Natural Beauty Secrets From the World’s Top Plastic Surgeons (No Surgery Necessary!)

25:11Shawn Stevenson:Here's what happened. Within just four weeks of treatment, participants had up to a 36 % reduction in wrinkles and up to a 20 % increase in skin elasticity. Phenomenal in just four weeks. Obviously, red light therapy is changing the game right now when it comes to beauty and appearance. But it is so good for reducing pain and healing. A meta-analysis published in the BMJ sought to see if red light therapy could reduce pain in people with osteoarthritis versus a placebo. The study included over a thousand people and found that red light therapy significantly reduced knee pain in study participants.

25:50Shawn Stevenson:But not only that, the results appeared to have lasting effects with benefits seen up to three months after the treatment. The researcher stated, quote, the positive effect from red light therapy seems to last longer than those of widely recommended painkiller drugs, unquote. Yes, red light therapy is phenomenal, but it's critical to make sure that we're getting our devices from a reputable FDA registered source to make sure that we have both red, which is the 660 nanometers light, and near infrared, which is the 850 nanometers light. This is the same irradiance seen in these studies. And this is something that we can do from the comfort of our own homes.

26:32Shawn Stevenson:The wavelength and irradiance needs to be verified in third-party labs. And the red light therapy devices that I use meet IEC safety standards and EMF safety standards. The only red light therapy devices that I use meet the key IEC safety standards for electrical and EMF safety. They have the number one red light therapy mask in the world. And I'm talking about the incredible team at Bond Charge. Go to bondcharge.com forward slash model and you're going to get an exclusive 15 % off all of their red light therapy devices. I personally prefer the max and super max red light therapy panels to do more of a whole body treatment.

27:22Shawn Stevenson:because if I'm going to get the treatment for my skin health, for my face, why not get some healing when it comes to my recovery from exercise or pain or injuries, things like that, just really helping to stack conditions. So they have these large panels as well, and also small portable handheld red light therapy devices too. They've got so many different iterations that can fit our lifestyles. So head over there, check them out. Again, all FDA registered and really checking off those boxes for performance and irradiance and safety. Go to bondcharge.com forward slash model. That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E dot com forward slash model and use the code model at checkout for 15 % off.

28:06Shawn Stevenson:And now moving on in this very powerful compilation with our natural beauty secrets from the world's top plastic surgeons. Up next, we have Dr. Cameron Chestnut. Dr. Chestnut is a facial plastic surgeon for the world's highest performers. People all over the globe seek out his services for minimally invasive procedures and also his focus on regenerative medicine and practical at-home beauty support that all of us can take advantage of. In this segment, he's going to share the beauty bonuses that help his patients to heal faster and improve beauty outcomes. The amazing thing is that you don't need surgery to take advantage of these things.

28:53Shawn Stevenson:And for those who do undergo any type of surgery, we're not just talking about plastic surgery, but dental surgery, or if this is a surgery regarding a bone or a ligament or any kind of surgical application, these insights you're going to learn are critical. So if anybody that you know, yourself included, ever has to utilize a surgery, this is stuff you need to know to support healing before and after the surgery. So incredibly valuable stuff. Let's dive in this segment with the incredible Dr. Cameron Chestnut. From my patient standpoint, they'll notice a pre and a post-operative regimen that I have them doing.

29:35The post-operative one is the very in-depth one that has sort of the most fun, unique things in it. And you sort of mentioned healing faster, which is definitely part of it. And if I were to flash back 10 years into something like hyperbaric oxygen, which is a staple of my post-operative recovery, that's mostly what it was cited for. It makes people heal faster. And that's very, very, very true, like to a noticeable, statistically significant degree. But interestingly, where my real passion in this lies is that I want everybody to get better faster, but the things that I do also make our results a little bit better.

