Skin and Hair: What Your Gut is Telling You
Hi, and welcome back to our channel.
Today we're going to be putting the pieces together between our skin health, our hair health, and our gut. I will share how impactful our gut can be with how shiny our hair is or how clear our skin might be. Sharing what kind of inflammatory factors may be a part of that, and then also following up with what can you do if your gut may be impacting your skin and hair. What can you eat and what kind of supplements you might want to add in.
But before we begin, my name is Marcie Vaske. I'm a functional licensed nutritionist with Oswald Digestive Clinic and at Oswald Digestive Clinic we see many clients struggling with gut health and some do have hair and skin issues. So as you learn today, how impactful is your gut with those symptoms? If you would like to make an initial appointment, I'm going to link our website here and as well, I'll link our free guide, which is Five Ways to Improve Your Gut Health. So let's dig back into our topic, which is about skin and hair and the connection between our gut and skin.
[Video Transcript Below Video - it is the same information]
The Connection Between Gut Health, Skin, and Hair
Hair health is really directly connected to what we call the skin hair gut access. This is a communication network that really influences the way that your hair might be bright and shiny, or if hair is you're losing your hair, and also if you are struggling with skin issues like acne or just a dull appearance. So better understanding how our gut can be impactful on our skin and our hair. I'm just going to run through a few ways that do make a difference.
How an Imbalanced Microbiome Affects Your Skin and Hair
So number one, we have our microbiome balance. If you listen to any of our videos, we talk all the time about our microbiome. Our microbiome is made up of trillions of different flora that helps support our skin clarity and even the growth of our hair.
If we have a healthy microbiome, all those flora help to absorb the nutrients that we consume. It helps to keep inflammation down, keeping our skin glowing and our hair growing. Now, if this flora or the microbiome becomes imbalanced or what we also can call dysbiotic, you can end up with skin conditions like acne, rosacea, or just skin rashes. Now, if our microbiome is imbalanced or dysbiotic, then we may have more inflammation in our gut than we want, and this in turn can show up for some people through thinning hair. When we have a microbiome that's not flourishing, has a big amount of diversity, then that barrier to our immune system, there's a breakdown in which we can lose our hair from.
The Role of Nutrient Absorption in Skin and Hair Health
Now, the gut, as I mentioned, is very important for nutrient absorption and specifically vitamins and minerals like biotin, zinc, and omega threes are going to be crucial for good skin and for good hair.
Now, if we're having poor gut function where we're not absorbing specific vitamins and minerals like the vitamins A, D, E, K, and also our B vitamins, we can find that we may have dull or lackluster hair.
Also, if we are not absorbing our nutrients, we may be short or deficient in short chain fatty acids and those short chain fatty acids can show up as lack of hydration in your skin and even elasticity. So, so far we've learned that we have to have a diverse and healthy microbiome to have healthy skin and healthy hair. If we don't, we'll run into a lack of nutrient absorption, which can give off the appearance of dull or lackluster skin or even brittle hair.
Inflammation and Its Impact on Skin Conditions and Hair Loss
Now, third thing that shows up is inflammation or in the inflammation that's connected to skin conditions. And one type of inflammatory gut issue is going to be leaky gut syndrome. Now, if we have chronic inflammation going on in our gut for a long time, some people may end up with leaky gut, and this is where we have damage within our intestinal tract and the tight junctions that are in there are inflamed and they're letting in toxins into our bloodstream. If this is happening for you, you may end up finding that you have more symptoms of psoriasis or eczema or even hormonal acne. If this goes on for a long period of time, we can end up with systemic inflammation, and this is then where you may find that you have hair follicles being inflamed, and then we're not growing hair, so we're starting to lose hair or we have more scalp irritation.
Hormonal Balance: How Your Gut Influences Skin and Hair
Now, the last way that the gut can be impactful on our skin and hair is the way that it regulates our hormones. So if we have a diverse and healthy microbiome and we're having regular bowel movements and things are moving great, we won't have a lot of hormonal issues going on.
So what happens is that our gut helps to regulate hormones in the way of metabolizing them, our androgens and our estrogens. And in turn, if these are not being metabolized properly, we're going to end up with oilier skin and see a lot more hormonal acne. Now, that's how it will show up in the skin, but in our hair, we see a hormonal dysregulation showing pattern, hair loss or baldness as well as just excess shedding of hair.
The Gut-Brain-Skin Axis: How Stress Affects Your Appearance
And the last thing I'll bring up is the gut brain skin axis, and we've talked about the gut and brain axis as far as how it communicates through the vagus nerve, but this can also happen for our skin. And if you have chronic amounts of stress going on, you can oftentimes feel like you have more breakouts, there might be redness, there can be scalp sensitivity or irritation going on, and this is just from the chronic stress that is suppressing our digestive system.
And chronic stress really depletes us of all of our B vitamins and collagen. So even if we have a pretty good gut in general, but we have chronic stress, it's eating up a lot of these nutrients that we need to have healthy skin and healthy hair. So now we understand how our gut impacts our skin and hair.
