215: Healing the Root Causes of Eczema, Psoriasis and Acne- with Barbara Paldus

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Josh Dech (00:00.821)Can hear me okay? I'm delightful. I'm in the middle of a... Yeah, loud and clear. We might have a bit of an audio delay. I've got a little bit of a thunderstorm here rolling in. I'm not sure if it's going to affect the internet. But let me do a quick timing with you. Let me know when you get to... When you hear me get to three. One, two, three.

(00:01):
Barbara Paldus (00:01.304)Hi, how are you? Yes I can, can you hear me?
Josh Dech (00:25.333)Okay, so we're a little bit delayed, but not bad. That should be okay. All right, Barbara, you are a skin specialist, is that right?
Barbara Paldus (00:34.862)I'm actually an electrical engineer who spent the last seven years researching skin gap ring microbiome. Before that I spent 15 years in biotechnology creating... I've become a skin specialist, yes.
Josh Dech (00:44.917)So you're a skin specialist.
Josh Dech (00:51.196)Very good. Well, I think that's super cool. So you were electrical engineering. What is it you do now?
Barbara Paldus (00:57.93)Well, I run CODEX. So basically we do research on essentially skin gut brain. So we look at clinical studies of different kinds of probiotics on their effects on asthma, sorry, eczema, or various hormone modulating compounds and their effects on acne. So we are looking at both the metabolic pathways, the gut microbiome, leaky gut comes up a lot with eczema, gut inflammation comes up a lot with eczema. And so we're essentially trying to
Josh Dech (01:23.359)Hmm.
Barbara Paldus (01:27.704)seal up. You can think of it as we're trying to seal up the barriers in the body, both in the gut as well as in the skin.
Josh Dech (01:32.213)Mm.
Josh Dech (01:35.797)I'm going to show you something you might really, really like. Just as like a point of interest before we get into the whole everything today. What's your hard stop?
Barbara Paldus (01:46.158)I have an hour, so we should be good. Yeah.
Josh Dech (01:48.629)perfect. I'll make this lickety split. So I've been, I specialize in bowel disease like Crohn's colitis. And so what I've done, you can't really see it here clearly, but I've actually mapped bowel disease. I've been thinking about this for like years and so just put it on paper today. So based on your symptoms,
Barbara Paldus (01:54.646)Okay.
Josh Dech (02:06.716)right, looking at the TH1 dominant pathways, what it does, so I'm trying to get this out to a layman's association, the symptoms when it's hyperactive, et cetera, blah, blah, drugs that help the symptoms. So you can tell based on what drug you're using, what that looks like and how it actually impacts your body. So you go through TH1, 2, 9, 17, 22 and Treg, and then I've correlated the drugs. If you have this drug and it helps correct these symptoms, these are likely your root causes. And here's a test you can use.
Barbara Paldus (02:31.544)How interesting.
Josh Dech (02:34.95)And then I went through as well and mapped out based on the primary root causes, which immune pathways are overloaded based on what processes. So you go through mold and mycotoxins, parasites, Clostridia candida. This has been my brainchild for a year. I literally put it on paper yesterday and just like put it out in a whole day. So.
Barbara Paldus (02:46.096)Interesting.
Barbara Paldus (02:51.856)Wow!
This is insane. I was just thinking, I'd love to introduce you to my CTO, because he's now studying metabolomics and impacts of basically what are the cytokine pathways that are modulated by various microbes in the gut, and how can we actually create products that are similar, for example, in mechanism of action to do PICCENT, but don't have that modulation of the biologic pathways, because those can lead to other problems.
Josh Dech (03:04.275)Mmm.
Josh Dech (03:23.24)That's super cool. That's really cool. Yeah, I'd love to. This whole process, I think when we look at things differently and this is the benefit and we'll get to this definitely I think in the show at some point, but the idea where you go to school, you get told what to learn based on research is already existing and they're told how to think, not what to think. I came into this and I was like, none of this makes any sense.

(00:22):
Barbara Paldus (03:37.358)No.
Barbara Paldus (03:41.699)Yes.
Josh Dech (03:45.545)So I unpacked it myself without the formal education. And now we've got a map as to everything, the dominant immune pathways. And this is not like research. Like I'm actually gonna go back and cite all of these things, but there's research backing this in my last several years of clinical experience. So.
Barbara Paldus (04:00.994)Josh, this is amazing. Now, this is amazing. And this is actually exactly what we're working on as well. Like, we basically have a map of all the different published papers on every single strain of as many bacteria we could find, primarily lactobacillus, amphibidobacterium. But there's some streptococcus thermopolis. There's some bacillus coagulans, et cetera. And so we're mapping it now to all the cytokine pathways and mapping those to the diseases. So we created a probiotic about a year ago. We ran it through clinical trial.
Josh Dech (04:26.653)Yeah.
Barbara Paldus (04:29.806)and it has eczema clearance that's faster and better than dupixense. So then of course we were not expecting this. Okay. So now we're trying to figure out, okay, why does it work so well? So because otherwise, you know, we're, we're otherwise we're basically putting quackery out there. so my, so Mark, my CTO spent the last six months putting together like, I don't know, it's a review of 600, 800 papers on essentially every GI paper on
Josh Dech (04:35.284)jeez.
Josh Dech (04:41.254)Right.
Josh Dech (04:46.536)Ugh.
Barbara Paldus (04:59.37)cytokine mapping of these various bacteria and lo and behold when he put it all together here's our basically you know our probiotic list and here's all the cytokines and it's like IL-4 IL-13 IL-4 IL-13 you know up regulates IL-10 down regulates IL-4 down regulates IL-13 we're like okay now now we know why this thing works so well and they're right and there's still that question like is it live is it dead and why does the
Josh Dech (05:15.095)Uh-huh.
Now we get it. But that's science. That's amazing.
Barbara Paldus (05:27.522)dead probiotic work almost as well as a live probiotic. And is there, do they stay? you know, is there, or do you have to keep taking them for the rest of your life? You know, because we've had people, for example, and then they go on vacation, they forget to take their probiotic with them, their eczema comes back with a vengeance, you know, two weeks later. And it could also be because they went to Mexico, they're eating hot food, you know, probably drinking, but all of a sudden they come back and they look like...
They did three months before we started taking care of them. So it's kind of like, wow, how did you manage in two weeks to completely destroy everything we spent three months doing? So it's kind of like, maybe the probiotic just flushes through. Maybe our concept that you take even a live probiotic and it somehow colonizes your intestine is just horse shit. And once we lose it, and then why are we losing it? Is it microplastics?
Josh Dech (06:01.181)Yeah, thanks guys. That's kinda wild.
Josh Dech (06:21.481)Yeah. Yeah.
Barbara Paldus (06:21.75)over prescription of antibiotics as children. And then we also see massive deficiencies in kids with eczema. So I hope that now that we're going to have this telehealth platform coming out in September, we'll be able to get enough statistical data that we'll be able to actually say, here's your gut microbiome profile. You've got this disease, this disease, this disease, this disease. I mean, that would be really cool. And they're all skin diseases. We're not doing diabetes. We're not doing cardiovascular.
Josh Dech (06:45.661)Yeah, that's super cool. Totally. Just kidding. Yeah. Well, not to take up too much of our interview time together, because we really should just be recording this whole thing. This here is what I've sort of put together for this one for eczema, which fits directly into our Th2 pathway, which is your STAT6 IL4 513s and eosinophilic responses. Now,
Barbara Paldus (06:51.864)per completely focused on skin.
Barbara Paldus (06:58.444)Ha ha ha.
Josh Dech (07:13.607)I'd love to get into this a little bit more. Obviously my user base isn't what I put up here, Keysight of kinds.

