kitchen that is okay to put on the skin? Coconut oil? Is there anything people could just reach for that's not going to be harmful? It might sort of be helpful, but is there anything okay to put on the skin just in general that you can say is out there in the grocery store or in the kitchen?

Lindsey Baillie (1:10:58.129)

I'm not a huge fan of that. Because of what I said earlier about what else is in that ingredient and how that's going to affect the skin. But one of the things that I do tell clients to do if they're having a skin flare-up or something—oatmeal. Oatmeal baths are amazing. Oatmeal calms the skin. It's an amazing ingredient. I've yet to experiment with other things because I know oatmeal can trigger gluten reactions too.

So I'm not speaking to people with celiac or anything like that. But if you make an oatmeal bath or let's say you have an eczema flare-up on your skin and you don't have the right product or whatever to put on your skin, you can create a paste of that oatmeal and water to put on that. Oatmeal calms down that flare-up.

Ashley James (1:11:51.735)

What about aloe?

Lindsey Baillie (1:11:52.871)

Aloe can be good if it's pure aloe. Pure aloe. I forget the name of the particular chemical constituent in the leaf between the gel and the leaf that can irritate the skin, but pure aloe gel can help. Absolutely, pure aloe gel, especially for sunburns, is excellent.

Ashley James (1:12:13.347)

It's important that you mention that there is a membrane between the gel and the skin. That's why you don't want whole-leaf aloe. Don't drink whole-leaf aloe unless you have constipation because that irritates the skin of the intestines and causes diarrhea. So it actually would be a great natural way to rescue yourself if your constipation has gone out of control.

Aloe just in the gel is wonderful for skin, good inside and out. You can drink it. I have two interviews about drinking aloe and its benefits. Actually, we mentioned it in a third interview where we talk about the anti-cancer properties of it.

Yes, just get yourself a giant aloe plant, tear it off, squeeze out the gel, and go to town. Is that something that you could say a hundred percent of people, no matter what kind of skin type, would benefit from aloe or is there any exception?

Lindsey Baillie (1:13:14.575)

Except for people with rosacea. Rosacea is a very tricky condition in the osmotic balance. So the balance of water and salt is very temperamental. If you use too many hydrating ingredients, it can actually cause the rosacea to swell, cause more inflammation, and make that condition worse. The same with too many lipids too.

So we think of your cream-based skincare products or ingredients. There's this delicate balance with specific skincare conditions. But when I reach for things like, aloe or chamomile is another great herb for calming down the skin. Aloe, it's more of a medicinal purpose. Sunburn, number one, sunburn, or we have some sort of flare-up, or the skin is just really inflamed. So I tend to look at it more as a medicinal way.

Ashley James (1:14:13.787)

Could we make a chamomile tea bath?

Lindsey Baillie (1:14:13.787)

Absolutely—and green tea, green tea is excellent in a bath as well. Drinking green tea, having a green tea bath, it's really, really calming and excellent for the skin.

Ashley James (1:14:28.799)

I just learned more about green tea and how it helps our DNA and helps the mitochondria, how quickly it helps the mitochondria. So I'm now back to drinking my matcha lattes that I make every day. I'm back to drinking those because of how healthy green tea is. Dr. Greger, I had him on the show and he has an amazing library of knowledge for free that he provides where he pores through scientific studies and then he figures out which ones are legitimate because I can't believe how much BS is out there. 

As a listener, you probably have seen some BS come out of the studies in the last four years that were debunked. But he goes through and he makes these great videos and blogs where he dives through this information. 

Just recently posted, I think it was on X, one of his lectures, a little clip from his lecture on the surprising benefits of green tea. I knew how good green tea was before, but now I'm hooked. Because that's one of the anti-aging aspects of it, how protective it is of our DNA, of our mitochondria, of our cells. So if you want to protect your skin, green tea.

Lindsey Baillie (1:15:48.207)

Absolutely. Yes, green tea is excellent to drink. Everybody should be drinking green tea. It's so wonderful for skin health. It helps to actually create the proteins that make skin cells. So skin cells are keratinocytes, keratin, keratin is a protein and that's what our skin cells are made of. So green tea can help make healthy skin cells.

Ashley James (1:16:10.213)

What other foods or herbs are excellent for making healthy skin?

Lindsey Baillie (1:16:17.019)

Just getting a variety of nutrients. So getting your vegetables, cruciferous vegetables are excellent for those who suffer with acne conditions, getting your fruits, your whole grains, getting enough protein as well, just having a variety. So it's hard to pinpoint one food because just experiment with your vegetables, experiment with your fruits. Here in the U.S. especially, we do not eat enough of that at all and fiber too. Surprisingly, something that I talk about with my clients is your elimination. I ask them, are you pooping every day? Because if you're not, you're holding onto those toxins, and it's coming out in your skin. We need to be pooping at least once a day, if not more. We have to get that out.

Ashley James (1:17:08.155)

So some, some people can look some holistic practitioners can look at skin and map out the health of different organs based on the presentation of skin issues. So like, you have acne around your mouth. That means you are constipated. That kind of thing. Do you do that or can you look at someone's client's face and go, how's your blood sugar? You could just see it on their face that they're wearing their internal health issues.

