Kelsey Kinney: I typically would add in some supplements here, and what I would think about is a lot things, of course, that we talked about last week in the skin health section, but particularly for acne, I look at gut health. So I would definitely do a stool test. I would do a SIBO test. I would kind of rule all those things out. I often see with acne clients that there’s not a lot of good bacteria. If you’re just looking at the balance of bacteria in the microbiome, they will tend to have slight overgrowth of bad bacteria and not enough good bacteria. To deal with that, I find that prebiotics are one of the best things to use. One of my favorites is GOS, so that’s what I use a lot. Klaire Labs makes a great supplement that’s pure GOS powder called Galactomune, so I use that a lot in my acne patients.
Omega-3s can be really useful as well, so making sure that they’re getting their omega-3 levels from fish. That, for example, is a case where it could come from other food or a supplement. It doesn’t really matter to me as long as they’re actually getting it, whereas something like prebiotics, the therapeutic amount of prebiotics that you need, which for GOS is, I think it’s five grams, that can be hard to get from food. If you’re talking about FOS, I think it’s 10 grams. Those amounts are pretty difficult to get, and so if a person is not getting that amount or even close to that amount from food, which is almost definitely the case, that’s where I want to see supplementation. It’s really difficult to get that from the diet. For GOS, for example, I would want to see a supplement, but for omega-3s, I don’t care where it’s coming from as long as it’s getting into their body.
Like I said, I really do come at acne from a gut-focused place as well as an HPA axis place because stress is often really, really involved in acne. Then even though it’s often coming from the inside out, you do also just want to look at their cleanliness habits, too. Sometimes I’ve had clients where they’re totally stripping their face oils. They’re using all these crazy products that are just taking all the oils off their face, making it really dry, and then it’s overproducing oil. So there sometimes does need to be a bit of re-education around how skin is supposed to regulate itself. In this day and age, we’re not taught that, and a lot of the products that we have available to us are all about no oil, killing all the bacteria on your skin, that sort of stuff, so you may need to re-educate about proper skincare and see if that helps. For me personally, that was one of the things that really helped me. When I was younger, I had fairly significant acne, and I just stopped washing my face with all of that stuff that strips it to death, and that helped a ton.
Then hormones, of course, are an issue here too. You, again, can look at the HPA axis in terms of how it might be affecting sex hormones and kind of go from there. Sex hormones definitely play a role as well.
So I would look at gut health, figure that out, and add some probiotics. Particularly prebiotics, I think, can be even more helpful for acne than probiotics, but both are great. Omega-3s, whether that’s from food or from supplementation. What was I just talking about? I can’t even remember now. What was the other thing? Oh, stress and all of that. You want to just make sure that they are making sure that they are implementing mind-body activities, making sure that their life and work are not just overly stressful. Of course, we can’t necessarily change that a lot of the time, but we can change how someone manages that, and that will have a big impact on the skin as well. Then, of course, re-educate about how skin is supposed to function and why we shouldn’t always be stripping the skin or killing all of the bacteria on the skin.
Let me know if you have any other questions, again, about any specific nutrients here as to whether I would go for food or supplements, because it does depend on the particular nutrient, of course. Anytime you can get the nutrient from food in the right amount and it’s relatively easy for the person to do that, I would definitely recommend doing so. If there’s a therapeutic dose of the particular nutrient that is above and beyond what can be found in diet easily, then I’d say supplementation is probably the way to go.
I’m generally a minimalist with supplementation as much as possible, and most clients typically appreciate that because they don’t want to be taking a million supplements either, but sometimes you have people who don’t want to pay as much attention to their diet, and of course, we’ll work on that over time because I would much rather them be getting these things from their diet, but if we want to just see good results a little bit more quickly rather than working on those habits from the start and months later getting to the point where they’re getting all the nutrients from their diet and then seeing improvements in whatever they came to me for, I will just supplement from the beginning because you want people to be happy right away. You want them to get that motivation as quickly as possible, and if they see that these nutrients are helping and then you kind of say, “It might even be better if you got them from your diet because then you’re getting a lot of other great things that are coming from those real foods,” they’ll be more open to doing that down the road, and you can work on habits slowly over time, whereas the supplementation can just help immediately. So it depends on the person’s ability to get things from their diet, their willingness to get them from their diet, and sort of just their personality in terms of how they want to go about changing all of these things in their life.
I’m not seeing any other questions, but I will give you guys a minute here. And if anybody has any follow-up questions on anything we’ve talked about today, feel free. Or if you have questions that have nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about lately, by all means, I’m open. I’ll give you guys a second to think about this. We have 15 minutes. What can you ask me? It’s always good to use this time, but if you guys don’t have anything else to ask, that’s fine too. It’s a lot of information to take in. I’ve been trying to keep up as much as possible with what you guys are learning as well, but it’s a lot of information, so I’m sure it takes some time to simmer on it and come up with some questions too.