Dr. Doris Day's Skin Longevity Protocol for Midlife Women : Sugar, Estrogen, and Collagen | #166

**Doris Day** (0:00)
Why am I breaking out again? Why is my skin dry and itchy? You can lose up to 30% of your collagen in the first five years post-menopause.

**Vonda Wright** (0:08)
Dr. Doris Day, a board-certified dermatologist, clinical associate professor at NYU in New York. What is menopause and perimenopause doing to our largest organ in our body?

**Doris Day** (0:21)
When your estrogen starts to go down, the estrogen receptors in your skin, they start to decrease. Because your brain estrogen receptors increase because your brain is trying to grab to any estrogen. So by the time you feel brain fog, your skin has already been depleted of estrogen for years.

**Vonda Wright** (0:38)
What is the pathway to start preventing this loss of collagen or modulating it? And should we be doing face yoga?

**Doris Day** (0:46)
Exercise routine that includes strength training that builds muscle because building muscle will build collagen in the skin. Just as simple as moisturizing, protecting your skin from losing too much water.

**Vonda Wright** (0:57)
What is the biggest skincare myth that women are coming to you with?

**Doris Day** (1:01)
I would say...

**Vonda Wright** (1:04)
I just want to take the time to thank you all for being here with us at the Dr Vonda podcast. You are smart, you are curious, you are generous, and you have turned this sleepy podcast into consistently ranking in the top five, six, seven of all medicine podcasts across the world.
And we are currently in the top 100 of all health and wellness podcasts across the world. And I'm thankful. I want you to keep sharing with everybody you love, with everybody who needs to hear our guests. And I want you to subscribe. Every single month, more than 135,000 people listen to this podcast. And we have educated millions of people over time.
I want you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. I want you to follow this podcast on all the platforms. And if you want to see the videos, you need to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Thanks for being here on the Dr Vonda Podcast. The best is yet to come. So welcome back, everyone, to the Dr Vonda Show where I am privileged to get to talk to some of the best clinicians, surgeons, doctors in the world. And today, I'm talking with Dr. Doris Day, who is a board-certified dermatologist, clinical associate professor at NYU in New York, and has a thriving practice, a thriving radio show, and really comes to us with, we were talking earlier, we've both been caring for patients for a very long time. And I believe that sitting across from people for this long, really listening to them gives us this view. I do this, looking them in the eyes gives us this view that if you're just reading about it, or maybe having stopped practice, you don't get to do anymore. So I'm thrilled to have you today with us.

**Doris Day** (3:08)
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat.

**Vonda Wright** (3:11)
You know, something that I like to remind people as I talk about midlife and menopause and perimenopause and the role of the musculoskeletal system is the fact that we cannot forget that the musculoskeletal system or the muscle and bone and tendon are not the biggest organ in the body. The biggest organ in the body is our skin and all the layers of it, right? And yet sometimes we just frame it as what's going on right here, right?
But that is only a small part of the story. And for the women that I serve, what's happening to us 35 to 65 and beyond is that as we go through menopause, just like every other organ in our body changes, our skin changes. And women are like, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, what do I do now? So, what is menopause? And even, let's go back, perimenopause, starting as early as 40, doing to our largest organ in our body?

**Doris Day** (4:19)
Well, I love that question. I think of your skin as your largest contiguous organ. Because if you want to put the skeletal system as an organ, it's not contiguous. But I think of that as one of your most important organs that drives metabolism and hormones and health and youth, really. So I try to get all my patients into an exercise routine that includes strength training that builds muscle because building muscle will build collagen in the skin. But I do agree the skin to me, it's my favorite organ, it's your largest contiguous organ, and it is essential for life. People think of the skin as just a vanity thing or cosmetic and pay no attention to the skin. As a matter of fact, when I did internal medicine before I did dermatology, anytime anybody had a rash or anything to do with the skin, they would just ignore it and say, call DERM. Well, I learned when I did dermatology that everything they were seeing, if they paid a little bit more attention, they would have clues as to what was going on, whether it was meningitis or heart disease or kidney disease or tropical disease or infectious disease or cancer, all of those are allergies, all of those show in the skin and they give you clues as to what's going on in the body.