(00:43):
Barbara Paldus (07:18.794)Yeah, tell me at what level to talk. Yeah, definitely tell me at what level to be talking. Like, are we talking... So basically like grade eight, grade eight kind of science level.
Josh Dech (07:22.933)Gen pop. Very Gen pop, yeah.
Great three. Yes, I think three to eight is probably realistic. I try to if I do get into the weeds with it, I explain it very if I couldn't explain it to a child or my great grandmother, it's probably not suitable for the podcast. Yeah, that's sort of the idea. But let's let's die. Do you like Barbara Barbara? OK, I go by Joshua. I'm a big trouble mister. So I always like like to ask. And is it Paul this?
Barbara Paldus (07:35.117)Okay.
Barbara Paldus (07:46.252)Okay, okay, got it, got it, got it.
A Barb.
Barbara Paldus (07:59.084)Yes, Paul, this.
Josh Dech (08:00.245)Perfect. All right. Any questions for me before we just dive right in here?
Barbara Paldus (08:04.616)anything not to say, any topics that are taboo,
Josh Dech (08:10.153)More taboo the better. Big middle finger to the man. Everything's open book. Totally fine. Whatever you want.
Barbara Paldus (08:17.39)Because we kind of go by the science, and then we usually have some dermatologist who gets, you know, irretrievably upset at us. It's kind of like, well, it's like, OK, show us the paper. know, tell us your hypothesis and show us the paper. This is like about steroids. So we usually have these violent agreements about steroids, disagreements about steroids.
Josh Dech (08:24.413)Yes, that's ideal.
Josh Dech (08:34.719)Totally. Well, I had somebody like, show me the research. I'm like, bitch, I am the research. Like, this is it right now. Here's the anecdotal clinical evidence. We just need to put it in a study and publish it. But it's happening whether you like it or not.
Barbara Paldus (08:39.022)Exactly.
Barbara Paldus (08:48.334)Exactly. No, but seriously, mean, afterwards, I really would love to connect you with Mark. putting together a scientific advisory board and we are putting it, you know, we are not doing like, oh, the Harvard person or no, we are putting it together with people like we do have one professor from France who's considered insane over there, but he actually identified the link between eczema and Crohn's 20 years ago. And he's now identified a new type of Crohn's disease that happens in people with eczema. And it's finally getting published after 20 years and about 10,000 patients.
Josh Dech (08:55.623)my goodness.
Barbara Paldus (09:17.974)So.
Josh Dech (09:18.633)That's why I would be honored to be part of some of that stuff because Crohn's and colitis are fixable conditions. They're 100 % reversible every single time, nearly. Now there are SIRS cases, immunodeficiency, immune collapse, but I break down another conversation by break down the four stages from acute to chronic to immune mediated and then immune collapse or deficiency.
Barbara Paldus (09:26.402)Wow, wow.
Barbara Paldus (09:40.483)Amazing.
Josh Dech (09:40.51)And it's the immune mediated responses we're seeing excessive TH2 and 17 primarily in IBD, which is driving these neutrophilic responses. Ulcer, strictures, fistulas is based on the hyperactivity of these systems. And then it's the collapse, is like biotoxin illness serves by Shoemaker that we tend to see more of on the far end of the spectrum, which is a game of defense, but most people are grade three.

(01:04):
Barbara Paldus (10:02.862)Cool. Yeah, no, I think, I mean, so the issue I have is this French guy's brilliant, but he speaks no English. And so I would love to connect you with Mark because he needs somebody like you to actually be talking about all of these things because we're working exactly in the same arena. The only difference is we're now tying it back to the skin diseases. And we're going to be doing clinical trials, like population clinical trials through our own platform, which is partly why we got this, why we're launching this platform because we're trying to get
Josh Dech (10:08.563)No, no, okay.
Barbara Paldus (10:32.152)the basically nutritionist talking to the naturopath, talking to the dermatologist so that there is actually some cross fertilization of these different fields because you cannot just slap a steroid on. You can't just slap a retinoid on and expect it to get rid of the condition in the long term. You have to look at this from a more integrated perspective.
Josh Dech (10:45.076)right.
Josh Dech (10:52.213)Yeah, 100 % agree entirely.
Barbara Paldus (10:53.538)And the more science we can put behind it, the more we can take on the medical community. They are, they are every step of the way. So yeah, we have a huge topical steroid withdrawal community. And one of the things we want to figure out is how are they different for regular people with eczema?
Josh Dech (10:58.165)Because they are working against us, very thoroughly. Okay.
Josh Dech (11:11.485)Yeah, that is so good. Well, let's do this. So your hard, what time is it for you right now?
Barbara Paldus (11:16.622)I have like 45 minutes, so we should be good, right? And I can stay longer, like I'm just at a conference, my team's at the booth, so I'm good. Like you just tell me what you need.
Josh Dech (11:19.637)Okay, so 45 from now, that's perfect.
Josh Dech (11:26.133)All right, well, we'll try to wrap it up in 45. I like to go as long as they can, but not longer than they need to. We spent 10 minutes just chatting because it's so good.
Barbara Paldus (11:33.068)Look, if we need an extra 15 minutes, we need an extra, no big deal, no big deal.
Josh Dech (11:36.661)Okay, I won't stop the conversation too early, but I'll do my best to wind it naturally.
Barbara Paldus (11:41.112)This is not a beauty podcast where it would be like, I've got 25 minutes.
Josh Dech (11:45.28)Perfect, thank you very much. No, I'm very, very interested in this. I got a fire under my ass. I popped some methylene blue 20 minutes ago. Like I am ready to go. Well, shit, let's just do a quick welcome to kick it off and we'll get rolling. It's no doctor, no title you want, just Barbara or Barb. Perfect, all right. Barbara Pauldus, welcome to the show. great, great. Doctor, yeah, my father is Mr. I get Mr. Deck, I'm like, that feels weird.
Barbara Paldus (11:52.214)Nice.
Barbara Paldus (12:05.068)Dr. Paldus is my dad. That was my dad.
Josh Dech (12:14.3)fair enough. right, a quick welcome to We'll Get You Rolling by Rapalda. So welcome to Reversible.
Barbara Paldus (12:20.45)Thank you so much, Josh. Great to be here.
Josh Dech (12:22.803)Yeah, no kidding. You know what? The first 10 minutes we spent just off air chatting was just amazing information we're gonna get into here today. And it's almost too bad that it automatically records and we kind of just get chatting and shoot the shit and then we're like, we better start the episode. And we miss all the good stuff, but don't you worry. Right now you're listening to this. We're gonna make sure we get you back to that good stuff. Barb, we talked about some amazing stuff here, but can you summarize really quick what it is that we're talking about?
today and why it is just the coolest thing anybody will need to know today.