Lindsey Baillie (1:17:36.307)

Absolutely. Especially you say your blood sugar, that type of skin will tend to have more of a sallow appearance, and it almost looks a little bit sludgy, which means that there's a slow cellular turnover. So there's kind of a backup of those skin cells. Especially acne along the jawline and down the neck is going to indicate digestion issues, hormonal issues.

Acne on the forehead can be caused by hair products, touching your forehead a lot, or it can indicate mental health issues. Between the eyebrows and down around the sides of the nose can indicate thyroid issues or stress. Cheeks are usually stomach, lungs. You can definitely tell what's going on internally, and then I'll look at their consultation form and say, okay, yep, that's exactly what's happening here because you've indicated I don't eat well or I'm really stressed. I can see that because we have acne in this particular area.

Ashley James (1:18:41.313)

Let's go through some of the major skin health issues that people have. The whole world can't come see you, so what is your best advice that you can give?

Let's just go down the list. I'll start with acne. Everyone listening who suffers with it, and there are different types of acne. So maybe you want to talk about that, but in terms of what advice you could give them.

The do's and the don'ts. What you should do, what you shouldn't do that will really help clear up your acne that we haven't already talked about. Maybe even a mom is listening, and their daughter has it or their son has it, so teenagers or something. So what do we recommend specifically? What's the best advice you can give the world about acne?

Lindsey Baillie (1:19:34.449)

Acne is going to be nutrition. You say the teens, pre-teens, we're definitely starting to see acne a lot younger because of our modern-day world. We're starting to hit puberty a lot earlier, unfortunately, and so we're starting to see acne as early as eight or nine years old. It's pretty interesting.

With young skin, especially, you don't want to do too much skincare. You don't want to take them in for regular treatments and things because this is such young skin. It's still learning how to form itself, it's still really susceptible to the environment, and it's learning how to form its skin microbiome. So we don't want to do too much to that skin.

With those younger kiddos that are starting to get that kind of prepubescent acne, cleanse and moisturize your skin. That's it.

Get the diet under control. Young kiddos tend to eat a lot of sugar. How much candy are they eating after school with their friends? Kind of getting that under control. With acne, dairy is going to be a big, big culprit. If we can minimize dairy or get rid of it altogether, that would be ideal because it's going to stimulate that IGF-1 production, that insulin growth factor one, that's going to stimulate inflammation in the body, which is going to show up on the skin.

I'm a fan of hormone testing too, throughout these different periods, especially for women. I will actually refer them to a naturopath, or if they don't want to work with a practitioner and they don't have insurance, send them a link for the Dutch test just so we can get an idea of what's going on hormonally in the body to see what might be driving that acne.

Ashley James (1:21:28.985)

My mentor, Dr. Joel Wallach says most of the time acne is a blood sugar issue or at least blood sugar issues sustain the acne because acne is a bacteria that's fed by sugar. So think about you've got bacteria in a petri dish, but you only put bacteria in a petri dish. It's not going to grow. You got to give it food. And what we give it is a high process diet, which is high in sugar, high in processed sugar. And you're just feeding that bacteria that lives under the skin, guess, or in the skin.

Lindsey Baillie (1:22:01.721)

Absolutely. Yes, getting your blood sugar under control is going to help most skin conditions.

Ashley James (1:22:05.997)

But getting your blood sugar under control is eating a healthier whole foods diet void of processed foods. If you have blood sugar issues, please check out my three interviews I did on Mastering Diabetes. Go to learntruehealth.com and use the search function, search Mastering Diabetes. 

Just outstanding, outstanding men, two men that wrote this book, Mastering Diabetes. Also, just listen to the audiobook, Mastering Diabetes. But I think the interviews give a great preface for it and explain how to heal the root cause, which is healing the insulin resistance.

You said, if we cut out the processed food and start eating whole foods, cut out oil, cut out these processed high fat, high processed fat, high processed sugar, helps the body come back into balance.

I've seen it. I've seen it with people that when they balance their blood sugar through diet, through a healthy diet, through a life-sustaining, healing way of eating, not a temporary diet, it is a reflection in their skin.

Lindsey Baillie (1:23:16.621)

Absolutely. Just like you mentioned with your husband, it can happen very quickly. I will tell you, when I started eating just whole foods and more plant-based foods, within two weeks, all redness was gone out of my skin. To me, that said, I could not believe the amount of inflammation that I had because we just normalized these things.

I have a Celtic background. That's my ancestry. I have very pale, translucent skin. So of course, I'm going to have red skin. Well, actually, it's a lot of what I'm eating. You can see those changes very quickly, but it's sustaining those changes. That's going to be the root cause of healing your skin condition.

Ashley James (1:23:59.957)

Yes, a lot of my clients lose between five and ten pounds their first one or two weeks of working with me. I tell them really quickly that wasn't necessarily fat because they're like, “My gosh, everything's looser. My pants are looser.” They start noticing.

