Kerry: 0:29

All right. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Get Healthy Tampa Bay podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kerry Reller, and today we have Christa Biegler. Welcome to podcast For both of Yeah. Excited to be here. Thank you. So why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Christa: 0:46

Yeah, My name is Krista, as you said, and I've been working in private practice for about a decade. Been in practice for a little over a decade and a half, and specifically what I focus on right now is helping people overcome eczema and food sensitivities without unnecessary restriction over supplementation or over testing.

Kerry: 1:03

Yeah, I feel like I found somehow and I am so excited that I did so I can't wait to have our wonderful conversation today about eczema. I know we're gonna learn so much and some, like I was saying, before, like things that we don't really do on the medical side as much when it's awesome that we can have somebody work with somebody like you. Do you mind sharing like what your training and credentials are so we know where you're coming from? Sure. I'm a registered

Christa: 1:27

dietician by trade, I don't know what you know about that. It's usually four. It's currently now a six year pathway before your one year internship. I did a four year pathway with that. And then as most of us figure out, a lot of our training is post school, We do a lot of other things, credentials, et cetera. I always like to joke that my. Like my greatest education has been working with clients and like really working very closely with them and seeing what works and doesn't work because pretty much all we really care about at the end of the day is results. And I like to remember that evidence-based medicine is not only the literature, but also the client experience and the practitioner experience as well. And when we have all three of those, then we get to make magic happen instead of I think sometimes we undervalue the client's experience or the clinician's experience or overvalue the research, which often can be quite behind on being up. Like we don't really get it applied as quickly. As maybe something is progressive around that. Of course like many people in private practice are doing different things. Sometimes there's a personal story and so I did have personal stories around food sensitivities and eczema at the very beginning of private practice. So because I have a diet, I'm a dietician background, I was doing some additional training in food reactions, food sensitivities, which is not. Medically necessarily, we don't agree about universally reasons for that, right? It's not black and white. It actually is quite malleable. So we recognize food sensitivities, but we also don't, we recognize them in saying there is something called non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which is essentially a food sensitivity, but you don't diagnose positive for celiac. So we acknowledge it, but we also are like, Ooh, those are also not quite real. Food sensitivity is different than allergies, of course, which you talk about all the time. Those are IgE reactions. They should be repeatable, although they do often shift for small children, especially as the immune system gets developed. We think that usually this is how I perceive it. We usually think that those tests are gonna be positive again and again. Typically, when you're testing for allergies with whereas when you test for sensitivities, we're looking at different immune mediators, IgM, Different immune reactions, and those can shift depending on what's going on in the gut and the immune system overall. So anyway I was doing some additional training in that when I had this massive eczema flare happen in 2017, and I really just struggled to find someone who could help me around it. I really just, I was like a normal human. I just wanted to go to someone and have them fix me, and turns out there was a lot of hard lessons to learn related to that. Sometimes I think that this is very common we're always trying to outsource things and there does have to be a level of autonomy of kind of understanding what is my body trying to tell me overall. And after getting some not real deep answers around this, I did dive into the literature because part of the experience was I did do a food sensitivity protocol and actually made my own symptoms much worse through that experience. We're all a result of our experiences and so of course all of those experiences at that time in sense, and I've really formed where I land today.

Kerry: 4:30

I think you have so much said so much right there. Like basically you, you showed the discrepancies of our education and research. It is a little bit lacking and I would definitely say it's lacking in the food sensitivity area. We're not there yet. But for IgE mediated allergy. We are there like for somewhat, right? We can at least tell you this is probably not an IG mediated allergy. And obviously we get lots of patients coming to us for that question, right? And I can say, okay, that's not this, but we can send you to someone else that might be able to help you with that.'cause unfortunately, we, I don't have all the answers for this, but being able to send you, send someone to someone you would be invaluable really. And then think you said. I think also about your own story is just so helpful, right? So you are your own client essentially and learning all these things as you go. And I think that is so helpful'cause sometimes, a registered dietician may have this niche, right? But they don't really, it's not nearly as profound. And the way that you can learn it is as if you're experiencing it yourself, yeah,

Christa: 5:31

it's totally different when you've experienced the, I know that I didn't buy anything black in my closet for a long time because. because Of my, it's just like these crazy, weird, tangible things that you only know if you went through this scenario. So whether it's good or bad, I really tried to not work with people with eczema for a long time because It felt like a painful wound of my history, right? Where it took longer than I wanted to heal it because I had to figure it out a little. I, I saw lots of people, but I struggled along the way. All of those were good learning experiences. You can look at the past self and always be thankful for what that person endured. Because just because you have something show up once doesn't mean it won't ever show up again if all the scenarios are correct. So I'm a huge fan of discussing relapse from prevention. I think we can always kind of shift our overall physiology and our wellbeing and all of those things. But yeah, to your point, when you've had the experience, it does provide a different level of empathy. And one thing we do sometimes we're not prepared for when we go through our medical. Training is, we're not really prepared for all the emotional weight that is carried with different things, and there is a lot to that. It's been something I've focused a lot with clients in the last couple of years because the farther down the rabbit hole you get, you realize that stress is such a self-limiting factor to improving the physiology, and so you're like, oh, I not address these things in practice I really want to support people in the best service.

