Hormonal Health and Wellness
Dr. George E. Sadowski, MD, head of research and development for Nourishing Biologicals Skin Institute, is a physician with a thriving surgical practice with Surgical Associates of North Florida in St. Augustine. He has developed an interest in functional medicine and has a specialty in anti-aging elements and transdermal delivery systems. He discusses the role of hormones, hormonal deficit, and wellness as we age.
Dr. George Sadowski, a surgeon for almost thirty years, has first-hand experience dealing with devastating skin damage. President of the medical staff at Flagler hospital. Dr. Sadowski didn’t have confidence in any existing product range to offer relief to his patients, so he set about developing a product which he could give his stamp of approval, Nourishing Biologicals. He is currently the chief medical scientist of Nourishing Biologicals as well as the Medical Director of the NB Skin Institute.
Transcript
Neal Howard: Welcome to Health Professional Radio. I’m your host Neal Howard, thank you for joining us. Our guest is Dr. George Sadowski, he’s a Head of Research and Development for Nourishing Biologicals Skin Institute and he’s joining us on the program to talk about the role of hormones, hormonal deficit and wellness as we age. Welcome to the program Dr. Sadowski, how are you?
Dr. George Sadowski: I’m very good, thank you for having me.
Neal: Thank you for taking the time and joining us this morning. I mentioned that you are Head of Research and Development for Nourishing Biologicals Skin Institute. A bit of background about yourself and what is your role there at Nourishing Biologicals?
Dr Sadowski: Well there are essentially two entities. One is Nourishing Biologicals where we develop our products and the Nourishing Biologicals Skin Institute is an offshoot from that where we teach the aestheticians the latest techniques in skin rejuvenation, so those two are kind of separate.
Neal: Now when you say skin rejuvenation, are we talking plastic surgery? Are we talking using a person’s own skin for cosmetic or health wellness purposes?
Dr Sadowski: No, we are not. We’re not talking about anything invasive. We’re not talking about skin grafts. The whole story and the reason why we came about was we wanted to find a product that will actually help the skin. So we looked at all the products, we surveyed the lay of the land and we found that none of them worked. Not only that, none of them contained any ingredients that are supposed to work. So we looked at the theory of aging and we explored the free radical theory of aging, just how everyone ages. We produce free radicals when we run out of antioxidants and anti-inflammatories to neutralize these free radicals. The balance which we call oxidative stress tilts in favor of aging and degeneration instead of renewal. So then we looked at the literature, the world literature and we picked out all the different ingredients that are found in nature that actually reverse this process. Now some of these were proven to reverse this in cell culture, some of them were proven in animal studies and some of them were proven in clinical studies and some of them had been used for thousands of years. So there’s a little bit of track record, there’s something to kind of hang your head up. It’s not nothing, do we know everything about it? Our knowledge is limited and always will be but these are the ingredients that we put together in our product.
Neal: These ingredients that are found in nature that actually reverse or at least slow down the aging process, you put them all into one product for skin rejuvenation. How does it work and where do hormones fall into this?
Dr Sadowski: Well hormones especially estrogen support skin growth. As we age, hormone levels decline. As we age, the antioxidant levels also decline so things like glutathione, all the oxidized enzymes, the sodium PCAs, all of these building blocks for collagen and elastin – they all decline. And as a result the skin growth also declines, fibroblast production declines so the skin gets rejuvenated but it gets rejuvenated as old skin. You never really go back to younger looking skin. The skin that is produced is just old looking skin and healthy skin because it doesn’t have any other potential to get healthier so the introduction of antioxidants, anti-inflammatories and chemical messengers does improve that.
Neal: How do you tell that you’re deficient in some of these compounds and that you could benefit from your products? How do you know?
Dr Sadowski: Well you don’t. It’s very difficult to measure things in the body and some of them have a very short half-life and so they escape rather quickly. But the skin is the largest organ in the body, it’s also the most visible. We never look at the liver and say “Geez well I better do something about this liver.” We look at the skin, we know exactly what is going on with that person, so appearance of the skin is psychologically active. It determines how people will react to you, it determines your behavior depending on how you feel, what you look like so this is a very very important thing. Now the other organs are not visible but believe me, damage is happening in all of them.
Neal: How does taking care of the skin directly relate to other organs? Like you say the liver and you can say you look at the skin and you can tell exactly what’s going on with that person. So I’m assuming that if you take good care of your skin, it directly relates to the care of other organs even without you directly administering to those organs.
Dr Sadowski: I will answer that in the following manner: some people take a multivitamin and some people take an aspirin, some people will even take supplements. These supplements go down the GI tract and they are degraded and a large percentage of these supplements do not get a chance to work but some percentage of it does and then it goes to the liver where the liver’s job is to detoxify all these chemicals. So these antioxidants and anti-inflammatories get further degraded, so only a small percentage of this actually goes to work on all the internal organs. In relation to the skin, the skin’s job is to protect the inside from the outside so you have to formulate your products that will have an easier way of permeating the skin and going inside. Now of all the antioxidants, supplements in the inflammatory is that we can take, they very rarely get to the skin because the skin is on the outside and the body has a way of directing the supplements where they are needed the most. So the central organs get the benefit. The skin is the last one to get benefit, therefore in order to rejuvenate the skin, you have to apply it.
Neal: When it comes to exercising to keep the skin elastic and/or supple or looking good, is that something that’s as important as some of these topicals?
Dr Sadowski: All this falls in line with healthy living which is eating right, getting your vegetables, exercising, all these things are anti-inflammatory. Eating poorly increases inflammation. Inflammation ages without the cell, whether it’s the skin cell or skin in the or liver cell or kidney cell or brain cell so it’s all about inflammation and so this is the way we direct our formulations to combat the inflammatory reactions going on at all times in the body and these things are basically unavoidable because they are a product of our own metabolism, of own respiratory system and there anything else that we would put in the body whether extraneous such as sunlight or radiation or pollutants and noxious chemicals. So all of these work together targeting different inflammatory pathways to stop the aging process.
Neal: As a physician, talk briefly about the importance of not depending on anti-inflammatory drugs in order to fight inflammation. As you pointed out, healthy living and eating right is of the utmost importance but many people say “Hey it’s an anti-inflammatory, why not just take that and do it the easy way?”
Dr Sadowski: Well let me answer it this way: our society has not evolved enough so that we can go point to a specific molecule that is causing harm and just knock that out. Usually what we do is we go to the first … and we poison that enzyme. Now this has some positive effect because eventually, you can’t get to the end product it’s harmful so you also have knocked out a lot of other intermediate molecules that are beneficial to the human so taking nonsteroidals, sure we may have relieved the pain but it too much of that is also harmful and has harmful side effects.
Neal: Where can our listeners go and get some more information about Nourishing Biologicals Skin Institute and Nursing Biologicals as well?
Dr Sadowski: You go to nourishingbiologicals.com or nbskininstitute.com.
Neal: Thank you so much Dr.Sadowski, it’s been a pleasure and I thank you for joining us on the program this morning.
Dr Sadowski: Thank you very much.
Neal: You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio, I’m your host Neal Howard. Transcripts and audio of the program are available at hpr.fm and healthprofessionalradio.com.au. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, listen in and download at SoundCloud.
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