I say, that's inflammation leaving your body. If we did a Dexa scan and we could see ounce per ounce what you lost, it wouldn't have been bone tissue. It wouldn't have been muscle. It was mostly that excess water from inflammation. Maybe you lost a few ounces of fat, but most of it was inflammation. That's the first thing to go when you get on a healthy diet. You can see it in the skin because the skin is the reflection of our internal health.

Lindsey Baillie (1:24:47.716)

Absolutely. Us as women kind of obsess about whether we are getting what we call turkey neck right under our chin. That's an accumulation of fluid and inflammation. You don't need surgery. You don't need an injection or whatever the treatment of the week is. You don't need that. It is inflammation, and it is fluid accumulation.

Ashley James (1:25:15.992)

What is that? What is it called? It's called Gosha. What's the name?  Gua Sha. Yes, Yes, Yes. I'm pronouncing it like a white person, Gosha. It's that thing where you take a utensil and you are moving the lymph to help drain it from the body, physical manipulation, physical lymph massage, which is great and all, but if the lymph influence is going to keep coming back because of your diet. So you got to do both.

Lindsey Baillie (1:25:49.604)

Absolutely. It can be as easy as the way that you're sleeping at night. I mean, we have to think very minuscule, where's this root cause happening? So one thing I noticed about myself is I noticed one side of my face is a lot droopier than the other. Normally we would think, okay, I'm just getting older. I guess I need an eye lift or I need Botox or whatever. I need something to lift the side of the face. But really, am I sleeping?

A certain way or do I lean a certain way and I tend to sleep on one side of my face and I notice I kind of smoosh down my skin and that's what's causing it. So we have to kind of follow this investigative path. Why is this happening? Even I'm on the computer all the time. So I have an accumulation of fluid and I have neck wrinkles that are deeper because I'm always looking down because I'm on the computer or I'm writing. So if I want to change that, it doesn't have to be this dramatic thing. I have to change my neck position.

Ashley James (1:26:50.378)

Right, get one of those desks that architects have where what you're writing on is a little bit higher, it's on an angle. I have a really healthy fear of any kind of surgical procedure that is not life-saving. I have a healthy distrust.

I think we should, I think we should. I don't think we should be, it's like going to the spa. Let's get a little eye tuck. No, dude, you're going under for general surgery. You're going to be put under anesthesia. You have a chance of dying. Look at Barbara Walters, we've lost so many amazing women because of just stupid vanity. I wish, I wish as a society, we could love women as they age. Maybe it's happening a bit more.

I really wish we could just love women at every stage in life and respect them.

Lindsey Baillie (1:27:54.314)

Yes, that's becoming the thing. It's such a huge thing. We've made it a fun thing. We've made it a fun thing. I love that you sound like that because that's how I sound when I talk about it. I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but it's a literal issue. If you go to, there's an account on Instagram called Never Tox, and their website is toxsafety.net. 

Ashley James (1:28:15.953)

Is it like toxic, T-O-X ?

Lindsey Baillie (1:28:18.718)

Yes, T-O-X. Never T-O-X, they are huge advocates on bringing awareness to how toxic Botox and fillers are. There are so many people that have been injured by this. I don't know if you've seen, I think it was last year, there was this video that was being shared around of this teen boy who was getting Botox for his migraines, which is a bandaid approach, of course, it's not really getting to the root cause.

He had always done it. Then just this one time, he got injured by Botox, and now he has severe migraines. He has uncontrollable seizures, and he has just graduated from high school. This is his life now. So you could get these things 99 times, and on the 100th time, congratulations, you've had life-altering poison. 

Ashley James (1:29:11.553)

For what? For what? For slightly fewer wrinkles? Embrace your fricking wrinkles. Okay, the healthier you eat, you're going to look younger. Go look at some raw vegans in their seventies. They look like they're in their thirties. It's insane. Go look at people, look at their skin, who eat incredibly healthy. But also, let's not care so much to the point where we're destroying our health.

I just want a little side note. I got to share this story. I have a friend whose wife at the time really disliked the look of her face. And it's so sad because she's so beautiful. She's from a different country. Her face structure just doesn't look like the average American, okay? She has a very tiny chin. I'm not going to say she's Asian, but she's a very petite woman of Central America, South America, which might have some Asian in there.

We’re all kinds of mutts at this point. We're all kind of mixed. But she has almost no chin, but I think she's so beautiful. She's petite, and she's got this beauty. Her skin is beautiful, and she looks very young for her age, again, the genetics.

She goes in for surgery in LA to a plastic surgeon to have a chin implant to put in and she’s on the table and he’s doing something, she’s not asleep yet. He hasn’t put on her general anaesthesia but she changes her mind. The intuition kicks in. Her husband is out in the waiting room, and she gets this intuition to stop. She says, I don't want to do it. I've changed my mind. Now she's lying on the table. He hasn't given her the general anesthesia yet. She goes, I changed my mind, changed my mind. He doesn't listen to her.

It's like rape. You're very vulnerable at that point. She goes, I changed my mind, changed her mind. He goes, no. He basically just puts the drugs in her, sends her off to sleep. She's yelling out for her husband. He can't hear her.

