Clean Beauty: Your Endocrine System

Out of desperation, I became a Nutritional Therapist in 2012.  I was deeply struggling with my health and wasn’t able to get any answers from my naturopaths or western medicine doctors.

My training as a Nutritional Therapist answered several key questions for me, two of which were:

Why was I so dang tired all of the time?
Why was my immune system seemingly incapable of fighting anything off?

When I changed my diet, my entire life changed.

I became more energetic, focused and motivated.  I stopped getting sick all of the time, and my weight normalized.  My mood improved, and I was even able to get pregnant and have a healthy baby girl after being told that would never happen.

The relationship between the endocrine system and the digestive system has long been known by some of the greatest thinkers of our time, but until recently was unproven by scientific research.

Hippocrates said “All diseases begin in the gut”.

Over the course of the last several years, the studies of the gastrointestinal microbiome and the relationship to the endocrine system has become synonymous with landing on the moon or reaching the depths of the ocean.  It’s complicated and fascinating stuff!

We still have so much to learn about the bodies we inhabit, but one thing is clear…

What we eat, drink and put on our skin has a huge affect on our wellbeing.

In my nutritional therapy practice I specialize in digestion and hormonal health. For several years it’s bugged me that I was helping people restore their gut microbiome and balance their hormones, and yet I had no tools for advising them on what they were putting on their skin.

The skin is our largest organ, and it absorbs what we put on it.

But that begs the question: who cares what I put on my skin?  It doesn’t really make any difference to my health, does it?

​Turns out it makes a profound difference what you put on your skin.

Dr. Leonardo Trasande is a world-renowned researcher of environmental toxins and endocrine health.

Dr. Trasande’s resume is too extensive to list here, but he is perhaps best known for a series of studies published in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology and the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism that document disease costs due to endocrine disrupting chemicals in the US and Europe of $340 billion and €163 billion annually, respectively.

Dr. Trasande studies how environmental toxins cause significant disruption to the endocrine system which causes changes to hormones and DNA and leads to the development of disease.

Other countries have gotten keen to this.  The European Union has outlawed over 1300 environmental toxins, while the U.S. has only outlawed 30. 

Have you ever heard of obesogens? 

Me either. 

Obesogens are chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system and can dramatically affect your weight, energy and fertility. 

Organizations like Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, The Endocrine Society and the WHO are speaking out on the threats of endocrine disrupting chemicals that are found in food packaging, cleaning products and most commonly – personal care products.

I’ll be breaking down the in’s and out’s of this in my free workshop: Clean Beauty: The Endocrine System.

Sign up to join this workshop.

To shop Ishbel’s Beautycounter shop for luxuriant, award-winning, clean beauty, click HERE.