Glowing Skin and Health with Naomi Whittel

Trevor:             Hi there. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to the Spa Dr. podcast. On today’s podcast we’re discussing graceful aging and glowing skin through autophagy. I know that might sound like a funny word, but it’s one you’re going to want to know about because of the tremendous impact it can have on your health and your skin. My guest today is Naomi Whittel. She is CEO of Twinlab Consolidated Holdings and was named the nation’s leading female innovator in the natural products industry by Prevention.

Trevor:             Naomi is known as a trailblazer and an advocate of purity and potency in nutritional wellness. Her story and products have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, PBS, InStyle, The View, Dr. Oz, Shape, Good Morning America, and many more. She is a steward of sustainability, a sought-after keynote speaker, and a member of the UN Chamber of Commerce. She lives in Boca Raton, Florida with her husband and four children.

Trevor:             In this interview we discuss autophagy. What it is, how it helps, and how to achieve it. Naomi is a wealth of information on this topic, so please enjoy this interview.

Trevor:             Naomi, it’s so great to have you on my podcast.

Naomi:             Thank you, [Dr. Cate 00:01:23]. I am thrilled to be here.

Trevor:             I know you’ve got a really interesting story, so let’s start with your story. What led you onto the journey to doing all the great things that you’re doing?

Naomi:             Well it started when I was a little girl and I was born in Switzerland on an organic or biodynamic farm. You know all about the benefits of biodynamics, and despite this incredibly clean, pure, nutrient-dense lifestyle that I was exposed to, I suffered from the autoimmune disorder of eczema, and it manifested as eczema that was so bad it would cover all of my skin and it would bleed and it would pus, and all of the negative effects that it has.

Naomi:             And so growing up I would just stay fully covered like this at all times, and I was just looking at a picture of myself when I was about seven years old and I was covered from head to toe and you could just see my hands, and they looked like they were 60 year old’s hands because they were red and they were cracked and there were places where they were bleeding, and so I was very shy and very embarrassed of the way that I looked and when I moved to the US I was about 14 years old and my mother had said to me, “It’s the springtime. You’ve missed out on so many things that you would want to do with your friends. You should go to the pool like they do, because the weather’s getting nicer. You should put on some shorts and a T-shirt. It’s not a big deal. You have a lot of friends. They’re not going to judge you.”

Naomi:             And that was the same time of the year that I was getting ready to go to the spring dance, and I had my eyes set on this one particular boy named Clovis Chester Young, and I adored him. I thought he would be my future, and ultimately I listened to my mother and I wore shorts to school one day and a T-shirt, and I think when he got a glimpse of my skin and saw me in that way, it just grossed him out and he didn’t invite me to the school dance and it was that moment in time where I would say that all of my self esteem just fell and I committed at that point to myself, it doesn’t matter what I do. I’m going to get rid of this eczema.

Naomi:             But what I didn’t realize at that time also was that this eczema isn’t something I could get rid of. It was deep, deep down at the cellular level, so I could suppress it, which I ultimately did and I went to the pharmacy and I went to a conventional doctor for the very first time, and I started to take different steroids and different products to suppress the eczema, which I did for a little while but you know that doesn’t last. It’s just like a Band-Aid.

Naomi:             Ultimately if I fast forward in my own journey, I got to a point where I was working with this amazing Oriental Chinese medicine doctor and he was doing acupuncture and he was looking at how I had blood stagnation and he was working on my gut and on my overall wellbeing and my health and really helping to fight the autoimmune disorder, and with that process the layers of eczema were coming out of my body. So sometimes it would get much worse and other times it would start to thin out, and it was this onion peel essentially, and during that time he also gave me these little Chinese herbs. They’re like little black pellets. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken them.