She wakes up, she feels, she's kind of groggy. Doesn't really remember everything clearly until the anesthesia wears off when she's home. But she gets this pain in her neck, and it doesn't go away. It gets worse and worse and worse. Her chin gets worse and worse and worse. The pain is burning. It's intense. Her body's rejecting the implant.

The unfortunate thing is, in order to put this implant in, he shaved her bone. She had a very tiny jawbone to begin with. She got it taken out by someone else, and now she has a deformed chin.She suffered from an implant illness, which I have a whole interview called Breast Implant Illness. This is where we really discovered it, because breast implants are more common than chin implants or calf implants. They're the most common sort of implants, cosmetically. At least, I'm guessing. I think that's a pretty educated guess.

I just can't believe how many years it took for this to come to light, I guess because of social media. It's wow, I feel really crappy, and my doctor's gaslighting me. Wow, I also have a breast implant, and I also feel that way. My doctor's also gaslighting me. Then all the women's voices lit up on Instagram. This is actually a problem.

Breast implant illness, although women have suffered with it for decades, is finally recognized as a thing. But many surgeons still haven't learned about it. You can go to learntruehealth.com, type in Breast Implant Illness, and listen to that episode.

The reason why I'm talking about this is we go down this rabbit hole because it's so appealing in the public eye. Let's just get a facelift. Let's get a chin tuck. Let's get this filler put in our lips. Let's take the fat from my butt and put it in my lips. It's natural. It's my fat. Let's put it here. Let's do this.

Every time you're doing something there to change, alter your appearance, first of all, you're telling your unconscious mind you're not good enough, and you don't love yourself or accept yourself the way you are. There's internal conflict. But also, there's a chance you could be doing damage that then you suffer from.

I would rather you feel beautiful the way you are and focus on feeding your cells—every cell in your body—the deepest, richest nutrition you can so that you radiate with beauty on the outside as a result.

If you want to go get those things done, I still support freedom of choice. I am one of those people. You do you. But I just want you to know the full extent of what's going on, because most women don't.

Lindsey Baillie (1:34:24.221)

Yes, it's that informed consent. It's that informed consent. That's such a heartbreaking story, and I've got one to tell you too, which is why I'm so vocal about it too. I think we need to, number one, rally around each other as women. If you're going to make that decision, that's fine, but you should have both sides of the story, and you should know the risks that come with that, and those aren't being talked about. Women are being bullied into this, whether the surgeon or injector means to do it or not. 

Usually, it's a sign of their own issues that they have themselves, which is why they do what they do. It makes money, and they can do it because of their scope of practice. But they're not getting the informed consent out there because the companies that are making these products that are being given, they spend millions of dollars in marketing to make this practitioner believe that what they're doing is the right thing to take care of whatever issue that is. When I was teaching, I was substituting at the time, substituting teaching aesthetics. There was this young student, and she—lovely girl, just wonderful personality, adorable, beautiful, just a wonderful person. She had come in to school one day, and usually, she always said good morning to everybody, and she just kind of went into the classroom. I was asking the other students, what's going on? Has something happened? Is everything okay? What happened was she had gone to a filler appointment with one of her friends just as moral support. She wasn't going to do anything. She didn't want to get that thing. She didn't believe in it, didn't want it.

She told me that the injector proceeded to ask her, you don't want anything done at all yourself? And she was, no, I'm good. Well, I can see this side is a little bit different than this side of your face, and we could put some filler here, and we could put some Botox here. She's young, and got talked into it. She was so upset that she did it and hated the way that her face looked. She was in tears. That moment changed me forever. That is the moment I realized that I need to be vocal about this because that was not okay. That is what is happening behind the scenes. It's either being looked at as this fun thing, and this is how you take care of wrinkles, or this is how you get rid of acne, or they're bullying people into getting these things. If you're aware of this and you're doing that, shame on you. That's terrible, and it's heartbreaking.

Ashley James (1:36:57.827)

I had a similar experience with an esthetician when I was getting my eyebrows waxed. This is again, 16 years ago. She's like, don't you want your chin waxed? Don't you want this? I'm like, no. She's like, I can see this. I can see a black hair. I can see—I'm kind of like—I'll just get it with a tweezer. It's just—I don't want to wax my entire face. She ended up just slathering.

There was also a language barrier, but she ended up slathering my neck and face with wax, and I'm sure it was the wrong temperature because I was red for two weeks. My skin got raised and red, and it was so painful for weeks. All I wanted was my eyebrows done. I stopped waxing a long time ago because I kept having these really bad experiences.

That's actually happened to me twice where the esthetician ended up just hovering from neck to eyebrows, my entire face, and then just peeled it. I'm like, I didn't want that. Once you're on the table, they're like, no, I see this. You have to do it. Then they charge you extra because they're like, I didn't ask for that. It's kind of wild. You've got to be really, really protective of yourself when you're around people that are pushing these services.