(01:25):
Barbara Paldus (12:55.256)So we're talking about skin diseases, so things like eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, acne. And we were talking about how they originate in the gut and how an old Greek guy, Hippocrates, 2400 years ago, it said all diseases start in the gut. And we're now rediscovering since about 10 years ago how much of the gut microbiome, gut inflammation, leaky gut actually impact the skin diseases. And in a way like that, the skin is a mirror of what's happening on the inside. And you can't just treat it topically. You have to go in.
inside the body.
Josh Dech (13:26.741)I'll tell you a story. Years back, I was dealing with really bad acne and it all came in from my gut. Once again, it was Candida and parasites. And I learned all of this from liver congestion, you name it over the course of my life. But I went to the dermatologist and I said, Hey, I've got a GI map and it shows Candida. Now a GI map is this measurement of your gut microbiome or your bacteria. And Candida shouldn't really show up on there because it's a small intestine microbe. If you have it in your colon, it's real bad. So I had it there. I had the white film on my tongue.
Sensitive teeth I was getting because candida in the mouth will produce like lactic and acetic acid which can erode your enamel So I had all that stuff I had the dietary markers and I had a urine test that actually showed high levels of a byproduct called a Rabinose or a Rabinitol Which is a byproduct of candida. So I said hey, I've got candida. I got the fungus. got the diet I got the signs. I got everything when I eat I had the journals and said here's my skin issues my acne comes from its fungus Can you help me with some antifungals? He says nope, but here's what I can do instead. He says number one
I can give you Accutane. I said, but that's going to jack up my liver, right? It's ridiculous. Laugh out loud, please. said, I'll give you Accutane. And I'm like, that'll congest my liver and stop my skin from showing, but it doesn't fix the problem. He says, I agree. The next thing I can give you is antibiotics. I said, but if you give me antibiotics, they destroy my bacteria, but the fungus will grow. He says, I agree. The third thing I can give you is a topical cream. It's like a vitamin A retinol cream, which might help with some of the redness.
Barbara Paldus (14:31.92)Yeah, my god. my god.
Josh Dech (14:54.42)I said, none of these get to my Candida. says, I agree Candida could be causing it, but the standard of care says I have these three things. I can't help you beyond that. In that, ladies and gentlemen, is medicine. So that's all bullshit.
Barbara Paldus (15:07.746)And you're absolutely right. And we see that with people with eczema.
who are loaded up for 10, 15 years on corticosteroids, topical corticosteroids. And then they develop topical steroid bedroll syndrome. And then the doctors are, well, this is not really a disease. This is all psychotic. And these are people who are in the hospital whose skin is peeling. yeah, we're still trying to get a code for TSW to recognize it as a disease. And yet the label in the 70s for the topical steroids said do not use for more than three to five days. And these guys are prescribing 10 refills. You know, just keep using it if you need, you know, a stronger
Josh Dech (15:23.761)no!
That's
Barbara Paldus (15:41.232)potency will go up in the class of the corticosteroid. It's exactly the same. Eczema is the same. Acne is the same.
Josh Dech (15:47.735)Get fucked, pardon my French. That just kinda slipped out. That's crazy. So you have these people who are on these, they're dependent on these drugs or these topicals. The doctors are giving them for long periods of time. They're not actually getting to the root causes at all. They're going off label for the safety recommendations and guidelines of the drugs. And then they say, oh, the problem is psychological. So they create the issue, then gaslight you? Awesome. Very good, okay.
Barbara Paldus (16:12.064)Exactly. That's exactly right. And it's not like these people, you know, if your audience looks up Google's topical steroid withdrawal syndrome or TSW and looks at the pictures of what a person looks like when they're experiencing that steroid withdrawal, they are burning, their skin's peeling, they're oozing, they're bleeding. It is just their entire body's covered in this. This is not a trivial like, I got a pimple. And yeah, they're causing the problem and then they're denying that it exists.
Josh Dech (16:29.462)Josh Dech (16:41.056) That's crazy. I mean, that's basically Western medicine in nutshell, though, isn't it? Here's the problem. We're going to make things worse. We'll give you a drug. Then when the drugs have side effects, it's a you problem. It's like when you eat a food and get an allergy, stop eating that food. When you take the drug, it's all in your head if it causes a side effect.
Barbara Paldus (16:58.294)Exactly. You got it. You got it.
Josh Dech (17:00.886)Perfect, okay. So that sounds like an ex-girlfriend. the skin stuff we're dealing with today, we're talking about eczema, it acne, is psoriasis, is it like what are the conditions that we're really covering? Anorasasia.
Barbara Paldus (17:05.026)Ha ha.
Barbara Paldus (17:12.524)and rosacea.
And rosacea, so call them any inflammatory skin disease. So anything where, if you look at, for example, the creatine protein HSCRP measurement, you're going to have an elevated inflammatory level in your blood. And that was also funny. We did a clinical study recently on rosacea. And this is where people turn red. And if they eat spicy food or have a coffee, sometimes they like really turn red. And then they start getting little spider veins on their face. And they can sometimes get an infection from a parasite
called Demodax, which burrows under your skin and it looks like a spider and is really disgusting. But basically, we assumed it was an inflammatory skin condition. the dermatologist who was doing the trial with us and basically dermatologists we spoke to were like, it's not an inflammatory skin condition. We're like, well, what if we measure this inflammatory marker? no, no, no, no, no. You only get that when you're really sick. That's not going to be elevated. And we said, well, can we measure it anyway? Well, you're paying for this study. So go ahead. Go ahead and we'll measure it.

(01:46):
every single patient in the study had elevated inflammatory markers. So there you go. And it was like, and it's not correlated, really?
Josh Dech (18:19.092)come on.
Josh Dech (18:23.58)Wow. So again, I think there's a certain level of assumptions. We get these medical doctors and these scientists and researchers, we want the data, show me the data. And you say, we don't have the data yet, but why don't we try this? go, nope, not unless there's data. But the data doesn't exist. Why don't we go find it? Nope, not unless there's data. So we're saying we want these papers and we want to abide by the papers, but we're not willing to go outside of current papers to understand, to publish new papers. Therefore, we never actually excel or grow or develop science.
Barbara Paldus (18:53.036)Exactly, and that's what my chief technology officer sometimes says if I give him an impossible problem. goes, Barbie, you're putting me in a round room and trying to find the corner. Tell me to find the corner. That's exactly what they're doing. It's an insolvable problem. They're creating a Mobius strip. You're just going to go around infinitely chasing your tail and never, ever find the solution. So you just have to break out and say, hell, we're going to do it anyway.
Josh Dech (19:02.134)Wow, well I'm glad you... Right. Yes.
Josh Dech (19:16.52)Mm-hmm and this Moby a strip unlike the Avengers is not cool for time travel It's just stuck in a loop of like medicine and health care and finances Barb how did you how did you get here in the first place? Like what brought you to? dealing with skin
Barbara Paldus (19:30.678)It was my son. My son actually has eczema. So as a baby, when I brought him home from the hospital, I bought, you know, the regular California baby stuff and, you know, whatever, DesiDen, you know, the stuff you buy at Target. Brought him home, put his first diaper on. He starts screaming, take the diaper off. I'm looking at him and his skin is completely red, peeling and bleeding. And it's like, my God. So I called my mother, who's a medical doctor from Eastern Europe. And she was like, okay, stop. Whatever, whatever it is you're using, just stop. She goes, do you have any?
coconut oil in your fridge and I'm like what do mean like coconut oil like I cook with that she goes precisely it's like well I'm not putting that on my kid she goes you use it to cook you eat it it's an antibacterial put it on him she goes clearly he's hyper allergic to whatever it is that you're putting on him well he got better and we discovered he had an allergy to phenoxyethanol which is a common preservative and pretty much most cosmetic products most topical products most body wash products even chewing gum
Josh Dech (20:08.522)Hahaha.
Barbara Paldus (20:28.884)know, rare allergy, but the problem was the contact dermatitis triggered eczema. So it must have raised the inflammation in this little newborn to the point that, you know, he started getting classic forms of eczema. And of course we went and it was like, here's the steroid. And my mother was like, no. And it's like, what do mean? You graduated in the 60s. She goes, I know. And steroids came about in the 70s and you were not supposed to use them for more than three days. You know, we're not going to cause problems. And especially we're not stinting the kids' growth because if you overuse steroids on children,
that can lead to osteoporosis, can lead to cushings, that can lead to basically growth, slow bone structure issues, mean all kinds of metabolic disorders in the children. She was like, no, we're just going to figure out what he's allergic to and we're gonna eliminate it. And I had to keep the cats out of his room and the cat of course wanted to go play kissy kissy with the baby and so.
Josh Dech (21:20.804)Sure.
Barbara Paldus (21:21.452)We found out he's not allergic to the cat, but we kind of went through about 200 different actives and it boiled down to this one. So then there was no skincare product I could buy. And when I sold my company at the time, because I needed to be home more because he had, you know, he had a lot of needs. It was like, where am I going to buy this skincare? Because the only place I could find it was in Ireland.
Josh Dech (21:24.406)you
Barbara Paldus (21:47.438)which was handmade by a woman. So it was like, OK, I'm just going to buy her company. So I bought her company. And so my son would have a moisturizer. And that's how I ended up in skincare back in 2018, 2019. And that's when I met Irish ethnobotanists. And I started realizing, oh my gosh, they have access to all these incredible plants. They have access to manuscripts from the Middle Ages.
Josh Dech (21:54.741)You
Josh Dech (22:01.289)Wow.
Barbara Paldus (22:12.812)we can start really understanding what these plants do. That's how we discovered comfrey, which is called bone knit. They used to use it on broken bones. created poultices and they let the poultice soak through the skin and it helped repair bone growth. And then we started doing, since I came from the biotech industry, we started looking at the gene expression, like what do these plant extracts do to your gene expression in your body? And we found out.
Josh Dech (22:35.415)Mm-hmm.

