Healing Your Skin and Gut with Kefir
On February 1, 2017, the BBC2 show Trust Me I’m a Doctor aired a ground-breaking experiment on probiotic foods. They found that kefir, a traditional fermented milk drink from Eastern Europe, had the most powerful and statistically significant effect on the gut.
On our family farm in Wales, Chuckling Goat, we’ve been making kefir in the traditional style, with goats milk and real grains, since 2011. We’ve collaborated with Aberystwyth University on cutting-edge kefir research, and coached thousands of clients around as they incorporate kefir into their daily lives. We’ve also have studied the dietary habits that can enhance the beneficial effects of kefir inside the gut.
Looking after your gut can also have excellent benefits for skin health. Eczema, psoriasis, rosacea and acne: these conditions are not actually skin conditions at all. They are autoimmune disorders, that sit inside the gut. This is why steroid creams alone won't permanently clear these conditions. Your skin is really just a map of what’s going on inside your gut. You should heal the gut, in order to heal the skin.
Kefir can help to do that, by re-populating the good bacteria inside your gut. Like any fragile natural ecosystem, your gut microbiome is constantly being assaulted by hazards like antibiotics, sugar, stress and environmental toxins. The good bugs inside your gut biome get killed off, and the damage maps onto your skin.
Your gut and your skin are connected, because they are both barrier sites of your immune system. Logically enough, your body has located your immune system in all the places where the inside of your body touches the outside: skin, gut, sinuses and lungs.
So your skin is really the first defensive line of your immune system. Your skin may look solid, but it actually consists of trillions of bacteria whose job it is to fight off pathogens and allergens that are trying to get through your skin barrier.
When you use chemical soaps or lotions on your skin, you kill off all the bugs, both bad and good. And once the good bugs are gone, there’s nothing to keep the bad bugs in your skin biome from spreading and taking over.
Applying kefir skincare can help to protect your skin biome by pre-emptively putting good bugs into the biome, to keep the bad bugs under control and help strengthen your immune system’s first line of defense.
The Good Skin Solution details our system of healing your skin and gut applying kefir inside and outside; on the farm, we call this process “kefirising.”
If you’re kefirising, there are also certain dietary rules you also need to follow, in order to promote the action of the kefir inside your system.
Drink 170 ml of goats milk kefir every day to heal your gut biome
Apply kefir skincare daily to nourish your skin biome
Follow the Kefirise Diet:
Drink 170ml of bone broth daily
Eliminate all cow dairy in favour of goat dairy.
Use 100% pure stevia; eliminate sugar
Eat good grains (gluten-free, low-GI) like oatmeal, buckwheat, sorghum, amaranth and millet; eliminate bad carbs (which contain gluten or high-GI) like bread, rice, pasta, white potatoes.
Eat good fat to enable your body to heal: avocado, coconut oil, flaxseed oil, salmon, walnuts.
Follow these steps and you will heal your skin - from the inside out.