Lindsey Baillie (1:38:14.445)

Yes, that's poor professional practice. I mean, I get it, you want to stay in business, but that's not the way to do it. That's why you have to be an advocate for yourself. But again, it's hard to find the right person to help you with that.

Ashley James (1:38:27.181)

They're making women feel bad about themselves to sell your service. That's disgusting. That kind of sounds like most of the beauty industry. So we've talked about acne, let's touch on a few of the more common skin issues. Is eczema and psoriasis similar enough that you can kind of put them in the same category when it comes to dermatitis, when it comes to giving some general homework for those people?

Lindsey Baillie (1:38:59.676)

Yes, absolutely. So eczema and psoriasis, they're under dermatitis conditions. So it's the same. Number one, those are going to be a genetic issue as well. So you're going to be predisposed to have that. But that's going to be very common in dry skin type conditions. So making sure that you're not stripping the skin, your skin should never feel squeaky clean. That means you've stripped the skin of all of its natural lipids. We don't want that.

Then making sure that we have adequate moisture. It's very simple to take care of those issues. Diet again is going to have a play in that. Gluten can be a big trigger for those conditions. But just kind of paying attention to what triggers those reactions. I know for me, I have eczema, it's genetic, my mom has it. Corn is a trigger for me.

So I can have a little bit of corn, but when my legs start getting itchy, I start getting those rough patches, I've gone overboard. So it's paying attention to those triggers. If I'm shaving, it does it to me. So I just really don't shave my legs that often. I just don't really care about it either. It is what it is.

Ashley James (1:40:16.358)

Yes, yes, let's just grow our hair back and if enough of us do it, let's just shave. Women didn't shave until the razor industry wanted to double their sales. So they put out media to make a shaved woman, which at the time was actually unattractive because shaved women, hairless legs, and hairless underarms were associated with underage girls. That's kind of disgusting for a man to be attracted to, I mean, it's wrong and disgusting. So imagine you're an adult male, you're in your 30s or 40s, and you see a woman with no hair, they would associate that with a seven-year-old girl. So that's actually unattractive. 

What they did was they had to change their minds. I think it was, I can't remember the exact timeline, it might've been the 50s, but they made commercials of women, we must have been, it was kind of in that whole movement, the same, the similar timeline of convincing women that smoking cigarettes was associated with women's liberty. So they wanted to double the sales of cigarettes while only men smoked because it was considered masculine and disgusting for women to do that. And then they put it on the media. And again, this is how much media manipulates us as a population to make us think that only drug -based medicine is effective, right? For example, they've been doing that for a hundred years, but now they had us go from women who had hair on their legs and hair on their underarms. That was a sign of you're now available, right? You're now a fully grown woman, right? And you're no longer prepubescent. And you're available to be sought after to be considered for marriage. And that was considered sexy. 

I'm actually thinking of fashion where they tried to hide hair with leggings and stuff. Then they wanted us to shave. Maybe it was earlier than the fifties, but I'm just remembering the commercials and how it shifted. There were actually pictures in magazines in the early 1900s, where there were women with hair and that was normal. That was considered fine. 

 I think we should start questioning everything. Why do I do this? Why do I shave? Why do I wear this? Why do I use this product? Why do I put on perfume? We should question. We don't have to douse ourselves with chemicals that cause cancer to make people like us. There are alternatives, but we should start questioning the habits that we were just taught were normal. They're unhealthy. They're unhealthy and we should start looking at it. Yes.

Lindsey Baillie (1:43:00.528)

Yes. Why did they happen? I mean, there's a lot of sinister reasons for a lot of things. You talk about being hairless too. That is very much tied to the pornography industry as well. Making yourself, as a woman, be bright and shiny and perfect for those sinister reasons. That's why it's hard for me to think of it in a secular way because everything is such a spiritual issue and it's tied to a sinister reason. There's a lot going on behind the scenes in that realm that we just don't think of. I do talk to my clients about that too. If I could just plant that seed so you can just maybe have a think about that.

There's a great book if you're interested in the history of just the beauty industry and cosmetics and everything. It's called Beauty Imagined. It kind of goes through the history of cosmetics and beauty. It's really interesting because a lot of things that we do today are tied to a medical purpose. It started out for a medical reason, as like, you know, the snake oil of the season, if you will, and then it's turned into what we have today. It's just interesting to learn how we got here.

Ashley James (1:44:16.665)

Would that be a good book for moms to give to their daughters coming of age or teenagers so that they understand what's behind things before they just go putting whatever makeup they see on TikTok on?

Lindsey Baillie (1:44:30.960)

Absolutely that one. There's also a book called Skin Side Out by Robin McAlpine that actually breaks down just the skin, makeup, everything in a very simple way, in a way that I've been talking about too, but it's in a book and there's even more. So those two books would be a great gift for anybody.

Ashley James (1:44:53.836)

The idea of chicken skin or keratosis pilaris, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, it's usually, for me, it's usually people see it on their arms, they feel their arms, it's all bumpy. I don't know if it shows up on the face.

Lindsey Baillie (1:45:09.242)

No, not the face, but it can show up on the neck and the back. My husband actually has that and it's all over his body and his flares up when he eats high amounts of meat. He drinks alcohol and doesn't moisturize his skin.

