TRANSCRIPT:
- Today, I'm gonna be sharing with you guys my top five favorite herbs for beautiful, healthy and radiant skin, that have been used by ancient cultures around the world for thousands of years. So we're gonna go to a variety of different regions and pick out the best that they have to offer.
For our first one, we're gonna journey down to South East Asia to Thailand, where they have something called the blue butterfly pea flower. and this is known in Latin as clitoria ternatea. It's a vibrant blue beautiful flower that grows all over Thailand. And it can be used in a wide variety of food and drink preparations, because its flavor is very mild. But it gives this amazing bright blue color. You may have seen a video previously, where we used it to make a vibrant blue ice cream. You can go check that out afterwards. But we're not here, of course, to talk about what it tastes like necessarily, we're here to talk about what it's gonna do for your skin.
It does a few things that are very interesting. The first of which, is that it supports synthesis of collagen and elastin that help rejuvenate your skin. But it actually goes even further than that, because there have been in vitro studies that have shown that the clitoria ternatea flower extracted has the ability to inhibit glycation. What's glycation? When you are burning sugar as fuel in your body, When you are burning glucose to create energy, to create ATP to fuel all of your cells, something that happens as kind of a side effect of this, it's like you have cars that have emissions when they are burning fossil fuels. When you are burning sugar as a part of your metabolism, something happens called glycation and you produce what are called advance glycation end products, AGEs. And it's funny that that acronym is AGE because, these actually cause aging. They cause cross linking of your DNA, as your DNA replicates, they cause it to have little errors and mistakes and what's called cross linking happen each time so that each successive round of replication is less perfect then the previous one. So glycation is really one of the main things that cause aging and wrinkling of the skin and blue butterfly, it appears, has the ability to inhibit glycation, which is amazing.
And it has a whole wide variety of other benefits that we can get to another time in terms of stress and brain health and blood sugar balance, but we're today gonna focus on skin health. So that's blue butterfly. Now, we're gonna leave the tropics of Thailand and journey north, we're gonna hop right over China and go up to the cold of Siberia.
What do we find here growing on birch tress in Siberia? There is a mushroom called chaga mushroom, that's becoming very well known these days. This is a powerful antimicrobial, it protects against oxidative stress and it also, in Russian research, they've shown it to be very effective against psoriasis. Psoriasis is a very common skin issue that so many people deal with and have a hard time making progress on improving their condition and it causes a lot of frustration and suffering and it's fascinating to see that something like chaga is able to really do something when it comes to psoriasis and creates a noticeable benefit and these antimicrobial effects of chaga as well, are so nice because you know, whether you're dealing with acne or various different skin conditions, having a healthy microbiome on your skin and not dealing with any difficult microbial issues, is gonna make your skin a lot healthier.
Next, we're gonna drop back down into China and here we deal with something that some people might say, wait a second, that's not an herb. And this is pearl powder. Now you have to understand, that in the Chinese system herbs are not just plants. The Chinese herbal system incorporates plants, it also incorporates minerals, which pearl could be in essence considered a mineral. Or you may look at what they call dragon bone, you look at something called like shilajit, you look at mushrooms which aren't plants, they're from an entirely different kingdom completely. And then you also have things coming from the animal world. They get into things like polyrhachis ant, which is big black Chinese mountain ant or you know deer antler tips being extracted into alcohol for the growth factors, but here we're looking at pearl which is grown inside a shellfish and they remove it and they actually go for the smallest pearls, interestingly, because the beneficial part of the pearl is the outer part. What's on the inside is actually not beneficial necessarily, its just kind of inert. And so the smaller ones are gonna, by having more smaller pearls rather than just a couple of big ones, they get more of the outer material.
Now, what is pearl doing? Pearl is a wonderful herb for supporting rejuvenation of the skin. Creating smooth, fine elastic skin and preventing wrinkles. It is of all the herbs we're talking about here, it has some of the greatest history of use in China and if you mention pearl as an herb, as a supplement to somebody in China, they know that you are taking it for its beauty enhancing effects, for its skin enhancing effects. That you know it was kind of their way of saying it traditionally was that it would give one the complexion of a jade girl and that was one of the highest compliments you could pay to the health of somebody's skin and their beauty.
Now going on from there, we're gonna stay in China for the next herb and talk about tremella mushroom. This is a mushroom that grows on trees and it is known as the jelly mushroom or the snow mushroom and it has the amazing ability to improve hyaluronic acid production. So hyaluronic acid, many people take it itself as a supplement to support moisture and elasticity in the skin and tremella contains it yes, but it can also help regulate your own natural production of hyaluronic acid which is pretty amazing and there is an ancient Chinese beauty her name was Yang Guifei, very famous for how beautiful she was and it was widely said that her beauty was attributed to regular consumption, daily consumption of tremella mushroom.
Last, we are going to go to schizandra, this is another incredible Chinese herb. It's a berry called wu wei zi in Chinese, in Mandarin, and this is called the five flavor fruit as it translates directly to English. It's sweet, sour, salty, bitter and pungent all at once. So you know that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with this herb. And we'll put a link in the description to a whole 'nother video that we did all about the various aspects of schizandra. But as it applies to the skin, schizandra was traditionally said to help protect the skin from the harmful effects of the elements, meaning from the heat from the sun, from the cold, from the wind. Cause all of these things over the years can really take a toll on your skin and gonna give you that weathered and weather beaten look that is not probably the look that you're going for.
So schizandra is helping you protect from the elements and just generally famous for making the skin radiantly beautiful, it's also a liver tonic which is interesting to note because it's not just a stage one liver detoxifier as many things are, but it's both stage one and stage two. Most herbs you'll find that work on the liver either support stage one detoxification or stage two and you can end up with an imbalance there if you're not taking the right herb to support the other stage properly, but schizandra, being stage one and stage two is fantastic, especially when you consider that the health of the liver is very often reflected in the health of your skin.
So guys, these are our five favorite herbs coming from all over the world, right? We're going Thailand, Siberia and then all through China for radiant and beautiful skin, making sure your skin stays clear, young, elastic, soft, beautiful and you know of course, this is not just about surface beauty. These are all herbs that are working on many other deeper levels of your health and a lot of what they're doing to create this beautiful skin is happening as a result of things they're doing to your internal organs. So don't be confused thinking this is just about superficial beauty. This is about creating beauty on all levels of your body, mind and spirit.
Thank so much for joining us today guys. Be sure to give us a like and leave us a comment. I'm super curious to hear if you've tried some of these herbs and what your experience has been or if you're curious about one of them in particular and gonna give it a try, let us know in the comments. I'd love to hear. Thanks again so much for joining us, hope you guys have a beautiful day.