(02:07):
Barbara Paldus (22:37.704)it up regulates, which means it increases phylaogrine. That's a structural protein. That's like a building, a building brick in your skin. And that's how we started moving into creating eczema products was, okay, if we could reduce the inflammation and they're called cytokines are basically essentially messenger molecules that cause itch that basically help rebuild your skin barrier, help the moisturization factor in your skin. If we could do all that with plants.
which have been around for thousands of years and have been used in Irish medicine for probably about 3,000 years, then we could pretty much do something equivalent without having it be a biologic drug, which most people can't afford and has other side effects, and your body creates pathways around them anyway in the long run, or steroids. And so this was a six-year journey into eczema. And then, Josh, we discovered most of eczema isn't topical. It's in the gut.
Josh Dech (23:36.012)Mmm, course it is. Thank you, Hippocrates.
Josh Dech (23:41.41)Wow, wow, it's so funny. So the whole segue for this section of the conversation was how did you get here? And it all started with your son. I released episode 190 on this podcast. It was all about who's qualified, like Western, functional, the doctor who went to school for eight to 12 years, or the functional practitioner who went through it for eight to 12 years and studied that one thing and how it works, studied nutrition, studied root causes. And that's really how I got here.
Barbara Paldus (24:05.804)I'm totally unqualified. I'm an electrical engineer. It's not my business, and yet I ended up here.
Josh Dech (24:11.423)Right? Which I think is so remarkable. But as an electrical engineer, your job as an engineer, how do things work? And you went back and broke down the same. I just spoke to a fellow recently. We did a podcast. I don't know by the time this one releases, it may or may not be. It was Steven Wright. He owns Healthy Gut. It's a supplement company and he was an electrical engineer. Same thing. He says, I had to figure it out and I just took my engineering brain and applied it to something biological. And that's really how you got here. And
The same process, I get slammed all the time. I get hate mail, I've had threats, I've had all kinds of crazy shit to my inboxes. I get people drop a cold DM like, F you, you're everything that's wrong with this world. You should be ashamed of yourself, preying on sick people, you're disgusting, you're viable, blah, This is the DMs that I get, not regularly, but it's because I'm coming in and saying, well, Crohn's colitis are fixable and I can show you how to do it.
Barbara Paldus (24:53.761)my God.
Josh Dech (25:03.927)And here's a whole podcast and all these free resources. had a girl literally, she was so upset that I was doing this. She said, I was like, just watch one YouTube video. She's like, I refuse because you get paid on ads. I'm like, girl, I got 1200 subscribers. I might make a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a cent in a year if you watch it now and just downright refused because that's the paradigm is that my doctor knows all, knows everything. This is my story. This is what I've been told. And I just, just like you, I figured it out. It was like, well, this doesn't make sense. What if we look at it this way? And here we are.
Barbara Paldus (25:19.788)Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Dech (25:34.016)And here you are.
Barbara Paldus (25:34.69)The thing is though, Josh, so engineers and people like you, we read, right? We read the literature. We read the medical literature. We read the scientific literature. You know, we'll go from a medical journal on gastroenterology to a journal on microbiology to a journal on genetics to, know, and we will find those papers and we will start putting all those pieces that to maybe a doctor seem random together.
into the bigger picture, into that synthesis, which then becomes the solution because as an engineer, it's not just what's going on, but it's also how do I fix it, right? And part of being the engineer is finding that solution, having it be practical, having it be affordable, having it be accessible because you can build a million dollar, for example, well, CAR T therapy, right? Where they're doing CAR T and stem cell therapy, one dose is $300,000.
Barbara Paldus (26:27.918)Who can afford that? Yeah, it might cure leukemia in three shots, but how many people can actually afford to get that treatment, right? So there's also the affordability and accessibility to any technology that you create and the safety, right? So that's what engineers do. And the problem is that I don't think doctors in today's medical system, because they see patients for 10 to 12 minutes, right? How much information can you really get in 10 to 12 minutes? And they're being forced by the
Barbara Paldus (26:57.802)medical system to see, you know, 12 patients a day, take notes, do all the reimbursement forms. How on earth can they have any time to read anything that's going on in their field? Like they might go to one or two conferences a year. And then you have the re I mean, the research doctors are very different, the ones at universities, but your typical average doctor, they're just trying to stay afloat and do the best they can.
in ever increasing type boundaries. And I think we're going to basically at some point, you know, when you squeeze something too hard, it goes pop, right? And I think that's what we've done to our medical system. Because when I go to Europe, I mean, first of all, the doctors like, yeah, I've got half an hour, maybe 45 minutes. You can actually have a meaningful conversation with them. And if you tell them something, they're like, oh, that's interesting. I didn't know. I'll go read about it versus in the US where it's like, oh, I don't have time for this, you know, and you get this.
Josh Dech (27:52.65)Yes. Yeah, and it's aggressive too. know, Cali Means, if you guys are familiar with Cali Means, he's really, really big in the maha movement, very like anti-pharmaceutical. He used to be a rep for them and now he works to make, he just wants people to be healthy, to understand how the system works. He was a lobbyist, right? Who's lobbying who? Why does Snap have Coca-Cola and high fructose corn syrup contributing to the diabetes epidemic putting

(02:28):
Barbara Paldus (27:53.855)instant negative reaction.
Josh Dech (28:19.723)burden and financial load on the system, which profits 4.7 trillion a year. This is all included. And he actually made a post the other day and he says, I was talking to a colleague of mine who has a network of over a thousand different doctors. And the biggest point of frustration amongst all the boards and communities and communication between these doctors is that patients are asking about root causes. It says five, 10 years ago, it was zero. Today it's 80 % of patients now asking about root causes and doctors are furious.
They're calling it, I think they're calling it the natural health grift and all this stuff like these grifters, these scumbags who are looking for root causes as if disease is innate to your biology. But you're talking about this saying, no, no, no, no, skin diseases, acne, psoriasis, eczema, any kind of dermatitis, like whatever you got going on. Rosacea, these are all internal issues. How does this? Yeah.
Barbara Paldus (29:13.79)And we have clinical trials now that show, for example, that our acne supplements reduce acne by 60%. We don't give them any specific topical. In fact, they're not supposed to be using topicals because we wanted to see, you know, what would happen if they just take the supplement. So yeah, they wash their face. This is our Codex Lab supplements. That's right. And so after eight weeks, we saw 58 to 62 % clearance. You know, we have one for hormonal acne and one just is a probiotic because
Josh Dech (29:30.721)And this is your Codex Labs, your company Codex.
Barbara Paldus (29:43.647)a lot of people who eat fatty food, they get dysbiosis in their microbiome, like their gut microbiome becomes imbalanced, and then they get depressed because of that. They start eating ice cream or sugary things, which furthers, that makes that imbalance even worse. So what we do is we kind of rebalance, and we have some scavenging bacteria in there that help kind of reset the balance of the microbiome and reduce the inflammation in the gut. And then we also have a couple herbs in there that we've combined with the probiotic, like Gugul.
Green tea is an anti-inflammatory, and Google basically helps regulate everything from your cholesterol levels to insulin resistance. And so we're trying to reset in a way their metabolism, reduce their inflammation. And some studies have also shown that it's as good as doxycycline, which is an antibiotic. So instead of just wiping out their gut to help with acne, we actually rebalance their gut.
Barbara Paldus (30:41.518)We're seeing these approaches. just tested another supplement for rosacea and got a 45 % reduction just with that supplement, not with anything else. So then you start adding the outside, you start adding the topicals, you get a good wash that's appropriate for the skin condition. You get a moisturizer or an oil control cream if you have acne, for example, for that condition. And then you can clear it 85 to 95%. And that's what we're seeing in eczema.
Barbara Paldus (31:07.458)between a prebiotic, a probiotic, a lotion, and a special soap. By special, I mean it doesn't strip your microbiome. And we can talk for hours about how hard it is to make a soap that doesn't strip your skin microbiome. That's why people also get staph infections when they strip everything, because there is no natural microbiome to help fight off the staph when it comes onto your skin. Say you're at camp and you're playing in the dirt. We're too clean in some ways. And so yeah, so we're seeing.
Josh Dech (31:19.97)Yes.
Barbara Paldus (31:36.462)You know, about two thirds is in the gut, one third is on the surface. You put it together and you can get that 90 plus percent clearance.
Josh Dech (31:44.887)Wow. You know, it's really fascinating to me. mean, my wife's always been super prone to staph. Like she grew up extremely healthy, eating well, playing outside, playing sports. It just seems to be her microbiome on her skin. Like when she was a kid, you know, she played soccer, she got kicked with a cleat, for example, staph infection almost immediately.
She can't, like her doctor years ago wanted to remove her tonsils when she was a little kid, they said no, but she does have recurrent issues. Now we're tracing it back to some other stuff, but she's like, I could never because I'll get a staph infection and I'll probably die like immediately. So she's always prone. If she scrapes her thumb on something, she's prone to staph. And for myself, I acne really severe when I was in my late teens, early twenties. It was...
And I traced it back to like lymphatic lines and other stuff, right? My liver was congested, it was full of toxins, was candida-based, it was parasitic-based, but I acne up my neck, down my back, on my shoulders, even down as low as my wrists. It was on top of my forearms here where I had it down there. So all over and I'm really well managed now, but still, like if I go and eat like a chocolate brownie that's got like 20 grams of sugar, I'll break out, I'll get pop-pop in my back or something. So what is causing...
this proneness for my wife or staff. What is causing my proneness to having acne at this stage?
Barbara Paldus (33:02.346)It's probably the state of your gut microbiome. And so with your wife, it's probably her skin microbiome. And what we're seeing, for example, with kids with eczema is that kids with eczema tend to get more ear infections. And there seems to be a genetic correlation for the propensity. And it goes back to barrier. They also have a 50 % greater risk for getting ADHD, like I found out with my son. there is a basically, and they also can get asthma. So it's almost like there's a genetic deficiency
of barriers, whether that's your skin barrier, gut barrier, your lung barrier, or your brain barrier. And we don't really understand ADHD, although there was a paper recently published about correlating certain gut microbiomes to OCD. So it makes me wonder if there is something in the gut microbiome that correlates with ADHD. But let's just go back to these kids. So they have all these ear infections. They get put on antibiotics. Some of these kids have been on antibiotics four or five times before the age of three.