Ashley James (1:45:21.648)

So my clients through the years, it's been 13 years that I've been helping clients to go gluten free, which means cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats. Oats contain gliadin. So that goes out the door with the gluten and not replacing it with gluten free processed foods. So you don't, now that I'm gluten free, I'm going to eat in the gluten free section. Nope. You can have your healthy starches from whole foods. But it's actually easier. It was just so funny. You and I have discussed that once you eat whole foods, it's infinitely cheaper and easier and also the healthiest way to eat too because you're not opening packages, you're just chopping up something. I steam the potatoes, steam the vegetables or saute them or bake them and make the lentils and quinoa or brown rice or buckwheat. There you go. It's so delicious.

Sometimes we can make a sauce to go on top and it's super yummy. But also it's super simple and it's much more nutrient dense. It's a void of all those chemicals and processed food. But what I see with my clients for the last 13 years is those with chicken skin. They don't even necessarily tell me they have chicken skin beforehand because someone with chicken skin is not going to go find a holistic health coach to teach them how to eat to get rid of their chicken skin. They don't even associate that with their diet. They just go, why does my skin feel that way? Feel your arms, feel your forearms. Are they smooth or are they bumpy? The bumpies go away when they cut out barley, wheat, rye, and oats and incorporate healthier whole food starches. That's been my experience for 13 years. That one change—cut it out. You can eat all the other kinds of whole grains, but cut out those four.

It's really amazing. If we see skin on the outside of our body not forming correctly like dermatitis—that is not a healthy formation of skin on the outside. Same with chicken skin, not a healthy formation of skin on the outside. Is it also doing that to the inside? Is it also doing that to our intestines, which is skin?

Our lungs are a type of skin, and most importantly, our cardiovascular system is a type of skin. The inside of our arteries—are they bumpy, inflamed, damaged, which then can increase cardiovascular death? We can go down that rabbit hole.

How much is it similar? The skin on the outside, the health of the skin on the outside versus the health of the inside. I love that people come to you, women probably mostly come to you for looking more beautiful, looking their most beautiful self. What really needs to happen is a revamp to help their entire body, every single cell in their body, be the healthiest it can be.

Lindsey Baillie (1:48:38.118)

Absolutely. I always change the conversation. It's not about beauty, it's about health. When we're healthy, we just naturally look what we would consider beautiful. So the goal is healthy. That's the goal—healthy. Healthy skin is glowy, dewy, has good color, less blemishes, less texture because it's functioning the way that it should be. So the goal is health, not beauty. Beauty is just a kind of a “side effect.”

Ashley James (1:49:09.254)

Am I going to say this right? Melasma, which is always called liver spots.

Lindsey Baillie (1:49:10.494)

Those are different. Melasma is hormonal mediated pigmentation. I see that a lot in pregnant women. Hormone testing is key. We've got to understand what your hormones are doing.

Pigmentation is really tricky because it depends on the degree of damage that's been done. When we’re thinking about our skin as a part of our immune system. Pigment is created to protect the body, and that happens when we are exposed to the sun. Sunlight hits our eyes. Melanin-stimulating hormone is stimulated to start pigmentation so our skin can be protected. This can go awry in so many different ways. Hormones with melasma are definitely a big culprit. But what happens is this melanocyte, your pigment-producing cell, gets over excited and tries to protect us. If something is going on internally or externally, it will actually overproduce pigment. That's when we see these abnormal age spots, liver spots, melasma, and things like that. This can be corrected sometimes, but if the damage has been done for so long, you might have that pigmentation for life. There are things we can do to lighten it and protect the skin, but the goal is how can we calm down this pigment-producing cell? When we heal the skin barrier, we get the skin in a healthy state that can send a message down through the deeper layers of your skin and down to that melanocyte: hey, we're safe, there's nothing we need protection against. That melanocyte can actually start to calm down. I've seen that in my own skin just from feeding the skin what it needs. A lot of my pigmentation has gone away without even trying to lighten it because I've just calmed down my immune system.

Ashley James (1:51:23.882)

And what about those age spots or liver spots? Usually  you see them on the hands. Is that the same thing?

Lindsey Baillie (1:51:30.984)

That's the same thing. That's just going to happen with age. It's going to happen with age. So a lot of what I tell people is acceptance. I mean, I'm doing it to myself. I'm starting to see the pigmentation on my hands and my arms. I noticed my grandma had that and everything. I think, Ooh, what did I do in my younger years to make this happen? I was in the sun all the time, drank alcohol in the sun, put oil on my skin, and I've done this permanent damage. This is why we need to talk about this, especially with the younger generations, because everything you do from birth to around age 25 is going to kind of solidify what you see in your health and on your skin later. I did all this in my teens and early twenties, so I solidified that damage. That's just naturally what's going to happen.

Ashley James (1:52:25.790)

So Dr. Wallach says that liver spots are a sign of oxidized fat and that he sees that removing oils, all oil from your diet, and he has a list of 12 foods that he wants everyone to avoid. One of them being those oils and the other one being the gluten grains we talked about. But he says increase your antioxidant foods. 