Naomi:             I would use those and over the course of a year and a half, the majority of the eczema, like 90+ percent of it, came out of my body and surfaced out, so it was a great healing experience, and then fast forwarding to when I was getting ready to have a child and I went and visited my doctor. My husband and I met with our doctor, Dr. Ericson, and as an integrative MD he did everything under the sun. So he’s testing my blood, my urine. All the different … My nutritional profiles, everything, to just make sure that I was ready to have a child, and I got a call back from him a couple of weeks later and he said to me, “Naomi, I need you to come into the office. I want to go over your results.”

Naomi:             I was a little bit surprised. I thought, “Okay, that sounds fine. Let’s do that.” Just was wondering, and when I got into his office he went through the list of heavy metals that I had in my body, and I was in shock over it and I thought, well how on Earth? I eat clean. I do everything from this health conscious perspective. What’s going on? Why would I have high and toxic levels of heavy metals? And Dr. Ericson said to me, “You have no business getting pregnant right now. You have to detoxify from this poisoning that you’ve had.”

Naomi:             And so I was trying to figure out, where did this all come from? And he ultimately traced it way back to those little tiny Chinese herbs, and so this was this next big defining moment in my life where I thought, okay, here I’ve worked with some amazing herbs that have really helped me to heal, but on the other hand by not understanding how they’re processed and where they come from, I’ve been a fool and I’ve hurt my body, and it took me months and months and months, over six months to get through the majority of the toxicity from those heavy metals.

Naomi:             So that’s what got me interested in health and wellbeing and nutritional supplements in particular. Then I started to make a commitment to myself that I always needed to know where things come from. It’s great to take vitamin C or it’s great to take ashwagandha or whatever it is that we’re taking, but unless we know where it was grown and how it was processed, we don’t really know what it is that we’re putting into our bodies, and so that’s how I began on the journey of obsessively trying to discover where things come from.

Trevor:             Wow, that’s definitely quite a journey. When people share their stories like that, I’m always fascinated to hear the people that take those types of journeys and take it into an opportunity to learn and to educate others, because it turns it into a very empowering experience instead of a scary one. Because we can look at those life learnings and choose to either get upset and angry or shut down, withdraw, or we can take it as an opportunity to do everything we can to find a solution, and then once we find that solution the next step is then to share it with other people or to help other people be able to avoid what we’ve been through, right?

Naomi:             That’s exactly right. I completely agree with that, and what I find to be so interesting about this particular journey was it’s very surprising and unusual to get that heavy metal toxicity from something that’s really been healing, but when you study and look at how things are actually processed it makes a lot more sense because there’s so many steps along the way, especially when we live in a society that’s really commercially based. We have to be so much more protective of our own health and our own wellbeing. Like with the incredible skincare that you’ve created, I know that when I use your skincare, and you just told me, and congratulations. You got EW … It’s what? EW-

Trevor:             EWG verified, yeah.

Naomi:             Verified, and I know how incredibly important that is for our health to have that kind of certification, but so many companies just would never do it because they have ingredients in their products that don’t belong there, but maybe give a more sensory, beneficial experience or they smell really good but they’re so incredibly toxic, so that journey I think is important for every one of us and especially those of us that are sharing those solutions.

Trevor:             Absolutely, and you’re definitely not alone in that journey that you went on. I’ve seen it with patients taking certain Chinese herbal formulas. I don’t think they’re all contaminated, but some of them are and then other things like even just greens. People are consuming a lot of greens or they’re doing green powder and they’re thinking they’re doing a great thing, but if they’re loaded with pesticides, or what’s in the soil that they’ve been grown in, and it’s concentrated. When we do a supplement, we’re concentrating all of those possible toxins that can be in the environment, so I’m so glad that you worked hard with your travels and your research and scientists that you brought in to create supplements and products that are clean.