30:10And when you're, you know, when you're already achieving very, very good results and things, I'm looking for every degree, literally one degree of improvement that I can get, I'll take anything, whatever it is. And so that's the real truth to a lot of these, like hyperbaric oxygen back to that. It doesn't just make you heal faster from your surgery. It makes the quality of your healing better. So if I take fat from like, instead of filler, This is a nice, you know, segue into that earlier, you know, pulling in the early part of our conversation and alternative to using filler and your face gel would be to borrow some of your own fat from around your belly button or your flanks and move it to your face.

30:45So now we're taking lost facial fat and replacing it with your own fat, which is incredible like for like, but it's also highly regenerative. Our fat is a very rich source of a certain type of stem cell called the mesenchymal stem cell, which are incredible for so many reasons. but they help regenerate the structure of our facial fat pads. And when you put them in the fat, they do a really great job doing that, but they do a better job if they're exposed to hyperbaric oxygen right afterwards. So a prime example of that fat does a better job, heals better, looks better if you have this hyperbaric.

31:17So just as a, to get into it, like I really want people to heal fast, but I also looking at better. I want things to be better. And after surgery, I'll have them do hyperbaric oxygen. That starts right away. They're usually doing that before surgery as well hyperbaric oxygen from a evidence standpoint and medicine is wildly well backed to help things heal better whether that is a chronic wound on a diabetic person's leg or whether it's a surgery that's struggling to heal or in my case a surgery that's not struggling to heal or just early on hyperbaric oxygen is like the most evidence back that's the staple of what it should look like and just so everybody knows that's just a chamber you get in it's a looks like a big tube with a giant glass wall on it and it pressurizes down so we call it a dive because historically this is used for divers who get something called the bends when they go too deep and then come up too fast they get little bubbles in their blood so you push them back down to depth and then bring them up more slowly but you do it in a hyperbaric chamber so it pressurizes and then you breathe in oxygen and when you breathe in you and i right now walking around our our red blood cells that carry oxygen are saturated to 98%.

32:26You know, they're just, they're doing all they can do. Basically when we get in a hyperbaric chamber, we don't need just red blood cells anymore because we can directly put the oxygen into the plasma of our blood, just like a soda gets carbonated with pressure that goes in there. And when you open the soda, it all comes out. Same thing. We can push oxygen into the serum of our blood and it goes to healing tissue and helps it heal faster. So hyperbarics, that's a nutshell of how it works. It's very fascinating. It's good for longevity, good for exercise recovery, great for surgical recovery. Other things that I would mix in would be something like pulsed electromagnetic fields.

33:05And this is like a little, we all hear about EMFs all the time. This is a very specific type that we use at the frequency for healing specifically. This also has really strong data behind it. has an FDA, which is an American Food and Drug Association indication to help healing of bones that don't heal after surgery or breaks, things like that. Super simple. Like we could be sitting on it doing our PEMF treatments right now. And I get to use that after surgery on my patients and help them heal faster and better from their surgery. It's a little bit of a different mechanism, the hyperbaric oxygen too.

33:38So now we're stacking things that are doing different things. Light therapy. This is a huge one. And I know you love this and different wavelengths do different things, really strong data behind light therapy for wound healing. I'm very well backed for that. But when we use it in a post-surgical setting, we have a bunch of things going on. We have a wound. Oftentimes for me, I'm using a laser as part of my facial procedure, which is non-surgical, but it's just sort of like icing on the cake. You know, I'm treating somebody who's, you know, doing a little bit of anti-aging and I'm going to help their skin with this laser as well.

34:13So they quite literally have a skin surface injury that we're healing. They have the actual surgery itself, but then they have just the whole metabolic cascade of healing as well. So something like red light therapy, near infrared light plays a wild role in helping all those physiologic functions happen better. Helps the direct injury heal, helps the surgical healing better and helps the overall metabolic profile. Like everything meets in the mitochondria there a little bit, you know, and then we can get as much in these as we want, but I use a very specific IV nutrition protocol. So if you're coming to me and I have your laboratory work, like your genetic work, any metabolic profiles I have, I can custom tailor your IV nutrition afterwards to, you know, what you need to heal.