Try to get 100 ORAC, stands for Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity. It's one of the measurements for antioxidants, but 100,000 ORAC a day in your diet. This is from a variety of, it actually goes to another Joel, Dr. Joel Furman. He talks about G-bombs in the diet every day. Onions, beans, berries, greens, mushrooms, and seeds every day. Get a ton of them .

You can also include very dark chocolate, small amounts and not at bedtime because there's caffeine in it naturally, but a small amount of dark chocolate every day, green tea, these other really high antioxidant foods. There's certain spices, obviously turmeric, and then including a little bit of black pepper with that every day, increasing ginger, clove, cinnamon. These are wonderful high-antioxidant spices and herbs.

Through that, sometimes women see, you said, it lightens up, it goes away, but at least we're preventing it from further, further damage also. I've also had clients where skin tags have literally fallen off their body, stopped their body, stopped producing skin tags, and they fell off. Have you had that experience? 

Lindsey Baillie (1:54:14.391)

Yes, absolutely. When you increase your antioxidants, that can definitely help reverse some of the damage for sure. And it's interesting the changes that you see.

Ashley James (1:54:24.528)

Right. It's wild. Okay. So I'm sure that women that want to help heal their skin are kind of on the edge of their seat when it comes to, well, how can I work with you? So let's talk about that. You have your website, saltoftheearthskin.com, where you love to educate. So there's a lot of free information. You've got your blog out there. People can also work with you one-on-one and also in person if they're local to you. But can you talk a bit about what it's like to be one of your clients?

Lindsey Baillie (1:54:53.732)

Yes, absolutely. So I especially work with people in the Western US because we don't have a lot of people that practice like I do out this way. All you have to do is go to my website and schedule an advanced skin analysis, and we do everything over Google Meet. Once you schedule your appointment, there will be an intake form that you'll fill out that gives me insight on your diet, your lifestyle.

Where you grew up for the first 25 years of your life, what medications, supplements that you're taking because sometimes those can be a cause of skin issues. Then we work over a video call to get that general advice for you. I craft a report for you to let you know what these habits that you are doing or foods that you're eating, how they might be contributing to the health of your skin and any skin issues you may be having.

A starter skincare set is included in that as well. Then we just continue to work virtually on these lifestyle changes. It's a kind of health coaching, but for skin in a way. When I have people who have more complicated issues with nutrition, then of course, I just send them your way because that's your wheelhouse and my wheelhouse is skin. 

Ashley James (01:52:19.31)

That's my wheelhouse. If I have someone with skin issues, I will send them your way because you're amazing. We kind of talked about the more popular stuff, but are there any other skin issues you have not or diagnosis that you have? We have not mentioned yet that you get really great results with and you want to definitely mention.

Lindsey Baillie (1:56:25.216)

It's really all skin issues. Mostly what I see is people concerned with aging, acne, and rosacea. I can help most all skin conditions because the goal is to heal the skin barrier and just feed the skin topically what it needs. When you do that, a lot of issues start to heal on their own. There's a lot of education and just information that I give you.

Ashley James (1:56:51.622)

Nice. A really dear friend of mine was born with ichthyosis. 70 or more percent of her body was covered in acute ichthyosis, which means fish skin. That's what she looked like. There would be chunks of her skin that would just fall off of her. She looked almost like she was made of gravel, smaller kinds of gravel that would just fall off.

Her dad had it so bad that he is actually in all of the textbooks. If you go look in medical literature, there are pictures of her dad because they studied him so extensively that they took so many pictures of him that his picture to this day is in the textbooks. She would eat very clean and she made all her own skincare, and she would have to spend hours massaging her skin, massaging it into her skin every day.

Just so she wouldn't crack and bleed. She ate very clean, she took supplements, and she believed in taking care of herself in that way, but she still basically just had it. This was about 13 years ago when I introduced her to Dr. Joel Wallach, who’s my mentor. He was actually in Toronto at the time, where I'm from, and she was living in Toronto. He was, that very day, giving a health lecture. She drove a good, probably two hours in traffic to get to him on the other side of Toronto.

At the end of his health lectures, now he does it online because COVID just started pretty much, he stopped. He’s also 86, but he's amazing. He gives health lectures all the time. He’s been doing that for over 30 years. He was answering questions as he does for hours until every single person has their question answered. She puts her hand up and she says, “I have ichthyosis.”

He goes, “I bet the doctor said it was genetic. That's the reason why you have it and you can never get rid of it.” She goes, “Yes.” He yells at the top of his lungs, “They're wrong. They're lying.” He proceeds to tell her, “Okay, this is exactly what I want you to do.” He gets her off the 12 bad foods. One of them, we already talked about, the oils, the fried food, the gluten grains.

He gets her on different supplements, and then he has her take a handful of higher doses based on what he knows to help. So higher amounts of A and E, and we watched her. She avoided the bad foods, still eating very clean, but she avoided the 12 bad foods. She added the supplements and a few extra with higher doses.