Kerry: 6:55

So true. We do, and I'm sure we're gonna talk about, we do think stress is very much related to eczema. Why do you think eczema has become like a common thing with adults and kids more so than it was previously?

Christa: 7:06

That's a good question. Do you think it, so I feel like I

GMT20251217-170738_Recording_gallery_1280x720: 7:09

like you

Christa: 7:09

and I might be looking through a pretty shaded lens of course, we feel like it's more significant. I don't know a hundred percent if the rates are increasing. Absolutely a hundred percent. If they are actually, I just know that there's lots of people with it and there's no shortage. I, at one point I knew it was, 10 to 20% of kids and maybe five ish percent of adults. That's a very large number. Overall, I will say we're seeing quite a shift in the population overall in the last five years. So we had this major inflammatory input in the last five years, and I think people have been getting by. I describe it like this. All of the systems in the body need workers, right? They're all like machines and they all have like different they have different nutrient needs to make all the machinery work. All the enzyme reactions happen and in short stress or inflammation in general and in several other things will use up those nutrients. And I think we get by just barely For a long time in life with kind of understaffed systems. And if you put in a big stressor like COVID or literally not even the condition, but all of the environmental influences that were happening at the same time. There was like this worldwide fear and anxiety that was quite pervasive, right? There was a lot of fear mongering. All of that would've induced stress more. I have seen a massive shift in the population in the last five years where people are ending up in a very hypersensitive state now overall, and so I think that's the big shift I have personally seen where they were getting, getting by, and then with those stress inputs or inflammatory inputs, it it was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people and sent them into a spiral of, and I don't know if you see this as well, but a lot of hypersensitivity, a lot of people saying like they're not, they're reacting to everything. Or maybe, They're having allergy testing where they're lighting up quite a lot, et cetera. I find that there's a lot to say about this, and I think that there's a lot of physi physiology things happening. It's just that when you layer on chronic stress, any stress that's been there more than multiple weeks or a month and the when it becomes chronic is almost unrealized, like it becomes the baseline. We're not very good at really that it's there. So when it becomes more chronic, that's where I start to see sometimes getting by. I'm getting by, I'm getting by, and then all of a sudden it's like. I had this stressor happen and you fall apart and I mean we see that all the time with like onset of autoimmunity in general, right? There's usually a big stressor right before that. I see that and I can, I could recount multiple case studies where people were like, oh, I was doing okay. I had some symptoms, but then I had this big thing happen with my partner at the company and then I started reacting to everything and I had skin stuff and I was reacting to foods and all these things. So I see a lot more of the LA that in the last five years and it has. Caused or created or inspired me to shift how I might triage clients as they come in the door, to be honest.

Kerry: 10:01

Interesting. I'm not sure. What I would if I'm like, I don't know the answer to what you were asking, is it more or not? And especially, I'm not sure about the last five years, I was more thinking with social media or something would have an influence in like people just thinking more things and learning more about things. Like we definitely have that's true. More concern about some more rare diagnoses. Everyone wants to rule that out because they never had heard of it before and all of a sudden they think they have all the symptoms of it And I think are desperate for validation. And so your perspective