34:56Like let's say how you methylate this or what your micronutrient deficiencies are, et cetera, et cetera. I can make these very customized IVs. I like to use peptides in my post-operative and pre-operative healing protocol, a lot of nutrition-based things, and then some supplemental things, enzymes, things like that to help you. And there's a lot to it. I don't want to talk about this for too long, but there's a lot that goes into it.

35:17Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. And the thing is, again, just having a couple of these things start to stack conditions and better outcomes and better recoveries. And so again, hopefully, again, we can have a vision of the future where these modalities are utilized in conventional medicine just to help people to feel better and to get better results. Like it just, It's kind of Captain Obvious that we should, but again, there's, there's complexity here. This isn't like readily available, but it can be because we're talking about conventional medicine here. Like there's endless possibilities of what can be done, but there's so much money that's wasted in the system right now as well.

35:55Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. And it's interesting because as you said, I haven't really talked about this or thought about it, but what you just said, you know, kind of made me think that we do use them in medicine, like hyperbarics or PEMF, for example, but we use them when things have gone bad, when it's too late, basically, when things are out of control, then we call them in. But yeah, what, you know, what's the threshold to kind of be using them in a normal situation or maybe somebody's at risk, but it hasn't gone bad yet. Yeah. Yeah. What a concept. Yeah. Right. Proactive. You know, it's, it's fascinating to me as well that, you know, you mentioned one of your, one of your great tools that you utilize is lasers, right?

36:31Shawn Stevenson:And just to think of the power of light to be able to do all these remarkable things with our biology, right? Whether this is like sculpting or creating some molding. Matter of fact, I wanna ask you about the name plastic surgery itself, right? So when I was a kid, I would hear plastic surgery and I would think like there, and of course some of the results that I would see as well with people on television is like, oh, they're getting plastic in their body. Yeah, totally. And sometimes that's not far from the truth. Right. So what does plastic surgery mean? Yeah. And let's just go there first.

37:12Yeah, so plasticos is like the Greek or the root word that leads to it. And plasticos just means that something can be easily shaped, molded, formed. And hence why we have plastics. They can be so easily shaped, molded, and formed. And that's where the plastic and plastic surgery comes from is that you're changing form, changing shape, remolding things. So pretty simple root word there. But I think the irony is that it really kind of gives that idea of, yeah, silicone or whatever kind of goes into to change shapes that we may perceive as not being good or not being as good as it was before. The ultimate intent is to restore form and function.

37:53That's how plastic surgery started. Yeah. Yeah, it started in wartime, basically, to restore form and function to soldiers. Yeah.

38:00Shawn Stevenson:Well, ironically as well, let's talk about actual plastics in plastic surgery today. Yeah, okay. Just, you know, obviously there's a lot of education about this now, just in our environment and our personal care products and whatnot. Totally, yeah. But let's talk about microplastics, nanoplastics in relationship to plastic surgery. Yeah, so this has been a very deep rabbit hole of mine. I don't really know any other colleagues who have quite done this yet. I think that we will see more of this because all the things we've talked about, I mean, if I were to just kind of say like of the scope of surgery or plastic surgery, what we're just talking about here is now we're about to get into a narrow rabbit hole of microplastics, you know, your audience is going to be much more familiar with them than everybody else walking around in the world, just from, you know, being a little bit more tuned in.

38:50in medicine in general, if I go back to thinking about medical school and my first times in the operating room, I remember this day, uh, you know, you're a medical student, you scrub in and you just like, don't touch anything. You're so nervous. You know, I don't want to touch anything. I don't want to mess anything up. Uh, and by the end of the surgery, I remember being three giant full garbage cans, full of plastic, just dumped everything. Everything's disposable. And at the time that was probably more eye openings from a waste standpoint, which, you know, isn't really the point of the topic here.