Naomi:             That’s the joy of it, and that’s really what I’ve done since day one because when you have the opportunity to work with the top researchers, and the researchers have been maybe focused on an ingredient. For example I was in Calabria, Italy and I was there because there’s this amazing special citrus bergamot fruit that grows there, and there’s only a 20-mile radius that it grows in and the scientists have discovered that this little special fruit is so rich in antioxidants and flavonols that they were going to do a lot of research on it, and they discovered that it helps to raise the HDL cholesterol profiles and lower the LDL, so for people who are on statins, for people who don’t want to do statins or can’t because of the joint pain and so forth that it creates, here’s a natural option that’s been used for thousands of years by the locals and now the research is really supporting it, and so that’s what got me … That kind of journey and learning from different parts of the world is where I focus all of my energy.

Trevor:             Absolutely, and then you’ve got a book coming out this week. Very exciting. Whenever anybody writes a book obviously there’s a lot of information that you’ve been wanting to share, so let’s talk about what are some of the big things from the book? What made you decide you had to write a book right now?

Naomi:             The book took me three years, and it was seven years of research that went into it. As I was just mentioning, this beautiful citrus bergamot fruit. While I was over in Calabria, Italy, one of the main scientists, Dr. Elizabeth Janda, was drinking this special tea from the citrus fruit. So if you think about Earl Grey tea, Earl Grey tea that has the natural citrus bergamot has some of these benefits, but anyhow she was drinking this tea and I was drinking it with her, and by the end of the day when we left her laboratory, I had had like four cups of it, and so I asked her. I loved it, it was delicious, but I asked her, “Why do you drink so much of this whole citrus bergamot tea?” And she kind of smiled and laughed and said, “Well, because it’s like my anti-aging elixir, and the reason I love it so much is because it activates a process in my body called autophagy.”

Naomi:             And I had never heard that word and I was very curious to understand what it was, and once she explained it to me she said, “In Greek, autophagy means self eating.” So “auto” means self, and “-phagy” means to eat. That sounds a little bit crude but ultimately what she was talking about was the self eating is what goes on at the cellular level. We have a mechanism inside of all of our bodies. We all have it and it slows down with age and it slows down from the accelerated agers that are in our environment, but if we can help to activate it it actually eats away the debris and the junk and the accumulation of all the toxins that build up and slow down our cells, so in return once we are able to clean it up, almost like a little Pac-Man or a Roomba inside of the cell, once you can do that then your cell is able to behave as though it were younger and it ultimately is like a younger cell.

Naomi:             I got fascinated by this word and fascinated that the citrus bergamot tea could help to activate it in my body, so I came back home and I searched all over the globe for the top researchers that would help with really understanding how to get this working in our body through exercise, through diet, through nutrition. Simple home remedies and so forth, and that began my journey three years ago and now I have this book that’s about to launch tomorrow. Glow15.

Trevor:             Oh, that’s so fantastic. It’s great that you learned a little bit and then wanted to expand upon that, and you’ve created a whole program around it. The name of the book is Glow15. It’s 15, right? 15 days. So, why 15 days?

Naomi:             That was the biggest surprise around the book. When I did the program I loved the results I got. I had more energy. I could deal with way more stress. I had just sold my company about six months before and I had then taken a job as the CEO of the parent company and I was traveling all over and I had all of these different things going on and I was doing the program and I had more energy. I felt more vital. I dropped a couple of pounds that were toxic weight that was sort of holding me back, and I got so excited by that that I decided to have all my friends and family do it, which they did, but then where I went is I went from there to actually a university, Jacksonville University, and I told them I wanted to do a clinical study, and so we put together an eight-week clinical study for women and the women were everything from mothers to administrators to doctors to CEOs to the deans of the college.

Naomi:             Everybody came together and 15 days into the study when the women were being studied on how their autophagy was being activated, I got a call from the lead researcher and she said, “Naomi, each and every woman has achieved benefits in 15 days, from dropping weight to improving the depth and the length of their wrinkles, to sleeping better, to having more energy, to reducing the body fat, to improving their cholesterol profiles.” I mean the list was enormous. And so Glow15 is a lifestyle, but we got results in 15 days and that’s why it got that name.

Trevor:             Oh, okay. Got it. Alright. And so what are some of the top foods that help with this?