Christa: 10:31

as a diagnostic clinician, I would imagine people, and especially if you're in private practice, you're gonna get typically a more, I think, I'm not sure, but I would not be surprised people came in more educated or came in requesting more things from what they've learned online, et cetera. But I think generally we are desperate for validation to know what's wrong with us, because we believe that once we have this validation and diagnosis that everything will shift after the fact. And quite often we learn that the diagnosis is not always the catalyst. Sometimes it is, but sometimes then I get the people who are like I didn't really like the treatment options. There a lot of treatment options there, overall. And I think we're layered humans, right? And so we all have what, it depends on preference of how people approach it because No, I agree. I think that there's a lot more education on social media, and I was telling you offline, I don't get too attached to the diagnosis i'm more interested in how the skin or the symptoms are behaving overall.'cause cause that tells me patterns of how it relates to different systems. And for me, it. I'm supporting systems of the body to work optimally. I think most symptoms come from imbalance or deficiency or these systems, not they're understaffed and overworked. we can all relate to that probably. I think that's generally what's going on with our systems and sometimes this stuff doesn't show up very well in testing. So me, a lot of what a lot what I get to do initially is education or I always say at this point in practice, I take a very informed consent or education first approach to testing in general because at this point people have now come, they used to come to me after going to their diagnostic practitioner, their md and now they come to me actually after seeing lots of other integrative or holistic or functional providers And so they may have spent a lot of money out of pocket on tests and so they start, that's a shift I've seen a lot in the last five years as well. So they actually I would agree Appreciate. So they they appreciate that education first. I'm, I like to be a good steward of people's finances and and we all, like we go through layers of just we go through layers of working through our health. I think we go through layers of practice as well. And about a year ago I was like how could I help people get results faster? And I was like I don't have to do. A ton of testing to start to help people to support their physiology. So it was just a shift I personally made. It felt crazy to be honest at first, because, For a decade I'd done. Lots of testing on everyone. But as I started to see more often customizing things where people come in there, I had these tests, I'm like, I'm not gonna retest this. You didn't even address it at that time properly. That was a really common scenario. I honestly find people are quite relieved by this at this point, although it takes a little bit of education.'cause if they have not spent all this money and lost this trust and all these things, sometimes it's hard to appreciate like, oh, would you like to save a couple grand? And there's a pro, but there's a pro and a con, like I always say I would never res, I would never withhold tests that someone wants to do. And of course, in your perspective, So I think it's important for them to establish whether they have allergies? Absolutely. I would never want someone to be consuming or exposed to their allergies if, it's really contraindicated and generally it is, right?

Kerry: 13:31

Absolutely. Most of the time

Christa: 13:33

Doesn't mean that people aren't gonna still have a dog sometimes when they're slightly allergic to a dog, or whatnot. There's all these, there's slight nuance, but, a serious thing. We're never wanting them to be exposed to typically.

Kerry: 13:45

I feel like we could ponder some of these issues forever. But you said, like you said, you want to get into what you actually do, right? What are you good at? How do help people with So can you tell us about like how inflammation is happening inside the body when someone has eczema? And tell us how you would approach that.