39:21But I remember even then thinking like, wow, we're using a lot of stuff, a lot of plastic that's disposable to do this. Flash forward years. And now this is even just within the last year with full transparency in my own practice. When I was kind of thinking about like, again, I think in these, like, what can I do to make things 1 % better all the time? And I was just thinking and looking at microplastics in general, because there's been a lot of small studies coming out on how they're affecting our bodies, where we're finding them, where they're coming from sources. And just had my wheels turning in the wellness world a little bit as I was looking into these and thinking like, I'm using a lot of plastic in my world at a necessity, just like using anesthesia as a necessity.

40:02But in my world, I'm thinking, okay, how can I, what do I need to look at and how can I get into this? So I started looking at some very specific plastics or plasticizers, phthalates to be very specific if we really want to get into it and what their places are in medicine. And what, in a nutshell, these particular types of plasticizers make plastic soft and moldable, like an IV bag, which I use all the time, or like the tubing for the IV, which I use all the time. So I started digging into, well, what's in these, is this something I'd want to be putting in my body? And I found not so much. One of the very specific plasticizers has been known for a long time, to, let's just say, not be great for us.

40:47And when kids get it over and over and over again, we would see issues with them with their development. Just like anesthesia in kids, as a side note, when kids get repeated bouts of general anesthesia, we know that those kids don't have as high of IQs as they grow up. Back to that topic. So in kids, we know that in vulnerable populations, these very specific plasticizers were not great for them, but for you and I in normal life, probably not as big of a deal, not as detectable maybe. these same things in Europe are not available, not used. So a side note. So I started going, okay, are these in my products basically?

41:23And so I started kind of going back and I did a very deep dive again. I own the operating rooms on the system, only everything. So I can do this. If I were at a hospital, this would not be possible, but I rallied my, I did my own deep research. I rallied my staff and I was like, okay, let's go look at every plastic product that we use. And here's what we're looking for. And here's what's okay. Cause there are some plastics that are okay, that don't do this as much. And we had a very, very deep dive and discovered, yeah, that we did have some of these in our protocols. It's been very well shown now that with things like IVs, that some sources even suggest that you run a third of the IV through the tubing before you start putting it in somebody because of the microplastics and nanoplastics that are in it.

42:05So we totally purged all those out of our operating room. It was a very expensive endeavor. and I loved my staff for this because they were very much on board, but this would have been something that like, you know, the nurse of the hospital is like, I quit, I'm not doing this. You know, my staff's like, oh, we can make this better, let's do it. And so, you know, very happy to say that we have a operating room that has, you know, we still use plastics, but plastics that I would use on myself now. And it's a, I think we'll hear more about that topic. There's, again, there's so many other things.

42:34This might be a little bit of a higher hanging fruit, but in my patient population, who is very well researched and very aware. This is something that they value. I value for sure. And they value as well. So, and I think the thing we didn't talk about that's really important is, well, okay, microplastics. So what? At a cellular level, this is what peaked me in the first place. If I go back to the beginning of the story, at a cellular level, they're causing a burden, an inflammatory burden, a mitochondrial burden, and we can't heal as well if those things are present in us, especially if they're very acute and there's a high load of them.

43:08So this all boiled down to healing for me too. It's like, if I'm inhibiting their healing even a little bit in that postoperative period, I don't want to be using it. And that's where the plastics come.

43:16Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. Wow. This is, again, this is going above and beyond. Yeah. It's not remotely normal. No, for sure. And it's just, it's very admirable to be just even considering and trying to figure things out. Yeah. I mean, we'll put a couple of studies up for everybody to see. Like one of them is just, obviously with our exposure today, you can't escape this. You can't escape microplastics, nanoplastics, but, you know, pretty much everywhere that they're looking in the human body, they're accumulating in our tissues. Right. And so one of the studies we'll put up for everybody found accumulation with our cardiovascular system.

43:50Shawn Stevenson:And it's one thing to have it there, but does that, does it mean anything? Well, they actually found it correlated with higher incidence of cardiovascular issues, right? So heart attacks, strokes. and then of course the famous study with studying 11 testicles yes I don't know what where the other pair went but every testicle they analyzed had microplastics accumulating in it you know and again everywhere they were looking in the brain just and so we're living in a very plastic world and it's one of those things that we can start to be aware of and just mitigate the effects because the human body is incredibly resilient.