(02:49):
Josh Dech (33:49.697)I believe so.
Barbara Paldus (34:00.29)Well, they have no gut microbiome. And that then starts kind of that cascade of inflammation, leaky gut, because they're the gut microbiome, bacteria like acromansia, for example, help get your gut lining in shape. And you need butyrate producers. So that's a short chain fatty acid. That's a very important molecule that basically helps make your gut lining tight and make the kind of your gut cells.
Barbara Paldus (34:27.86)stick together so that you don't have toxins or allergens or things leak your undigested food leaking through your gut into your bloodstream because then that causes inflammation and then that inflammation can drive your eczema flare up. And so we've been now trying to rebuild these kids' guts in an attempt to basically improve their eczema and we're seeing phenomenal results. And you know, again, we have that soap and we have that lotion and that soothes the itching so they don't scratch their skin apart.
you know, and it moisturizes their skin because it's so leaky that it just leaks water like a sieve and the soap doesn't strip and it doesn't strip their microbiome. So that's kind of the surface treatment, but really the work happens and how do we rebuild their gut microbiome? Can we, and it takes a while, like some of them we've been at it for six months and we're starting to see, you know, the keystone species like the certain types of bifidobacteria come up and the lactobacillus.
Barbara Paldus (35:26.648)come up, but they also have to keep a decent diet, right? If the parents are feeding them McDonald's, it won't matter what we do, right?
Josh Dech (35:34.008)Yeah, you can't out supplement that for sure. Now, quick question for you, Barb, you keep mentioning kids. Is this just for kids or is this an adult thing too?
Barbara Paldus (35:42.222)Oh no, it's an adult thing too. So the reason I mention kids is because that's usually where the corticosteroid starts. And these kids can start them as young as three and then they end up with topical steroid withdrawal syndrome in their twenties because they've been on them for 18 years, right? So kids are where the most eczema occurs. So kind of 10 to 20 % of children have eczema. It's kids with, for example,
African American genetics tend to have more eczema than, for example, Caucasian kids. Kids with Latino genes tend to have more severe eczema. So there are definitely genetic and racial components here. But basically, overall, kids have more eczema and then a lot of people kind of grow out of it. So maybe 5 % of adults have eczema. And those are usually the kids that had the worst eczema are the ones that then end up.
having the eczema well into adulthood.
Josh Dech (36:39.478)Hmm. You're mentioning genetic susceptibility. Excuse me. You're mentioning this genetic susceptibility and I do wonder because genes from I mean, I'm not a geneticist by any means, but there are very few genes that you'll have that will like cause this disease. Right. You say, okay, well, cystic fibrosis. These are kind of different animals, but to say, okay, you have this gene. Therefore you have this disease. Really what it is is correlative. And part of this thing we were talking about earlier off air here.
Barbara Paldus (36:56.888)Yes.
Yes.
Josh Dech (37:07.682)when I had my map of kind of how IBD comes about, I have a whole page on genetics, what genes they are, what they do, what they regulate. And if this gene is designed to say regulate the microbiome of the skin, and then you have a deficiency of nutrients or a trauma or something that impacts the expression of that gene, it can't do its job and regulate, therefore you get sick. So are we seeing this pass down of like epigenetics, and I'll put a story there.
Barbara Paldus (37:11.576)Yes. Yes. Yes.
Josh Dech (37:36.57)cool study on mice where they would put the smell of cherry blossoms into the cage and they shock the feet of the mice because the bottom of the cage was electrified and then they shock and shock these mice develop PTSD and then over the generations right to their grandbabies and great-grandbabies having never been shocked smelling cherry blossom would be afraid of the smell so is this this epigenetics that's being passed down is it generational dysbiosis as their generations lose it like what do you believe is this this African American Latino gene so to speak what really is that
Barbara Paldus (37:55.534)Mm-hmm.
Barbara Paldus (38:06.208)So there's about 40 % of people with eczema have a deficiency in the filaggrin gene. And normally we have four copies. And the genetic deficiency is that they have three copies or two copies. So it's not that it doesn't exist in them. There's fewer copies. Therefore, you produce less of the skin structural protein. And so your skin is leakier. And so there we supplement them with an amino acid called histidine, which filaggrin then uses, which is used to basically buy the body to make
more

(03:10):
Barbara Paldus (39:06.062)can rebuild your skin and then it's not leaky. At least you kind of plug that part of the wall. The other thing that we're seeing is again because when we're not sure yet what genetics are involved in that and the gut part but there seems to be a co-definitely a correlation between a leakier gut or an inflamed gut and eczema.
Barbara Paldus (39:26.318)And that may not be the same structural protein, that may be a different protein, that may not be the same gene, we don't know yet. So that's part of kind of the research that needs to be done. But what we do know is that typically keystone species in the gut microbiome in people with eczema are missing. And is that you know, does the epigenetics come in there because their gut when they were born couldn't be colonized by those bacteria? Is it because their parents didn't have that bacteria?
Barbara Paldus (39:55.31)Right? And so when you're colonized initially in a vaginal delivery, it more common in people with C-sections? How come they're missing those keystone species? And so one of the kind of research for the future will be is tracing the lineage of the gut microbiome and families. Are they handed off? Are they passed off from the parent to the child? Is there a in the chain if there's a C-section? Do pets contribute to the microbiome? Because we also know that when people live together,
Barbara Paldus (40:24.174)they exchange microbiomes. Are we keeping, for example, in Japan, there's been a huge increase in the amount of eczema ever since they started introducing all these cleansers and keeping everything in their apartments completely sterile. So is it just that you have to get your kid out into the dirt to play? And things that we did 30, 40, 50 years ago aren't done anymore.
Barbara Paldus (40:50.776)So for example, with my son, everything today that we do as parents, you control their environment, you control their friends, you control whether or not they walk to school or they're driven to school. You don't let them be kids. And so my son's eczema actually improved. And I don't know if it was because of more microbial diversity when I just let him play outside in the yard. And in the end, he didn't get an infection. He was fine.
Barbara Paldus (41:19.946)are we sterilizing ourselves to death, right? With the impeccable cleanliness that we now have.
Josh Dech (41:28.037)I mean, there's research already, I think that's already, I don't know if it's conclusive or whether it's more hearsay or clinical anecdotal. This is stuff they taught us back in school when I was going through for nutritionist. But they say, yeah, those who live on farms, those who have pets have more diverse microbiomes. So we imagine there's a correlation. We know, like you said, people who live together share these microbiomes.
We know, for example, looking at data, there was a cell report study back in 2019, when they looked at rural and urban Nigerians compared it to the same over here, and they had much greater diversity, but they also don't have pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. They're eating food off the land. They're playing outside. They're building mud hut houses. They're with the animals and the kids. Like they're just living life. They're barefoot in the grass, which also changes your physiology on a biochemical, electrical, neurological, mitochondrial level.
everything changes when you're barefoot in the bloody grass. it's almost like, mean, minus Lyme disease, which whether you believe that was manmade or not, if you, the closer you get to nature, it's like the further we get from disease. So this stuff you're talking about to me, it's like, duh, right? But what we talked about off air was how do we get this to a point where the medical community actually says, yep, I'm on board of this and I agree rather than, it's just hearsay or nonsense. That's really the barrier here.
Barbara Paldus (42:47.082)And we feel that for sure. And one of the things is, you know, they want clinical trials. So we're doing clinical trials. But again, as a smaller company, can't do like we can't do drug trials like phase one, phase two, phase three with, you know, 300 people, you know, basically random double blind studies. You know, that would then put.
the product. So this is a conundrum, right? That would then put a, for example, a $45 probiotic into the category of a drug product and it's $1,000 a bottle. And that defeats the whole purpose of being accessible and affordable. And so we're trying to do this with studies, 35 people at a time. Yes, that's enough to publish in medical journals. And we're trying to build that credibility over time with the doctors. But I think it's going to be also a push pull with the patient. Some of it is going to be patient education.
and going directly to the people who are suffering and demonstrating to their doctor that they're getting a lot better without the doctor intervening. I think that will help kind of the external force participating in conferences, finding those doctors who are the early adopters, who are the believers, and really engaging with them, educating them, and having them be your mouthpieces. I've always found not having those two magic letters, I have...
three letters, PhD, but that doesn't work in the MD. I don't have the right letter. And then we have a naturopathic doctor on our staff who's brilliant, but she doesn't have the right letters either, right? It's an ND, not an MD. But really just keeping at it, keeping publishing, keeping the education going. And then what we're doing is in September, we're launching our own telehealth platform.