Christa: 14:02

Yeah, sure. So one thing, and I'm thinking about this from a perspective of marrying some of what you might do with some of what I might do or how we generally consider eczema overall. So what do we all agree about? We agree that there is a bacterial overgrowth most co like very commonly topically on the skin staphylococcus aria. I I have never seen a functional stool test that did not have overgrown staphylococcus aria in an eczema case. So after 10 years of seeing that every single time, I can pretty much assume that is growing from the inside out. However, we're not that simple. We're complex creatures. We're a little more interesting than that. that. So there is typically dysbiosis in general. And so the analogy for dysbiosis to me is that having a perfect lawn is not normal, right? If you, someone has a perfect lawn, it is artificially manicured, right? Of there is imperfections and so we've got this lawn, and even if we have a lot of lovely grass, it's still very common for weeds to occur. And dysbiosis is when this becomes an issue, is when the weeds are getting out of hand, right? Because we know that weeds eat up nutrients from the grass and we know that they give off their own waste. Think about dandelions right? They grow, they take up the nutrients from the plants next to them, and then they give off their own little seeds, and it's quite interesting. I think we're quite reflection of nature and that this analogy translates quite well to the body. Similarly dysbiotic bacteria, opportunistic, Not really commensal or normal bacteria or other pathogens including fungus. We have a fungal microbiome, right? When that gets overgrown these things when the, when we have an overgrowth of these overall weeds in our body, they're using up nutrients, which you know, is gonna further tax the systems'cause we already talked about nutrients being the workers of all the systems in the body. And then they're gonna give off waste. And so an example of this that might be quite resonant to people is if you've ever known someone or experienced feeling sluggish or tired after eating, to me that lights up a couple possibilities multiples. First of all, I would think to myself, is this person digesting and absorbing food very well? Because if they're not digesting and absorbing food, which all of these weeds are gonna impair digestion, then what can happen is these partially digested foods are going to feed the weeds, and then those weeds are gonna give off more what we call endotoxins or their own waste. So these dandelion seeds, they're costing this, blood-brain barrier potentially causing brain fog after meals. And so I share this particular analogy'cause it's oh yeah, I know somebody who's experienced that. They're like, oh. And so what actually tends to happen sometimes is people. I will call it accidentally vilify the food sometimes, right? Where they're like, wow, I dropped gluten, or I dropped carbs and I felt so much better. I was like it sounds like you're actually just not digesting them and you're feeding the weeds. And those endotoxins from the weeds are crossing the blood or they're causing, the symptoms can be diverse, from a skin perspective if we know skin grows from the inside out. It's probably gonna be delayed. Not always, though. Sometimes people can have raised, red rashy, urticaria type things pretty immediately, or hives immediately. We know that hives are more consistent with an increase of histamine overall, right? And histamine is this natural chemical that is gonna be occurring in the body, but it's gonna be increased by foods. Allergies are generally like a lot of histamine overall, right?'Cause we take antihistamines for allergies. So we see these different types of na, like histamine's not really an enemy. It's just that it's supposed to be broken down in the gut and immune system, essentially, like there are some enzyme processes that should happen to break down the histamine and then the body should be able to eliminate the excess. So if it's building up, then maybe this process is not working optimally. And so how can we make that process work confidently? Yes, of course there's gonna be a genetic predisposition. Maybe the light switch. That triggers the enzyme reaction is gonna be a little slow. And I look at, if you look at your family history and you have parents that had allergies or aunts and uncles or grandparents that had allergies, there might be a good chance that possibly you're gonna have a slower, I call it a slower light switch to trigger that enzyme reaction. So my dad had some seasonal allergies, et cetera. And genetically I'm like half speed light switch on these enzymes actually working to break down this natural food, chemical histamine, that's not an enemy, but if we break it down and eliminate it, then things are fine. And so the point of this story is when we break things down and eliminate what we don't need, that is systems happening optimally. But there can be a lot that happens where the system doesn't happen that That process, that enzyme reaction doesn't happen optimally. Some of the things we've already mentioned would be we have reduced nutrients or workers that help trigger those enzyme reactions. A lot of these enzyme reactions are very nutrient dependent. And then if there are these weeds or there's overgrowth that can impair digestive enzyme function or specific enzyme functions, so specific enzymes that break down histamine would be DAO and HNMT. So dysbiosis can impair those enzyme reactions from happening and then. If how you're clearing this waste is congested in some ways, which could be, people we may agree or disagree about. To me it's all just basic physiology of how drainage and detoxification systems work. If there's any kind of Barrier, or again, an understaffed system, then that system that may just not happen very efficiently. And when it's not happening efficiently, then you're gonna see, start to see an accumulation of symptoms and it might look like brain fog, it might look like skin reactions, et cetera. So to answer your question, if I summarize from the top to the bottom, what do we agree about? Will we agree universally that there's a staff or RES overgrowth? Sometimes people go in and have a swab done topically to see if there's a lot of there's an infection happening. I always think that game over at that point, like you cannot rebuild a hou, you can't be drywalling a house the outside is fire. And that's how I think of an infection. So it's like I'm always sending people to their provider to an, to be certain that they do not have infections topically, but that will brew sub clinically. From the inside out, right? The skin grows from the inside out. And so what's impacting how that's growing from the inside out is the weeds and the grass, the population there. And why are weeds overgrowing and how are they impairing nutrient digestion and absorption? And then how are they impairing elimination overall, and how is that impacting the downstream effect? So as you start to put the pieces together, it's oh, of course this, to me, it just of course that makes perfect sense if we just track back what we're actually seeing, right? So I see, for example, with skin issues, people reacting the most to histamines, which probably doesn't surprise you, right?'cause it's part of the entire atopic march. So when we're considering allergy and eczemas asthma. Typically histamines are gonna play a role overall. So I don't know if that, hopefully that made some sense. It's a little mean

Kerry: 21:18

Actually, I love the analogy. That was such a good analogy. So you talked about, the nutrients being impaired. You talked about the enzymes getting disrupted and dysbiosis. What kind of other nutrients are you thinking that are getting impaired that they are not working, functioning, leading to this like downward cascade of all the issues.