44:27Shawn Stevenson:And one of the things that I'm hearing again, like we're like, whether it's, you know, fillers, for example, and we're, then we're got this huge plastic burden. Like we're just filling our tissues with all this stuff that's at its essence, creating inflammation and damaging the potential of our mitochondria. Right. And so that's one of the things as well that you noted is surgery as a mitochondrial stress test. Yes, absolutely. Right. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So, I mean, this happens in every facet. And again, I think all of those modalities that I mentioned sort of meet in the mitochondria because that's what's fueling our entire recovery.

45:06It's a big recovery response. It is, we talk about regenerative medicine, which is essentially what a lot of my practice boils down to utilizing regenerative medicine as part of my surgical or procedural processes, but we have to regenerate. We have to make something. That's the generation part of it. And that takes a lot of energy. And when a lot of that's happening at the same time, we have to have very efficient systems for that. And, you know, we talked about red light. We talked about, you know, supporting our metabolic health, which starts before surgery for me, whether it's some very specific fasting regimens that I'll have people doing or creatine before surgery.

45:44All of these are aimed at metabolic flexibility, fuel usage, how ketosis versus glucose versus even creatine is a fuel source. I want people to have all these options available to them. I want them to have great carbon dioxide tolerance before their procedure. I want them to be in good shape because they're going to heal better afterwards. Their mitochondria are going to be more efficient in these stressful environments. It is the ultimate stress test to do something like this.

46:10Shawn Stevenson:This speaks back to, again, light being used as medicine, whether it's the lasers, the red light therapy, in particular, the impact on the mitochondria, just helping everything to work a little bit better. Yeah. Lasers fitting into this like photobiomodulation thing is really interesting because lasers have been around for a long time. One of my mentors was a father of like the old lasers and medicine and, you know, like the seventies. and it wasn't talked about in the same way. And I think it's really that the availability to us at home or, you know, something like red light therapy that has an incredible safety profile and very little to no risk with it has really brought this into the world that light has a very potent interaction with our body.

46:53But when we really look back at it in the old school, I'm like, these guys were, you know, a laser is by definition, a single wavelength of light, one wavelength. And they were figuring out what that wavelength did in our body, basically what it hit and how that energy affected that target that it had. It's called a chromophore, a fun word. So a specific wavelength of light hits a very specific chromophore and there's an interaction that happens. And so some of the chromophores are red blood cells and that shuts down a blood vessel if it gets heated. Some of them are collagen, some of them are pigment.

47:24If we want to get rid of, you know, sun damage or moles or whatever it may be, things that have like melanin in them. So if we go, these guys were very old school, you know, pioneers, basically figuring out like what wavelength of light did exactly what in our skin and then applying them in incredibly life-changing ways. It's pretty cool. But it's like the OG photobiomodulation basically. And now it's so popular and, you know, red light has a different effect. Red light's targeting our mitochondria, largely, you know, cytochrome C oxidase. And so it's really cool to see the evolution come and have it sort of be, for who we're talking with, sort of a household, you know, idea.

47:59Yeah.

48:00Shawn Stevenson:What are some things, again, just with people who want to just look their best and feel their best? Are there any things that you recommend people to do just for their general self-care when it comes to, you know, just being able to look and feel their best? Yeah. This is a great topic. It's a big one. And I talk about these types of things a lot on my social media, for example, like here's what I would do in my twenties and my thirties, kind of go by the decade or just there's, there's lots to this because it, in reality, I'm thinking about this with my kids already, you know, I'm thinking about their skeletal structure with their orthodontics to their airway and how that's going to affect their jaw in the longterm, which is very functional, but also will affect how they look honestly.