Naomi:             Some of the top foods, well there are so many which is really exciting, but some of the top foods are avocado helps with it. Salmon helps with it. There are sphingolipids. There are all different sorts of polyphenols, so a lot of the dark berries and red wine and chocolate both activate autophagy. So the dark chocolate, the dark, rich red wine. So it’s a lot of foods that you would never imagine. There are 140 different foods that we recommend, and what I would say around food is it’s as important to think about when you eat as what you eat, so it’s not a program that tells you to deprive yourself of any sort of foods. You can have your carbohydrates, but instead of having carbohydrates in the morning where they’re going to spike your insulin and imbalance your blood sugar levels and create so much free radical stress on your body, instead you can have them later at night. So fat first and carbs last is a big part of the program.

Trevor:             Very interesting. And so when you talk about fat first, those are things like the avocado and salmon that you mentioned.

Naomi:             Yes, or you could talk about macadamia nuts. Also we have another principle which is around … We call it IF and PC, so intermittent fasting and protein cycling. This is not a ketogenic diet, but what it is is it embraces the importance of good, satiating fats, and so we have these amazing delicious avocado glow recipes, and then we also have these little egg recipes which every other day you’re going to have them with not the egg white but the egg yolk, so getting the good fats from the egg yolk and a lot of different foods.

Trevor:             Interesting, and then with the carbohydrates, which type of carbohydrates are your favorite ones?

Naomi:             Certainly the complex carbs, the whole food carbs that have higher levels of fiber in them and it could be anything from a sweet potato as a carbohydrate. You’re really looking for the ones that have the highest level of fiber, so any of the vegetables that are fibrous vegetables I think are very important too.

Trevor:             Okay, so you’re not talking so much about grains as more vegetable carbohydrates. Because a lot of  hear carbohydrates they think grains. They think bread, pasta.

Naomi:             Yeah, and that depends on the individual. For me, I don’t like to have any of the wheats. Obviously I don’t want gluten in my personal body, but that’s just me. That’s because of my autoimmune disorder that I have, but I do like to have a lot of the fibrous vegetables as a carbohydrate.

Trevor:             Let’s go back to talking about eczema, because I think that’s an important one. I know you mentioned that as part of your journey and I don’t know if you knew this but I struggled with eczema when I was a kid too, and that was actually what set me on the path to becoming a naturopathic physician because of learning about a different approach and not suppressing the eczema. That was making it worse with all the adverse reactions to medications. But instead looking for the underlying causes and supporting the body. So when it comes to eczema I imagine it’s still a tendency for your body to have that, so what part of this plan, what do you think helps the most in keeping that at bay?

Naomi:             That’s such a great question. I’m so glad you asked it, because while I created Glow15 over the past several years, many of the principles in it I was using really to help reduce the inflammation in my body, but what I didn’t realize is I was activating the autophagy inside my cells, so like with eczema so much of the time our cells get very stagnant with the buildup of the toxins. We’re not able to eliminate the toxins as effectively as other people so therefore we need the activation of autophagy ourselves probably more than we even realize, so the things that I was doing and that I continue to do as part of the program is fasting.

Naomi:             This intermittent fasting. I’ve been fasting for the past 25 years and I’ve used it as a key tool to help reduce the inflammation, and now I know it’s a key tool to activate my autophagy. A lot of women think, “Oh, I can’t fast. It’s going to affect my hormones, or I might not be able to do it.” I find that men do a lot more fasting than women and for me it’s such a powerful tool. It really creates this cellular brilliance, this beauty brilliance that we all have inside of ourselves. So in the program I recommend not eating for 16 hours. It’s a very simple intermittent fast and you do it every other day, so you’ll do it let’s say three days out of the week.

Naomi:             And so for someone who’s interested in fasting, the steps that I would take to get there is first and foremost I would reduce and try to eliminate sugar out of someone’s diet. That’s the first step, and once you’ve got control of the sugar then you can start to eat more of the good and healthy fats, and then once your body is adapted to eating more good fat, not eating for 16 hours is something that you don’t even notice because you’re satiated and you’re running on a much stronger fuel and that’s fat instead of sugar, so I use that all the time as a tool.