Christa: 21:37

So to be honest, I mean it's fair game for anything to be a problem. Okay. So I don't think so. I, let me describe it this way in a more relatable way. I can tell someone has seen someone who gave them a generic protocol. If someone comes in and they're like, I'm on zinc, omegas and probiotic. I'm cool. You got like generic eczema toolbox 1 0 1. Fantastic. If that works for you. Wonderful. Excellent. Because zinc can help with skin healing. But if you get into like the nuance of nutrients. Specifically minerals and fat soluble nutrients. They have antagonistic and synergistic impacts, right? So if you just take zinc, and by the way, this was a COVID issue too. People like just started taking certain supplements by themselves and it's all, I think it's finally fallen away, but like people would sometimes come in, they're on like 50 milligrams of zinc, which is a lot 50 milligrams of zinc and a whole just vitamin D by itself without K two. And I was like, these are actually causing other downstream effects. It's like you actually can be causing, and this is like the annoying thing about no learning and knowing more more things is oh, we need to be synergistic. And so anyway. Whereas zinc can be very reparative and healing to the skin barrier, and that's wonderful. It doesn't mean you just stay on it because zinc for a long time in isolation can cause a copper deficiency. And copper is essential for ATP manufacturing in the body, meaning like energy metabolism and manufacturing. Not to mention many other things important for pigment and all kinds of stuff, right? So every nutrient is a superstar, to be honest. So if we think about, back to that analogy, if we are having imbalances or dysbiosis, anything we're consuming might not be digested and absorbed very well. So for example, carbohydrates, a very common irritant to some people that have dysbiosis going on. Carbohydrates are a really beautiful source of B vitamins actually which are fats, which are water soluble. So if you're not really consuming them, they're not really being stored in the body. So you have to like, consume them and get them often. And B vitamins are huge for liver function in general. If you look up the nutrients needed for the liver to function optimally, it's a, it's just a ton of nutrients. It's amino acids. Oh, and by the way, let's just start with that one right off the bat. Amino acids are huge. Amino acids are the building blocks of protein, right? So where do we get them? We consume protein and we adequately, we actually digest the protein. Now we have amino acids, but I don't think people digest well because stress suppresses digestion. It's like the first thing that goes when people have stress. So if you're eating in the car or you're eating at your desk, whether we like it or not, we're not really triggering digestive function. And so I think like humans, Americans, it's becoming more worldwide. We don't stop and enjoy food and or we're running from thing to thing. So we're suppressing our digestive enzyme function in the first place, just from that perspective. Because why, just think about the physiology again. Your body doesn't really care about digesting when it needs to run from a tiger. It's just not the priority right now. And we're constantly sending messages to it that we've gotta run. And even when I talk fast, I'm doing that to my body. That's been a really big thing for me to figure out is like sometimes our stress doesn't look like we think it does, right? It doesn't mean someone's being a jerk in traffic or like your boss is being a whatever. Sometimes it's just that I stop and enjoy my food? Am I actually digesting the food and getting in the nutrients overall? So I think your question was what nutrients are we seeing with this? It's there's fair game for everything. First of all, it's what's a better, maybe what's a better question? It's am I digesting and absorbing anything Very well. And there's a lot, there's several layers to that question as well. And you start to start, you start to see these patterns with people. sure where it's the cell membrane has to be functioning well at the, like the bottom line, it's like, how is the cell functioning? Is there cellular? Is are nutrients getting in and outta the cell? And then what nutrients do these systems need to operate properly? And then I like work backwards from there. It's what systems am I trying to get to function properly and how do I get them to function, so if I just zoom in on drainage and detoxification. I get a fair number of people again I will use some stories to try to make it easier or generally easier to understand. I get a decent number of people that come in and they've done traditional Chinese medicine herbs. And just like last week I had a couple people, they were like, oh, I did these herbs from traditional Chinese medicine and I was flaring. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's because typically now, usually they don't, they make up a a unique concoction and so it's not always on the label, but usually with this approach, they're like too far upstream. When I think about how the liver and drainage and detoxification works, I think about it like kinked hose When you have kinked water hose and you want you want water to come out the other end of the hose, you don't turn up the volume of the hose before you un kink the hose. And so if you, when you work in reverse, and so often some of those herbs are turning up the water at the source and they're not they're not working in reverse process where it's let me make sure that drainage is open in general. And by the way the reason I zoomed into this one is because in my head duh, the skin is a drainage issue. The skin is the biggest drainage organ we have, right? All the drainage organs, there's many, right? So it's the skin, the lungs from respiration, the skin for sweating, right? The colon and For bowels, the kidneys for urine, right? All of these are drainage systems, there's operations that happen, and so when we start to not digest, absorb nutrients, not take in nutrients, not have this synergistic nutrient profile to support all. Because that's the thing. It's all these systems require all kinds of nutrients. Some of them I zoom into quite a bit more than others, especially drainage. How well is that system working? And I think we have no choice but to consider physiology because I don't think our testing is sensitive enough to pick up on things. Usually if things are looking, first of all, there's just limitations to how much testing we can do there. It's a little bit like piecemeals, in my opinion. And when lab tests are off related to this particular system, usually things are pretty messy at that point, like usually things are quite messy. And so my perspective is the skin is already, all symptoms by the way, to me are messages. And so it's if you're already getting this message from the skin, think about what is this system? How do I support this system to work more, ideally, more functionally? And I think about the as. as. A safe place for your body to put garbage that it can't quite get rid of. And you asked why is eczema increasing? I don't know if it's increasing or if we're just looking at it, but I don't think we live in a less toxic world. And I don't mean that in some crazy weird way. I just mean yeah, we have a lot of toxic burden in our world in general. And we pretend our systems are just gonna do it all. But I think we're our stress is high, our digestion and absorption is low. And if we dig into the research, we know we have big toxic burden. There's this, that one study that gets quoted all the time about the amount of chemicals in the umbilical cord, right? Of babies. And I I don't say that as a fear monger or anything. Do you know which one I'm talking about?

Kerry: 28:47

I don't think so.