(03:31):
Right, right.
Josh Dech (44:19.897)Barbara Paldus (44:32.888) where it won't have to just be MDs. It'll be a combination and we're really looking for integrative practitioners. And these are the people that are already the early adopters. They're already the people who understand that skin diseases, and this is purely for skin diseases, that you'd need to treat the gut, that you need to do a gut microbiome analysis, that you need to look at gut inflammation, that you need to look at gut permeability and leakiness. And then you can address the inside.
as you're soothing and rebuilding the outside and you have to do both. And then of course there's the mental component, which I always talk about that, you know, yeah, you can put my skincare on your skin and that's great, but if you're depressed, if you're not sleeping, if you're not exercising regularly, and we're not talking that you have to do, you know, run marathons, you know, I mean, like you go outside and take a 30 minute brisk walk every day, you know, we're not.
We're not talking the impossible here. And you have a reasonable diet. You can still have that piece of chocolate cake on your birthday. you have a colorful plate. You don't eat huge amounts of meat all the time. You balance everything out. You balance your protein intake, your fat intake, your carbohydrate intake. You have green leafy vegetables, God forbid.
Josh Dech (45:51.02)You
Barbara Paldus (45:52.8)then that will do more for your skin quality and longevity than any pill you can pop. And that's free. And obviously hydration, know, drinking plenty of fluids. They don't have to be, you know, it doesn't all have to be purified water. It can be, you can have your tea and have some coffee. You can have, you know, the occasional Coke, but just, you know, everything in moderation. Another kind of another Greek saying, right? Everything in moderation.
Josh Dech (46:19.044)Sure, yeah.
Barbara Paldus (46:20.366)But you need to maintain your general health and then the treatments will start becoming more effective. And we can't, for example, undo acne on a teenager who's eating Twinkies for breakfast, McDonald's for lunch, and Taco Bell for dinner. Like that's just not going to happen.
Josh Dech (46:40.054)Absolutely. So you answered my next question was let's talk about some tangibles here, some steps to take. And you just gave them to us. It's lifestyle, diet, wellness, outside, fresh air, all those basics, getting the junk off your skin. When I was 20, I think 2021, I was a paramedic. And at the time, I was working in a very small town called Fairyland, Newfoundland. And it was way off the coast, four or 500 people. And we had, you know, hour of coverage each way. So it's a tiny little area.
And I went to the doctor at the clinic up the road. And I mean like up the road, like it was kind of like up the hill over the dirt path and around the tree. And that's how they give instructions out there. Like you get a call for like to pick up a patient, like come on down the path, past the lighthouse. There's a big white rock and you'll see a dog tied up barking. If you go past, there's three pine trees. Take the one after the fourth pine tree. That'll be your right. Like that's how we got directions for the ambulance. There was no addresses. So I went out there and asked the doctor. He says, you need to exfoliate more. And he recommended like the St. Ives scrub. And guess what?
Barbara Paldus (47:36.72)god, apricot scrub. my god. my god.
Josh Dech (47:37.666)Right? The app, it was the apricot one. That was exactly it. And it got so much worse. It got, it was so bloody painful. I...
Barbara Paldus (47:45.958)You might as well take sand off the beach and exfoliate with that, right?
Josh Dech (47:50.199)No kidding. Honestly, that probably be better. At least it's got microbes in it. But like this destroyed my skin and I was break dancing as well at the time. So fun fact for you guys, you don't know me. I used to dance competitively. I was bad, but I competed and so like I was on my back and like doing these spins like it's called a windmill. It's like you're on your shoulders and spinning and like the pain I was in and I was wrestling and a jiu-jitsu like I hurt all the time and it didn't fix it. They never addressed diet. It was always like you said topical.
We're talking about the internal starting at food and lifestyle. But let's take this to the next degree. We covered the basics. Someone says, okay, I put coconut oil on my acne or my, my eczema, whatever it is. Okay. Good. So, okay, let's back it up. She said coconut oil for eczema. Why not acne?
Barbara Paldus (48:28.12)That's, that's the, wouldn't put coconut oil on your acne, but yes, you put the right topical on your acne.
Barbara Paldus (48:38.734)Because it's chlamyogenic so it plugs your pores So the last thing you want to do with that can use you want that sebum you want your natural oil to be able to come out of the pore So it doesn't clog it
Josh Dech (48:42.515)and acne is already a plugged.