Trevor:             Great, and I imagine this diet is very anti-inflammatory too. Immune balancing, so all of the different root causes that trigger eczema are addressed in this, so that’s great.

Naomi:             Yeah. The other thing that I would say that I think is very important for eczema is the polyphenols. I discovered that there are a number of what I call powerphenols, so they’re more than just the polyphenol. A polyphenol can be found in dark chocolate, can be found in the red wine, green tea, in the citrus bergamot. These are all polyphenols, and they all have antioxidant and protective benefits to the damage that we can incur through free radicals, but the reason I call them powerphenols is because they also, those four, so green tea or EGCG that’s found in green tea, resveratrol that’s found in red wine. You find it as I mentioned in the citrus bergamots and you can find it in a lot of citrus fruit but especially the citrus bergamot where you find it in like an Earl Grey tea, and these nutrients activate specifically autophagy as well. So I like to use powerphenols on a daily basis in my food and supplementation.

Trevor:             Fantastic. I think those are all great things. It’s interesting when you’re talking about bergamot, I have it in my skincare line so in addition to internal it’s also great externally.

Naomi:             It is so great externally. If you think about all of the most amazing perfumes in the world, they all use citrus bergamot as the base. While I was in Calabria, Italy actually and I was there working with the manufacturers, there was a group of like Chanel … All the top perfume houses were there because that’s the only place where they get their “elixir of the gods” I call it.

Trevor:             Yeah. It smells amazing, so I’ll have to start doing it internally as well because I haven’t been doing that. Great. What are some of the other things that people can do? Exercise, sleep. Any other things that you want to recommend along with the diet?

Naomi:             Yes, I’d love to. With exercise it’s very easy. The two forms of exercise that activate autophagy the best are interval training, so it could be where you’re walking faster for a minute and then slowing down, so interval in whatever way you want to do that and that can be at a gym, that can be at Orangetheory. It doesn’t matter but just interval training, and the time is what matters is you do it for 30 minutes. The big thing that we discovered is less is actually more with exercise and activating autophagy, so in the program it’s every other day, and then the other type of exercise is resistance training, and again that can be like this morning I was doing yoga on the beach. That’s resistance training. I’m using my own body weight to resist and those are great ways. You can use something that you have in the house. For people who like to go to the gym, which is not me, you can go to the gym and do the resistance training but those are the two forms, and 30 minutes activates tons of autophagy every other day.

Naomi:             The other thing I would say around the exercise is it’s really interesting because we know that stress is bad for us, and that’s like the chronic stress that could be even low grade that we’re under, but acute stress loves autophagy and autophagy loves acute stress, so these kind of exercises are providing your body with the good stress or the acute stress, so that’s something that I want everyone to keep in mind.

Trevor:             It’s really interesting this idea of acute stress, because our bodies do a great job with acute stress. It’s the chronic stress that gets people in trouble, and so there’s a lot of talk about stress management and I see some people sometimes get frustrated and say, “Well we’re all stressed out. Stress is part of life.” But the issue is the chronic level. Letting it continue to burden our bodies, or to find one thing like exercise and then overdo it, and then it stresses out your body.

Naomi:             Right. I love that point that you made. You’re so right, and I think for somebody like you, you’re really living it. You can see the vibrance that comes through your skin and the wellbeing that you exude, and I’m sure you must think about chronic versus acute stress and how you manage that, right?

Trevor:             Absolutely, and it’s a huge part of that and it’s easy to get stressed all the time, but we have to take care of ourselves. Especially when we’re taking care of other people. You’re a mom too. You have four kids, right, and I have three, so we’ve got the kids. You’ve got your clients and a lot of people that you’re … So there have to be ways to manage that, right?