Christa: 28:48

I'll look, I can look it up when you ask the next question, but there's a study I see quoted a lot looking I, I don't know how they were looking at it, but it's like there was like such a large number of chemicals and forever chemicals found in the umbilical cords of babies. And so anyway, I just say that because it's like the research actually quite validates this. And to me, skin issues always have a component of what's going on with the drainage systems overall.

Kerry: 29:12

So You said a lot, but how do you combine like this whole physiological approach that you know so much about with treating the patient?'cause we're coming from a conventional approach, right? So how do families and patients get stuck there? And then what can you do to pass them on for more for the treatment side of things? Yeah,

Christa: 29:27

so I think the first step for everything is assessment and prioritizing the system. And I think this is where we're getting it wrong. If we just treat everybody the same. We're, this is the opposite of doing this. And these concepts are amazing and I could talk for half hour about each of them. So let me try to be succinct as much as possible. From, and I think this is a really good thing to talk about in general. So the first step to me is prioritizing the real root cause. And so just by looking at how your symptoms are presenting and the skin is behaving and what else is going on? You can usually triage what area do I need to start in? In general? So I like to oversimplify things. So I've categorized this into three primary buckets. And so these subtypes for me specifically with skin but they have overlap into other areas would be inflammatory. There's gut mediation going on here with inflammatory. I'll describe what that looks like in a moment. Environmental, and that means that there's a lot more taxation or we need to prioritize those drainage systems even more. And the last one is the stress subtype. And that means we really need to love on the stress hormones. And we're pretty in a, we're in a pretty depleted state when that happens. So once we know what is the priority, we're gonna end up probably supporting all of those things. Overall, I feel like when we support those systems altogether, there's three to four primary systems. The stress hormones is technically like adrenal function and thyroid function. This is pretty big rate limiting wise because if thyroid function is sluggish before it shows up on lab tests motility is sluggish and dry skin is more prevalent, et cetera. And so when motility is sluggish, it's like a bird bath and then stuff can overgrow and so it sends you back to square one. Anyhow. So what does it look like when you have inflammatory skin subtype? It's very typical of what you might see. I feel like it's like very common for how children look. So usually it's gonna be inside the elbows, behind the knees, which is like very classically how eczema starts to pop up. First it's gonna be generally raised red. Might be better when you wake up in the morning and might be worse in the evening. Might be worse with hot baths. Basically it's very histamine driven because we talked about how histamine is broken down in the gut, which is very much where most of the immune system resides overall. So these people might look more reactive to specific histamine foods, cetera. So when that's the type of eczema you have, and I will tell you like, I think of it like a layered cake. You most people start with this one. If you have a child that has eczema for the first time. The majority of the time in my opinion, is it's this layer of the cake at least. And then what I see a lot is people will have had eczema as a child, then they quote unquote grow out of it and then they might get it happening again in college or after an adulthood. And I think that's because the genetic predisposition to allow this thing to happen was there. They just needed the right in things or environmental inputs to happen at the So the first layer of the cake is the inflammatory style, or I'm gonna start with correcting the weeds, what's going on in the gut, et cetera, assessing what's going on, and there's many pointed questions that help us get to that point overall. Okay, so the next layer is the environmental or maybe more of a drainage priority. And just stop me if you want in the middle, if you like, have some questions. I'm probably missing, I'm probably missing few of these symptoms as I go off the top of my head, but if you have this particular subtype, I think you need to start and support drainage. And what does that one look like? It looks like more dry and flaky. And I'm not saying the red doesn't go through a dry and flaky period, but it's not predominantly dry and flaky. Like the whole body isn't quite dry.'Cause I think that dry and flakiness is part of the healing process overall of that skin proliferation. So anyway, it's more dry and flaky in general overall. And then typically it's gonna show up in a little bit different places maybe a specifically around the eyes would be a big one. Possibly also in the armpits. Possibly in the groin as well. Again, it's a layered cake, so it's like you already have the first layer of the inflammatory gut subtype as well, but now you're gonna have the drainage thing, the drainage and environmental, and this is simply important because it just takes like a tiny bit longer. And so if you're not prioritizing specific nutrients related to this system, you may not be successful. This is my point. So

Kerry: 33:38

What do you mean? It takes longer, have the effect of the I mean that like into something when you're resolving,