So what can you do about it? And because we are nutritionists and dieticians, we're definitely going to be talking about food, and that's usually the easiest thing to try to do is change the foods that you're consuming.
Best Foods for Healthy Skin and Strong Hair
So number one, adding in fermented foods. So fermented foods will have a high amount of healthy flora to help balance that microbiome and support our hair and skin. So fermented foods will look like kimchi, yogurt, sauerkraut, miso, things of that nature. So adding those in on a weekly or even daily basis, if you love 'em, that's going to be awesome for your gut, which in turn is good for your skin and hair.
In addition to fermented foods, you can add in omega rich foods. So that would be things like salmon, flaxseed, walnuts. This will help to promote lack of inflammation, so it helps to reduce the inflammatory process. It will help to hydrate our skin and are follicles that need to keep healthy. And by just adding in salmon a few times a week, having a few walnuts or adding flaxseed into your daily routine, you are going to get plenty of omega threes to help support and reduce inflammation.
Next, we want to make sure our diet is high in zinc. And zinc can help to promote tissue healing, promote a healthier scalp, and as I said, tissue repair or skin repair. Now by adding in zinc filled foods, you can find that in oysters, nuts, seeds, beef, or also chickpeas. Things like this are going to be high in zinc and keeping those in your diet will be great.
Now, we also want to make sure that we're getting enough healthy protein. So proteins found in the way of eggs or Turkey or chicken or beef or any of those beans, tofu, Greek yogurt, those are all going to be high in protein. And why do we need them? We need them because they are high in amino acids. And amino acids are basically the building blocks to our tissues. And so by keeping a healthier tissue base or healthy skin, you are going to have more glowing skin and really support that.
And lastly, we want to make sure that we're hydrating. So not only just drinking the amount of water that we need every day, but you can add in more hydrating foods. And some of those look like watermelon, celery, cucumbers, and they will help to hydrate and those types of foods will help to hydrate, plump up your skin and give it a really nice glowing appearance as well as moisturize and keep a moisture for stronger hair.
So by understanding how the gut is impactful on your skin and hair can lead you to what maybe you need to do next. So if we're having a lot of eczema or psoriasis and some really serious skin stuff going on, is this leaky gut that's happening for you? Are you having more of that acne around your chin? Is that more hormonal and there's something in the gut that's impacting that? They'll help you make better decisions on what you need to do moving forward in terms of what foods could be best for you. As I listed out some of those foods, now we can eat those every day and feel amazing and it's going to be awesome. So adding in always making sure you're doing some sort of fermented food or something with probiotic in it is just going to give you a natural healthier base.
But then adding in and making sure we're getting all the other components of omega threes and high proteins, getting in collagen and hydrating foods, and they just kind of come natural. If you're eating a whole food diet. Now, if you struggle with getting some of that stuff in because maybe you don't like a lot of vegetables, for example, or you really don't like walnuts or nuts or you can't have 'em or even any of the seeds maybe your gut doesn't even like, there is always supplements that you can try. And I would say that again, sort of dependent on what you're needing to, what kind of skin or hair condition you're struggling with will lead to what kind of supplement would be best. But overall, taking some of the things that I talked about in foods and just putting that into supplement form. So if you don't like fermented foods, you can always try probiotics to help balance out that microbiome.
Supplements to Support Skin and Hair Health
If you don't like a lot of salmon or walnuts or flaxseed, you can always do omega fish oil capsules. You can always supplement with different kinds of biotin or zincs. There's also going to be collagen that you can take. So a lot of these things we can get in our food. We can also get in supplement form. I always say if you can eat the food, that is going to be hands down the best idea. It's more bioavailable. Your body really knows what to do with it, and overall it's going to help so much more. If you can't tolerate the foods that these types of nutrients are in, then like I said, try supplements.
Final Thoughts: Listening to Your Body for Better Skin and Hair
So I hope that this helps open your eyes to maybe if you are having skin issues or hair, if your hair is falling out, if it looks dull, if it's just brittle and breaking off all the time, what is the root cause? Take a look at your gut, how is that going? Are you feeling good? Are you digesting food? Are you absorbing your nutrients? These are all important questions to answer to help understand what steps you need to take next and where some of this other outward signs of our symptoms are coming from. I always say our body is always trying to tell us something. We just have to listen.
So I hope this helped. Like I said, again, I will link our website down below where you can easily make an initial appointment as well as our free guide, Five Ways to Improve Your Gut Health. And I'd like you to sort of take stock in what I said and think about if you are having any of these issues, where are they really coming from? Those are fun things to answer and if you can't figure 'em out, you can always come to us at the clinic.
So thanks for watching today and we'll see you next week.
If you'd like to explore any of this information further or obtain an individualized nutrition plan, you can schedule an initial appointment at our clinic.  We also take insurance and some of our clients get full coverage, which is great.
Or you can just start by downloading our FREE GUIDE: 5 WAYS TO IMPROVE GUT HEALTHÂ Â