Naomi:             I love it. No, I totally agree, and just even understanding there’s a difference between … That good stress is actually really beneficial to helping us eat away the fine lines and wrinkles and break down the toxic fat, all through this process along with understanding okay, I’ve had this ongoing stress and I’ve got to move past it.

Trevor:             Yep, absolutely. So what are some of the ways that … Do you talk about stress management in your book?

Naomi:             Yeah, I definitely do … I definitely do a bit. I’m sorry.

Trevor:             That’s okay. No, I was reading through your book. I got started on it but I haven’t finished it. I’m real excited. Your team sent me a copy of it so I’m excited to finish it but I haven’t gotten to any of the stress management stuff. I was wondering if you have tips in there.

Naomi:             I do but it’s interesting because when I did the clinical study at Jacksonville University, at the end of it we sat down and we did a postmortem. Like, “What did you guys love? Here are the results. What worked better than you thought? What wasn’t as good as you thought? How do we improve this? Because this is going to go out to millions of other women and I want there to be the easiest and fastest and most effective results from it.”

Naomi:             And so the majority of the women said, “We were hoping to get more out of the sleep program,” and I couldn’t figure out why what we were doing wasn’t quite working and so I went to Michael Breus, America’s sleep doctor and said, “Michael, help me.” What he did is he helped me to understand that … We put a quiz in the book which I hope you do, and the quiz basically looks at what type of sleeper you are. We have different words and we use this technique that he built for us so that we could understand what our own circadian rhythm was, and then once you get your circadian rhythm into the right flow, then you’re able to activate autophagy and we activate the most of our autophagy at night while we’re sleeping, so what I discovered was that every single cell in our entire body has a little clock inside of it and that clock can either be working or not, and we talk about stress being chronic or acute.

Naomi:             When you’re dealing with chronic stress, and it may be that you’re working late hours or that you’re traveling a lot and you’re dealing with jet lag, your body gets out of rhythm and when it’s out of rhythm it’s in a place of chronic stress. Even if you’re deprived of one hour of sleep that’s affecting your entire health, your metabolism, everything. And so knowing what type of sleeper you are and how much sleep you really need puts all of that into balance and then lets your body naturally work with its own rhythms, with its own autophagy rhythms, and so I think that process of learning about circadian rhythm, doing the quiz.

Naomi:             I learned that I’m better off if I sleep for 7.5 hours than if I sleep for 8 hours. That’s better for my body because I’ve had five sleep cycles, and I’m very excited about everyone that reads it or looks up circadian rhythm. Autophagy won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2016 and circadian rhythm won it in 2017, so these are the big topics for improving our health and wellbeing.

Trevor:             Yeah, absolutely, and I’ve had Dr. Michael Breus on the podcast so yes, we’re familiar with him. He’s fantastic. I’m glad that you were able to fit in some of his information in your book. Well Naomi, it’s been fantastic interviewing you today. Tell everybody where they can find your book.

Naomi:             Well Dr. Trevor, thank you so much. You can find my book at Amazon or you can find my book at Barnes & Noble. You can go to Glow15.com and it’s found there, so it’ll be found all over the place.

Trevor:             Okay, well good luck with your book and I hope everybody will go out and get a copy or get a Kindle version or something so that they can check it out.

Naomi:             Thank you so much.

Trevor:             Thank you for being on my podcast. Thanks for your information today.

Trevor: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Naomi Whittel and learned about autophagy and what it can do for your health and your skin. To learn more about Naomi you can go to my website, TheSpaDr.com. Go to the podcast page with her interview and you’ll find all the information and links there, including the link to get her book. You’ll also find the transcription of the podcast there as well, so you can check that out. And while you’re on the website I invite you to join the Spa Dr. community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows, and if you haven’t done so already I highly recommend you get your customized skin report at TheSkinQuiz.com. It’s free. It takes just a few moments. You can get great information about what your skin is trying to tell you about your health and what you can do about it. Just go to TheSkinQuiz.com. Also I invite you to join me on social media on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube, and join the conversation. And I’ll see you next time on the Spa Dr. Podcast.