Christa: 33:45

so if you have a dry profile, it might take like a, it might take like a few weeks longer to get the same results as someone who only has the first layer of the cake. Like it becomes more layered. And so there's more, like more systems need more support, and generally, if you think about it, like the more severe something is, the more significant something is, the more undoing there is or the more support that you would put in. Okay. So with that second layer that's simply telling me, oh, this particular system is probably not working optimally, and let's just back it up to basic physiology. So if you're having dry skin, why am I pointing to drainage and detoxification of the liver? Because one of the one big function of the liver is to make bile and bile breaks down fatty acids and fatty acids make up the cell membranes. Some of them make up the cell membranes of each individual cell, and if you have cell membranes that look like Arizona soil, you're not getting nutrients inside and you got a big Arizona style lawn going on your skin. Whereas we wanna have really lovely, supple cell membranes to make up nice supple beautiful tissue overall. And so it's really to me, if we just we're like, duh, we know this actually right From a physiology per perspective. Like we learned this in physiology if we think about it. So it's oh yeah. So if we're, if we have a drier profile, then maybe this system is just not performing at its highest. Maybe it needs a little more nutrient impact to support function, so it can actually optimally do a better job. Now, are there some genetic influences? Of course, like genetically, I don't convert plant-based omegas, a LA into animal-based Omegas, EPA and DHA, which means I need to consume it from food or take it as a supplement. I'm not gonna convert it beautifully through my, from my, through my lover. And there's a lot of, I have a lot of people like that as well. that might mean I might have to give myself some of those fatty acids to have, and so tangibly, how do I know when I need to do that? First of all, you can do a finger prick test and get your omega status from a company called Omega Quant. It was a research lab from a university in my state, and then it outgrew it because he was doing a lot of it became a commercial lab, but it's very inexpensive. never seen an adequate one. Most people are usually deficient. And again, might just be the people I'm working with, right? But it's something really, and it, there's a lot of testing that's not as straightforward. This one I think is pretty straightforward to be honest. It's oh, is it low? Then you might need to support it overall. Right? that's the second layer, that drainage and detoxification or environmental one. And I will also mention sometimes people come in, I think. I don't know if you ever have people say things like this. People say it to me all the time. They will say, I've tried everything for this condition. And I usually find that they've tried like a lot of things in one corner And so very normal for people before they get to me to reduce the fragrances in their laundry products in their home. The things that we are, we know fill our toxic burden bucket technically, right? Air fresheners and things like that. Things that are not in. Healthy They're not, They're more things for our body to break down and clear out. And I have a little story about this as well, just like the power of products that we put on our skin or we get exposed to scent, et cetera. Just because sometimes it's good for us to have these little things for our memory. I remember there was a functional company that does a toxic burden test and I haven't gotten a lot out of it. But I have run it and I remember talking, it was a number of years ago, was talking to the, I clinical director at the lab who was a colleague of mine, I knew her from conferences and I asked her about where the test we were evaluating that day where she felt like it landed on the spectrum.'cause if you're the clinical director of a specific lab arm of a company, you're gonna see a lot of the same test over and over. And that was a test I wasn't running commonly. And she said, Christa, the worst one of these tests I ever saw was like a teenage Instagram influencer where all these companies were sending her products, like skincare products that she was putting on her skin. She's that was the worst one these tox burden tests I've ever seen. And I was like, that makes so much sense. Like what we put on our body and what we inhale can is like our body has to process through all of that. Everything we put in our mouth, our body has to process through. And again, I don't mean this in some kind of fearmongering way, but sometimes we all need to like stop and consider and just reassess am I adding more burden to my body than I need to? And some of us are not gonna clear it as efficiently as others.'cause we each are uniquely, we each have our unique genetic profiles. I am not genetically blessed personally, so I have no surprise. That was something I learned after the fact. ran after the fact and I was like, oh, this feels comforting. It's like I just, I have a bad deck of, I have a bad hand of cards genetically, so like I'm gonna be more predisposed to this dry skin. And so I have a child who's predisposed to that too. And so I just know that and I just help support it, right? We've learned through these layers. So speaking of layers, we're talking about the layers of that first step, which is knowing where to start what to prioritize and when you have this awareness or understanding, it also helps, like how quickly could I potentially get better? Like how long might it take actually? Because if you just have the inflammatory subtype, like a lot of small children, I think that they can be a lot better within a month, honestly. The less severe, the faster it is, the less long that you've had something, the faster it is to clear something. When you've had something for 10 plus years, you usually have all the layers. So it's gonna take, you're gonna need to go back and put together, you're gonna need to go back and support all those machines to work properly again in the body. Okay, so talked about that second layer, and I specifically talked about that one. I missed a couple symptoms, so I talked about how it might look like eczema around the eye. It might look like dry or flakiness as an entire body profile. But some other things that I feel like are most resonant would be sensitivity to products. Like you might be oh, I get fragrance-free stuff'cause otherwise I get irritated by this. So you might resonate with having sensitive skin or you're like, you don't really like walking through the laundry detergent aisle at the grocery store. Like you're sensitive to smells as well. Or any kind of chemical sensitivity. I usually find these people need a support how they clear that stuff in general. And then the final layer at the top, and this one is the more prevalent one in the last five years. And this is the people who get lost between the cracks, to be honest, because we don't have good resources for, in general, all of this can get lost between the cracks, but these are the people who are probably suffering the most right now. They're the people who are the stress subtype, and specifically, I feel like one of the hallmarks of this is hand eczema, which really exploded in my opinion in the last five years. years.

