The Gut-Skin Connection: The Secret to Radiant and Resilient Skin

Q: Why is gut health so important to skin health?

A: Your gut is the largest immune and endocrine organ in the body, communicating widely with different organs in your body, including the skin. Your gut is the first to see the food and nutrients you put in your body and the importance of this simple fact cannot be underestimated. We rely on our gut to properly digest this food, to send signals to our brain to tell us when we’re full or hungry, to mount a proper insulin response, to not react to all the foreign antigens (immune stimulatory) in everything we eat, for example. And we all know examples of what happens when any of these processes don’t work correctly. Our gut is also colonized with trillions of bacteria that we now know are either directly or indirectly responsible for these processes we rely on. 

Q: Can you explain what is the gut-brain axis and what is the gut-skin axis?

A: These are bi-directional axes whereby the gut sends signals to the brain (and back) either through direct innervation via the vagus nerve, or through the production of bacterial metabolites (postbiotics) that circulate in the blood or stimulate certain hormone release from the gut.   These postbiotics that pass into the blood can affect multiple sites including the skin. We are just beginning to learn how supporting skin health via the skin microbiome both topically and via the gut can promote even greater skin resilience and health beyond just topical alone.

Q: What skin issues might arise from an unhealthy gut microbiome?

A: Any imbalance in the gut can have a direct or indirect impact on skin health. Acne, dermatitis and psoriasis are some of the most common skin issues from an unhealthy gut microbiome but sometimes just a lack of proper nutrients processed by the gut microbiome can affect the overall skin health.

Q: How does Editrix products work with the skin microbiome to repair and regenerate skin?

A: The proprietary postbiotic metabolites we discovered in the lab can be absorbed by the skin into its deepest layers. They also promote the growth of other healthy skin microbes which have so many benefits such as upregulating collagen production, brightening the skin and altogether protecting the skin barrier.

Q: Why is taking a probiotic not necessarily the path to gut health?

A: There are many assumptions we make about probiotics that have been proven untrue. For example, not all probiotics will colonize every gut. The vast majority will get outcompeted by your native gut bacteria. So, often what you’re buying will just pass through you. This is because we often already have many of the bacteria we’re taking in the pill. If that organism already exists in our gut, then taking more doesn’t meaningfully help. The only way to know if a probiotic can be potentially helpful is if you get your microbiome sequenced by a reputable source. It has also been shown that taking a probiotic after antibiotics can actually delay normal recolonization of a diverse microbiome. 

Q: Why are stool sample tests so important to understanding our gut microbiome better? 

A: Your stool can actually tell you a lot about the status of your gut health and sometimes even give you clues as to what’s happening elsewhere in your body. We often don’t like to talk about this, but we should! Things like stool consistency (check your Bristol stool chart!), color, smell, and most importantly, frequency, can tell you a lot. For example, everyone should have a bowel movement every day, optimally. Many people don’t even know this. Furthermore, stool can give you insights into the bacteria living in your colon. You can take a tiny amount of poo, extract bacterial DNA, sequence it, and see what bacteria has chosen to reside in your microbiome. We also have fungi, protists, and viruses that live there too, not just bacteria. While bacteria make up the vast majority of our microbiome, the other organisms are important too! We just know far less about them.

Q: What do you wish most people understood about the gut microbiome?

A: I wish people understood how truly complex the gut microbiome is. We have ~100 trillion bacteria consisting of ~1,000 different species and an order of magnitude more variations of those species (strains). We all contain a slightly different permutation of these microbes (or largely different depending on where in the world we live and how old we are) which makes the number of possible microbiome compositions astounding. But one saving grace to this complexity is that the functions that many of these microbes carry out are redundant, so we’re best to understand our microbiome’s function (who does what) than who is there. We are beginning to understand how important certain factors, like diet, are to our microbiome’s function. This is in part why probiotics are not always the answer.

Suzanne Devkota is Director of the Cedars-Sinai Human Microbiome Research Institute in Los Angeles and an Associate Professor in the Division of Gastroenterology. She earned her Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in Molecular Metabolism and Nutrition where she began specializing in Gastroenterology and the Microbiome. She completed her post-doctoral training at the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School and is a former Branco Weiss Fellow of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Dr. Devkota sits on the Editrix Scientific Advisory Board.