Within three years, the worst her skin was, was slightly dry in the winter. We watched her skin transform, and she was in her 50s. She had had that her entire life, and it was remarkable to watch the transformation. The rest of her family, because it's “genetic,” all her family has it.

But when I see genetics, genetics don’t pull the trigger, nutrition does. All her family has it, all her family related to her dad has ichthyosis to a certain extent, but they all have the same nutrient deficiencies. They all come from the same region, eat the same food, the same style. They all have the same nutrient deficiencies. She completely got rid of it.

Her family didn't want to follow in her footsteps because it’s too hard to give up the bad foods, or they just want to eat junk food. I'm like, “Yes, but do you really want cracking, bleeding skin that just falls off your body?” Anyway, so some people just won't give up the junk food. They don’t want it. They don’t want to get better. They’d rather have their addiction than their health.

That’s frustrating, but it’s also the freedom of choice. I mean, can you just imagine being God? “I gave you freedom of choice. What are you doing with it? What are you doing?” But when we have the information, at least we can spread the information, and then people can make informed choices.

Yes, she was able to completely live without ichthyosis based on a few health changes, but it had nothing to do with what she was putting on her skin.

Lindsey Baillie (2:01:42.098)

Yes, exactly. That's such a prime example. Just because you have a genetic condition doesn't mean, “Okay, there's nothing we can do” or “Take this drug.” There's a nutritional deficiency or a gene deficiency, so what can we do to work with that? That's a prime example. That's amazing. It's also a great example of how long it can take to heal a condition. That's where patience comes in handy as well.

Ashley James (2:02:07.200)

It was healing over time, but by the three-year mark, all the worst it was, was at times she might have dry skin. She went from the worst ichthyosis you could possibly imagine to slightly dry skin at times, within three years. It got better from there, which was really cool to see. I think we've established that so much of skin health has to do with our internal health and our diet. I love that you also want to protect us and shed light on how many toxic things are in our life and in our habits, the misinformation that's being spread. I would never put on my skin what's sold at a local drugstore.

You go down those aisles, most of those brands are actually made by the pharmaceutical industry. Most of those brands are, I'm just talking about body creams, face creams in general, just like things to put on your skin. Most of it has petroleum-based ingredients. I would not put that on my skin because it gets absorbed into my body. Why would I want to put that in? Would you take a bath in gasoline? Why would I put those chemicals in my body? You definitely take skincare a step further, but I love that you're looking at creating health as a whole. Wonderful. So, listeners can go to your website, check out saltoftheearthskin.com. Of course, the links to everything we talked about today are going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com.

Is there anything you want to say to wrap up today's interview? Is there anything you want to make sure that you shared with us?

Lindsey Baillie (2:04:07.012)

I mean, I think it's just stressing that God made you the way that you are. You don't need to change your appearance, get your stress under control, get your nutrition dialed in. When it comes to the topical recommendations, yes, the skin has its own recipe, but everybody's so individual. What works for one person or your friend or your mom is not going to be the same thing that works for you, but if you can focus on stress and nutrition, that just does wonders.

Ashley James (2:04:41.064)

What worked for you in the past might not always work for you, as you said. That's something that we need to be aware of. We also need to be aware of not beating ourselves up. That worked for another person. Why doesn't it work for me? The esthetician I went to said this would work for me. Why is it not working? The person on Instagram said it would work. Why isn't it working for me? I am wrong. Something's wrong with me. I am broken. No. They failed you. You didn't fail you. They failed you.

Lindsey Baillie (2:05:11.113)

Yes, absolutely. Get off social media if you find yourself getting down. Throw your phone down and go for a walk.

Ashley James (2:05:17.849)

Love it. Yes. Go for a walk. Hey, someone gave you that advice. Go for a walk. That's some of the greatest advice for clearing the head, clearing the cobwebs. Go for a walk, do some deep breathing, get 20 minutes of sunlight every day. Get out there and get small doses of sunlight is healthy for so many reasons.

Yes, go for a walk, but try not to walk in a highly trafficked area. If you can walk in nature, walk in a park, or down by a river or lake or something, then do that.

Well, it was wonderful, Lindsey, having you on the show. Thank you for enlightening us. I definitely learned some things today. This was a lot of fun. I know that you're going to be hearing from some of my listeners because it's so intriguing and also so individual. Well, I'll be excited to hear how that works for them.

Also, hey, Lindsey's in our Facebook group. So come to the Learn True Health Facebook group. Sometimes you pop in and answer some cool skin questions. I always learn something from you, so I love it. Thank you for today. This was nice.

Lindsey Baillie (2:06:31.525)

Yes, thank you so much, Ashley.

Outro:

As you heard me share before, about the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, it's an incredible opportunity to check out their free course and also check out the class that is starting soon. If you're interested in becoming a health coach or just checking out the free training, go to learntruehealth.com/coach and when you sign up, use coupon code LTH. You're going to get a great discount. Even if you're super busy, you can fit it into your schedule. If you have time to listen to my podcast, you have time to become an integrative health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and rock your world, bringing joy, clarity, and fulfillment to every area of your life.

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