(03:52):
Josh Dech (48:48.676)Hmm, that's the thing I asked. All right, so we got this specific topical for a specific thing. We dealt with the internal, we're eating well, we're going outside, and someone comes in like, I'm doing everything and I can't get rid of this acne, this psoriasis, this eczema, this rosacea. What else can we be looking at here for these deeper layers? They've done all the basics already.
Barbara Paldus (49:11.34)Right. And so this is where you start doing testing and this is where you have to get the data about their inside. So for example, for acne, you would do hormonal testing. You know, do they have too much testosterone or do they have a progesterone estrogen imbalance? You know, does is the woman, you know, she, might not even know it that she has polycystic ovary syndrome. And you can tell that from a simple hormone test, how much inflammation is really in the body because our bodies can tolerate a lot before they start manifesting it and breaking out on the skin. So do you actually
have elevated inflammatory markers in your body? Do you have heavy metal poisoning? It's not something we think about that often, but it's something on our platform we're going to be recommending people test because oftentimes you can get things that look like eczema, but they might be heavy metal poisoning and in some cases they might be self-induced heavy metal poisoning. We see people OD on zinc supplements and I mean OD to the point that they're, yes.
Josh Dech (50:08.28)Or like the micronized zinc, that stuff's dangerous too, yeah.
Barbara Paldus (50:11.166)Yes, yes, we see people OD on vitamin D. In fact, there was an older gentleman in the UK who killed himself by oversupplementing with vitamin D in the last year. So just checking that, you know, maybe the too healthy lifestyle is starting to affect their skin condition because too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Right. And then we would look at their gut microbiome. Obviously, we would look, you know, and the first thing would also be, for example, do they have H. pylori? Do they have parasites? And we work with a French
Josh Dech (50:30.266)course.
Barbara Paldus (50:41.072)dermatologist who one of the first things he checks are inflammatory markers for parasites. Have they basically manifested them in the past? Oftentimes people go on a vacation, they come home with an unwanted basically parasite in their gut and they don't know it and it lives there for years. And then as their health, for example, if their immune system starts, you know, decreasing with age, then that parasite can basically start creating more and more problems.
Sometimes the parasite starts creating problems right away, but it's amazing that we basically check and deworm our pets every year, but we don't do that with our kids anymore. And we probably should because antiparasitics are very simple. It's a very simple, affordable treatment. And you know then that you don't have that residing in your gut, but there's all kinds of, you know, worms, ringworms that we pick up and we don't even know we've carried them back.
It's funny because I do have heavy metals. I got long sleeves on but you can see here. This is where my heavy metals I think have come from. I got an HTMA done loaded with mercury and aluminum loaded super super high zinc copper was all out of balance. I had mineral imbalances the works. So I got those heavy metals, which is a prime environment. Now growing up is sort of how my acne came to be. I was I was in gymnastics. I was in martial arts. I was wrestling after school. I was doing all the things.
So I needed calories. So I went to McDonald's, I went to Subway, I was pounding back all the protein, 12, 18 eggs a day, cottage cheese, whole milk. Turns out I had a sensitivity to eggs and dairy, which lit up my gut. The McDonald's, the Subway, the breads, the pierogies. I would eat a bag of 25 pierogies for lunch and that loaded up my gut with Candida. Now on top of that, that's a prime environment for parasites. Here I am in college dealing with IBS, gut symptoms, the works. I moved away to this
where I was working as a paramedic and the home I was in had mold. Looking back at it, very moldy, which again prime environment for parasites who I believe moved in. Then I got a bunch of tattoos into my mid-20s and things got worse and worse. So my healing on my skin, most people get a tattoo and it's scabbed and healed within one to two weeks tops. Mine were taking eight weeks or more. Like I would have these thick scabs. wasn't healing, they peel off. Just gnarly. So my system was loaded.
Barbara Paldus (53:00.578)Wow.
Josh Dech (53:06.904)And then I got a liver that's congested full of toxins. got physical like liver flukes in my parasite and I've seen them in the toilet. So I had these physical liver flukes plugging my bile ducts, these tubes in my liver. I was congested, I had fatty liver, all this stuff. And so my body sort of produced or pulled the emergency release valve and said, we can't go through the liver. Can't go through the gallbladder bile ducts. We can't go through the lymphs. Those were congested. Can't go through the bowels because I got IBS now. All this, I said.
Barbara Paldus (53:17.966)Wow.
Josh Dech (53:34.85)The next exit door we have is the skin and it pushed all this stuff through my skin. And so I got highly inflamed. Yeah.
Barbara Paldus (53:36.758)Yep. And that makes sense that you had acne because if you had all that excess cholesterol running in your system, you were producing sebum like there's no tomorrow. Yep.
Josh Dech (53:44.962)and then the steroids. Yeah, then I was on anabolic steroids, right? Which congested my liver, yeah, that's probably the appropriate response. I say it all the time. And you know what, Barbara, hit a critical mass. My mid-20s, I went from about 215 pounds at five foot nine. So I'm juiced up, right? I'm dead lifting 550 for reps of 10, like easy, right? And so everything collapsed. I lost...
Barbara Paldus (53:51.278)It's amazing you're alive. mean, honestly.

(04:13):
Barbara Paldus (54:04.952)Yup. Yup.
Josh Dech (54:11.355)I went down to about 170, 75 pounds. I was having 15 bowel movements a day, 10 minute transit times. I looked in the toilet and it was undigested food. I'm looking at like my lettuce, my whatever. I was eating breakfast cereals cause they were tasty and you know, count calories, right? Not chemicals. So I was eating all this junk. And then I had, got to a point where I was having chronic fatigue, anxiety, mood swings, severe anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation. Barb, I planned my death three times.
Barbara Paldus (54:32.479)Yep. Well, your gut can produce serotonin, right? my god.
Josh Dech (54:39.855)Like I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna commit suicide. Like I was serious about it. I think, thank God I didn't. And then it got to the critical mass was the blood in my stool. And I was like, something's gotta change. And that's when I went back and picked it apart like you do with your son and figured it out, got some help and here we are. But your doctor doesn't put these together. They say, here's some Vyvanse for the ADHD. Bowels are too fast. Here's a modium. Why would I give something to slow my bowels down? My body's trying to get something out, right? Like it's so backwards.
Barbara Paldus (54:49.144)Yeah. yeah.
Josh Dech (55:08.121)But that's where my acne came from, was this congestion, these toxins.
Barbara Paldus (55:12.152)That makes complete sense. part of, I mean, the hepatic axis, that's another axis, right? We talk about the skin-gut-brain axis, but you can't forget that your gut is tied to your liver and you have the hepatic axis and the HPA axis. So...
Josh Dech (55:26.075)All the accesses. Yes.
Barbara Paldus (55:28.59)So in a way for an engineer, it's almost like the body is all these different axes, all these different systems, and it's almost like a telecommunications network. So in a way, if people wonder, know, what is an electrical engineer doing in health? Well, to us, the body's like a network, and the more we can model it, the more we can measure, the more we can integrate the models, the more we can hopefully predict, and the better we can diagnose. And so what I'm hoping is that in the next 10 years, with maybe a series of five to 10 tests,
Josh Dech (55:40.792)Hahaha
Barbara Paldus (55:57.294)We can actually start figuring out really what these root causes are and then of course, know, humanity is great at creating more problems faster than we can solve them. So then the next big question is going to be okay, microplastics. We know they're in fetuses. We know they're in our brains. We know they're in our bodies. You know, how are we going to clear them and how are they contributing, for example, to increases because we see
you know, year on year increases of acne. We see year on year increases of eczema. see year, we see early onset of psoriasis. Psoriasis used to be a disease of, well, you're usually 25 to 35 years older. We're now seeing, you know, people 18, 20 who are suffering from psoriasis flares. Why is it gone from? Yeah. Yeah. So what are we doing to ourselves with all these chemicals, all these pesticides, all these microplastics?
Josh Dech (56:34.651)I'm seeing children in my practice, months old in my practice.
Barbara Paldus (56:46.614)It's everywhere, it's in our drinking water, it's in our food, it's in our fish. mean, and how are we going to get ourselves out of it?
Josh Dech (56:54.267)Yeah, and that's really where this whole alternative, they call it alternative health. I mean, to me it is health. This is health care. Western is alternative, right? This is health care. Western is sick care. Yes. But it has to be sort of, well, I don't want to say hodgepodge because it is science and clinically based. But if you compare it to the trillions dumped into Western pharmaceutical medicine, which treats symptoms, we're here as the militia going through and saying, no, no, no, no, let's look at the data, look at the science. And now you have this
Barbara Paldus (57:00.8)It's health. Yeah. It's just a branch. It's a branch of medicine. It's just not recognized, right?
Josh Dech (57:23.867)multi hundreds of billions of dollars of industry for biohacking and probiotics and health supplements and all this stuff, getting your body to do what it should be doing if we just lived in an environment that was compatible with our biology, which we no longer do just as a byproduct of modernity living in 2025 and onward. So these are hiccups. And so someone who comes in and says, okay, well, I'm going back to my roots then I want to get rid of my acne, psoriasis, eczema.
whatever rosacea, other conditions I've got, I'm opening up my windows and getting fresh air, I'm eating clean food, I'm drinking filtered water, I'm getting pesticide chemical free, I've got probiotics coming in, I've got pets who are licking my face, but we're both doing parasite cleanses. I've still got all these issues. Now we're dealing with the testing. We're dealing with immune imbalances or like microbial issues and other toxins that's lingering, is that it?
Barbara Paldus (58:12.802)Correct.
And they're related. That's the thing is you can't basically say that, you know, the 80 % of your immunity comes from your gut again. so understanding that linkage, understanding where that inflammation is coming from. I mean, you know, we can talk about, you know, total receptors, can talk about TH1, TH2, TH17 pathways. You know, we can go into all these medical terms, but ultimately, if your gut lining is in bad shape, if your gut tight junctions, like if your gut cells
the wall basically is missing its mortar so things can get through the bricks. You're revving your immune system over and over and over and so that's why again we focus on seal the barriers, seal the body barriers, seal the skin, seal the gut, you know, and if you seal those you can start getting the immune system under control, you can start getting those immunological reactions and that inflammation under control and then you still have that element of stress.