Kerry: 40:31

You said hand eczema? Yeah, Hand eczema,

Christa: 40:33

it could be as simple as the fact we were using a ton of alcohol sanitizer and disrupting skin microbiome and impacting that what lipid membrane that kind of protects us from having imbalance of bacteria. I think it, that can be part that Plus, The pattern I see is that usually when they have that, and what I'm seeing is people will have hand eczema and they've never had any other eczema in their whole life. And there's usually a huge stress hormone component as part of that. But these people are also feeling ultra sensitive to things as I was talking about earlier. They're feeling like they're reacting to products and every things they try in foods and all kinds of things. And there's usually some big stress trigger at the beginning of the story. And again, a hallmark might be and may or may not be. That they didn't really have eczema before and this is like the first time they've had it. So usually in that particular scenario, I need to go in and when you're supporting stress hormones. There's a couple systems, the adrenals and the thyroid, but for me, I'm usually trying to put nutrients back. I find these people are pretty depleted nutrient wise,'cause stress uses up a lot of nutrients. So I wanna put nutrients back because then the systems can start to work a little bit on their own. And it's actually shocking how well that works. Like how much their systems calm down when they actually can like function properly. Because otherwise it's like a system that's gotta continue to rob from other places.'cause it's just so depleted of things. And I'll mention quickly conventionally, our options for testing nutrient deficiencies are not incredible. It's somewhat limited. So I always feel like there's, is why I think education around testing and what to do and whatnot is important. I struggle to make it, i'm trying to make it as simple as I possibly can. It's just oh, it's actually, our body is just a cool complex system, but it's actually not that crazy. It's just oh, just support the physiology of each of these systems in the right order for what you've got going on in front of you. And baa bing, baa boom, like it's a lot better. Overall.

Kerry: 42:32

Wow. I

GMT20251217-170738_Recording_gallery_1280x720: 42:32

feel like we have so much more to cover because we Only de described all the layers of the different eczema presentations, but we haven't gone into like exactly how you focus on treating each kind or what you do to help, your clients or patients I guess improve upon each different thing.

Christa: 42:49

In summary though, each of those layers is gonna be important, and what we're doing to support those is is technically just FI supporting the physiology of each of those That first step is really figuring out which system is in the most duress. Which one is the biggest bleeding wound. That needs the first support. And when you do that, it allows you to be more strategic and targeted and not be on a million things. And allows some ease. Like when you deal with the worst case, the worst area first, it allows your body to exhale a little bit overall and I don't think we're as simple as that. You can just know everything you need to know in an hour either. So I it's acceptable that,'cause we learn the most through experience, whether we like it or not. Yeah. And we all, and we we all wanna be 12 years ahead of where we are typically. You may not actively say that, but we have a lot of us have that programming running as oh, we all wanna be farther ahead'cause we've been working on something for a while. And it's Yeah, It's just a matter of, and to me this was all a lot of, to me it was like a lot of trial and error in time time and like getting to work really closely with clients and seeing what is working best and realizing oh, this is just pointing back to the physiology. Of course you have to un kink the hose first. of course this is a sign that the body is dumping trash in a place. And I'll also say, even though this is my approach, there might be other approaches that work as well. I think there's room at the table for a lot of things. And this is just how I have assembled these things for what I, how I like things to go, the results I like to achieve the relapse i'd like to prevent.

Kerry: 44:27

So Krista, where could people find you they wanna work with you and learn more about what you do?

Christa: 44:32

So you can find pretty much everything you need to know my website, christabiegler.com I have pretty nerdy podcast and I have a little secret if you found this helpful but you wanna know a lot more, there's two things. One is I spent a lot of time breaking down like I created this training that really breaks down my methodology on my website. So prioritizing the real root cause is really the first step, but there's a few more after that. So I get a chance to break all of that apart in about an hour and a half. So I do that. I'm actually quite proud of that training'cause it's the result of lots of years and it's all cohesive and in one place. But if you're just dabbling, wanna know all kinds of, if you're a sort of a super nerd, if you go to my podcast page, the, and you scroll down, there's actually a playlist for specific issues including skin issues. I'm pretty sure we have to go in and manually update it. But there's plenty of stuff there. If you feel like you needed more after today

Kerry: 45:24

what is the name of the podcast? called the Less Stressed Life. The Less Stressed Life. Okay. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. All right, everybody, so please find her and her podcast and her social media sites and we'll put everything in the show notes and we will do our best to bring her back on soon so we can get the rest of the story. Thanks

Christa: 45:41

so much for having me,

Kerry: 45:42

Carrie. All right, thanks everybody. Stay tuned next week for next week's episode and get healthy Tampa Bay.