(04:34):
Barbara Paldus (59:14.486)And I think that for us is really the intangible because, as you said, people can be doing everything right from the diet to the exercise to the going outside to drinking the purified water if they are internally stressed. And that's something where I don't know how to deal with that yet. I mean, that's not really our domain, but the brain, that's that brain part of skin, gut,
people will have to find a way. in the day of, in the age of cell phones and social media and being on all the time and people expecting responses to emails 24-7, I don't know how we actually solve that. And it's easy to say, well, just turn off. Just turn yourself off. Define your hours and turn off. Life doesn't quite work that way in that black and white advice kind of way. And so that, with the cortisol pathways,
Barbara Paldus (01:00:06.126)cortisol leading to increased inflammation, cortisol leading to insulin resistance. How do we turn that pathway off? That I don't know. I mean, that's hard, you And I'll be the first to admit, hey, I don't sleep that well anymore. I'm stressed. So it's like, I can give myself the same advice. It doesn't help. And I do exercise and eat clean and all that other stuff. So it's like...
Josh Dech (01:00:23.023)Sure.
Barbara Paldus (01:00:31.384)How do you, how do you kind of, it's almost like you need a co-pilot and how do you create that co-pilot? And is that maybe AI is that, you know, but then AI is going to suck up huge amounts of energy from our climate and probably make climate change worse. So how do we, or do we just say enough is enough, right? Do we say enough is enough and just reset and accept the fact that, you know, life has to be simpler. We're going to recycle. We're going to reuse. we don't need, you know, maybe it's just.
Josh Dech (01:00:39.707)Mm.
Josh Dech (01:00:44.507)We're all doomed.
Barbara Paldus (01:00:59.212)convincing ourselves of what we don't need rather than what we do need and looking at it, you know, do I need an extra pair of shoes? Do I need that fancier car? Do I really need that new cell phone? And that's one thing I've been now trying to teach my son. If you are perfectly fine with one pair of running shoes, then the cat pisses in them. It's like, fine, two pairs of running shoes.
Josh Dech (01:01:20.603)jeez.
Barbara Paldus (01:01:25.634)But you don't need more than two because we can always keep one pair clean and we'll put them up where the cat can't get to them. And do you really need all those t-shirts? Do you really need all those pairs of pants? Because you start multiplying all those things by eight billion people on the planet. And what worked maybe in the 70s when there were maybe three billion people is not going to work when there are eight billion. And do we all need to take a step back and look at simplifying?
Josh Dech (01:01:55.227)Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, think such a wise way to look at life. I admittedly, my wife all the time is like, you're a jacket whore. I have like 10 jackets. Now that being said, my defense, I live in Alberta, which is the, the biggest sales for men's jackets in at least North America, if not the world, because you'll get four different kinds of weather in a day. So it's like, you have a rain jacket, you have a winter coat, you get different kinds of what you get minus 50 and minus 10. Like you get all these variables. like, but I exploit, I...
Barbara Paldus (01:02:23.564)But see you have a functional argument. I live in California. I don't need 10 different jackets. It's usually 70 degrees or plus minus and you know in the summer you don't need a jacket and it rains occasionally so I need one jacket.
Josh Dech (01:02:27.788)Mmm. That's fair.
Josh Dech (01:02:38.808)Totally fair. Yeah, I exploit the weather here to have an excuse to have lots of jackets But on that other note Barb I know today you're actually at a conference and you got people waiting for you downstairs and you've just been so gracious with your time this conversation has just been a bit of a wild ride just covering so much Can we just put a nice tidy bow around this thing and give some tangibles right now for anybody's listening goes look I picked up the lifestyle and the health stuff and I heard you got some supplements
promote your stuff, because I'm looking at your products right now at Codex Labs. And I mean, these look really solid. I understand a lot of these different microbes. I've seen some of these. I've looked at your products here. give me the best. Somebody's got any skin condition, eczema, psoriasis, acne, rosacea, what we're dealing with here. What are the bullet points of here's the best things to do right now for yourself, including some of these products, which I think are just beautifully made?
Barbara Paldus (01:03:33.762)So what.
we're going to be doing is actually launching a teledermatology platform because I believe in data. Again, I'm an engineer and the first piece of advice is if you're guessing, you don't know. And if you don't know, you can't solve the problem. get yourself tested, get yourself a provider who will test you. They're not going to over test you because you also don't need to be overpaying for tests you don't need, but he will based on what you tell them about your needs and your skin condition will do the right
tests and those may be, you know, if you have acne that might be a hormone test or it might be a gut dysbiosis test. In many cases they'll be doing a gut test and they'll be looking at your gut microbiome and your leaky gut and your gut inflammation and then depending on the disease like that should be that might be enough for eczema and then for acne you might add hormones on top of that. If they see weird like blotches on your skin they might test you for heavy metals and if you're suffering for example, you know, you get depressed

(04:55):
of bouts and then you break out and you kind of notice a correlation, for example, between your mental state and your skin. They might do a neurotransmitter test to see if you have any imbalances there, you know, in serotonin or epinephrine or cortisol again. So really just measuring is knowing and knowing means you can find the root cause. Regarding our products, we're focused just in two areas right now and that's eczema and acne.
and we have our supplements. So basically our prebiotic is designed to fix the gut lining. So and what I tell people is don't bother buying the probiotic until you've had the prebiotic for at least a month because your gut lining won't be ready for the probiotic. So you're wasting your money. Typically also things take about 90 days to reset. A minimum of 30, 60 is good, 90 is ideal. And so for example, you would take the prebiotic for 90 days. Then we have
Josh Dech (01:05:17.084)Hmm.
Barbara Paldus (01:05:30.99)one probiotic for acne, one probiotic for eczema. The gut microbiome in those two disease conditions is usually completely different. And so what you need to fix your gut and rebalance is completely different. So I'm not saying one probiotic fixes everything. It's not like one thing fix all. So they're designed completely differently. So if you have acne, you pick the acne probiotic. If you have eczema, you pick the eczema probiotic. And then very simply get a good cleanser.
In the case of acne, get a toner which will keep your pores clean. Look for something like witch hazel. That's what we use in our toner. And things like PHA, which is a mild exfoliant, so to to unplug the pores. And then usually a face scrub. And that's it. Again, if you're oily, you don't need more moisturization. You're oily. Your own oil is keeping your skin moisturized. If you have eczema, you're dry as hell. So you need a good moisturizer.
Josh Dech (01:06:23.036)Hmm.
Barbara Paldus (01:06:24.99)And we have one that rebuilds the skin barrier and reduces itch without having to use a steroid. So it's basically a steroid free anti itch eczema lotion and a good soap. And that's basically it. Like you don't need 13 products. You don't need a 13 step routine. And the rest is, as you said, diet, drinking enough water or fluids, moderate exercise, going outside and trying to sleep.
Josh Dech (01:06:50.492)That's easy. Go back to waking with the sun and falling with the moon and eat real food, get outside and the body will sort of balance itself. It's just at this stage I hear that people come back to me and say well you said if I go natural my body will balance it. No, There's a difference between maintaining homeostasis versus being so far to the one side where you now need therapeutic level intervention to get you back so you could balance it and that's really what we're talking about here and I really appreciate that.
Barbara Paldus (01:07:16.29)And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to basically knock you in a 90 day period back into homeostasis, that balance that you can then keep up. And you might need, you I mean, you might get stressful periods in your life. So you might need a little bit of push during those stressful periods. And what we normally tell people, if you get to that homeostasis every six months, do like a two month cure. Just give your body that extra boost. It'll prevent the flare ups. It'll prevent the breakouts.
Josh Dech (01:07:44.252)Love that. Well, Barb, someone's gonna wanna learn more about you, your products, what you're doing. Where can they go? Where can they find you?
Barbara Paldus (01:07:51.886)So they can find us either on Amazon or they can find us on codexlabscorp.com. And we have two main sections, acne and eczema. And we also encourage people, if you have any questions, we love answering questions. If you want to send us a picture saying I have this skin concern, we love answering that. And until we have our telehealth portal up, that'll be called decode-me.com. Just write us. And we love dealing with, you know, we love solving problems.
So we'll try to solve yours.
Josh Dech (01:08:23.824)That's amazing. Thank you so much, Barb. I'm gonna put all that information in the show notes. Make sure you click that down below. If you guys don't know where the show notes is, you'll see the picture of the podcast. You'll see the player with the timestamp on it. Underneath, you'll see the show more. Just click that. It'll open up that faded text. You'll have all those links down there. I'm gonna go check out Kodak's Labs Corp. That's incredible. Barb, thank you so much. This has been a very stimulating conversation. I really appreciate your expertise.
Barbara Paldus (01:08:49.166)Thank you so much. Pleasure.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}215: Healing the Root Causes of Eczema, Psoriasis and Acne- with Barbara Paldus

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215: Healing the Root Causes of Eczema, Psoriasis and Acne- with Barbara Paldus

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