48:41Um, so if it really is at every level, we really want to be thoughtful about this, but the best advice I can give, because this spans every decade, even for my kids, honestly, to somebody in their 60s, 70s, 80s is paying attention to your metabolic health. Very cliche, but let's talk about something like blood glucose levels. Super simple. We can measure, I'm wearing a continuous glucose monitor right now. I kind of always know what that is. I use it as more of a systemic stress metric for myself to know what my cortisol levels are approximately doing. But when we look at what's happening with our blood glucose levels, and we know that as they get high, those things will age you faster.

49:20Very simple example of that right it's called the glycosylation attaching a glucose molecule to a protein makes the protein not function well and this happens in our arteries happens in our facial tissues not great for how things function especially when they're elastic and meant to flex like our skin or our blood vessels and we can measure this a fun fact people may people may have heard of this lab test called a hemoglobin a1c that is measuring exactly what i just talked about how much glucose is attached to our red blood cells. And it gives a really reliable example of like, you got a lot of glucose going on and it's attaching to your proteins.

49:57This is not good, but a very simple, basic, I think rubber meeting the road example of how our metabolic health affects our aging. Because what we're seeing externally often is reflecting what's happening internally, metaphorically, and quite literally in that situation. If you're having a breakdown of your elastic tissue of your skin, I'd be highly concerned that that's happening to your arteries as well, which are also very, very elastic. Same process is happening. So this is systemic inflammation, it's toxicity, it's glucose levels. These are all things that we want optimized before surgery, going back to that, but they're going to help you at every phase of your life moving forward.

50:34The challenging part is, and I think that we're going to see more of this as this gets into the healthspan lifespan discussion a little bit. We want both of those to go up and be better, but we do see a decoupling. We were talking offline about this a little bit before. The patients that I work with are often very, very high performers, like the best in their fields. And they are very metabolically healthy. They've taken care of themselves. And this is a selection bias of the people that, you know, I gravitate towards and gravitate towards me. But at some point it starts to decouple a little bit.

51:04And I was kind of saying, you know, this gets into our neuroanatomy. I was working out with Laird Hamilton this morning, his early sixties. And when you look at him, you maybe don't know exactly how old he is, but you know, he's older than you. But when it comes to the actual performance, he can hang with me easy or better. And, but when you look at him, you get a different judgment of that, right? So if you take that from the athletic world to the business world, to whatever, wherever we live, there starts to get a bit of a decoupling as to where we're at and what we're capable of and what we look like or what we're putting out into the world.

51:36So the space I live in is really erasing that cognitive dissonance and trying to put those things back together, just in a nutshell, making people look how they feel or trying to. And you can protect that gap from opening by starting early, by being metabolically healthy, by being present and aware of who you are, what you look like, what your goals, missions, and values are, which is a big mission to do to figure those things out. But that all kind of helps kind of things stay cohesive and prevent needs for distorting or altering or doing other things down the road. But at some point I, you know, this is where I get into it is like, I see that as part of the health metric is, you know, you, this is affecting your performance.

52:19It's affecting what you put out into the world. It's affecting how you feel about yourself. There's no question that how we look affects how we feel and our overall health. No question. Very well studied lots of things that look at that. Um, and so, you know, I get a chance to be part of that health journey for a lot of people that's beyond just what they look like. I want, I want to help them look how they feel, but then I also want to make them more healthy and make them look better for longer. So there's a lot to it, but very simple, just kind of like, you know, do the things, do your exercise, you know, that's going to keep your chronic inflammation down.

52:48That's going to make you age more slowly too. You know, it's going to make your blood glucose levels better. They're all intertwined with one another.

52:54Shawn Stevenson:Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. If you did make sure to share this out with the people that you care about, you can send this directly from the podcast app that you're listening on. Of course, you could take a screenshot of the episode and share it on social media and feel free to tag me. I'm at Sean Model, S-H-A-W-N, the right way, no disrespect. Sean Model on Instagram. There's many different ways to slice and dice a Sean name. I get it, no disrespect. I'm at Sean Model on Instagram and at The Model Health Show on Facebook.

53:29Shawn Stevenson:So share it up, share your heart, share your insights. I really do appreciate that. and please know we got some epic, epic masterclasses coming your way very, very soon and some world leading life transforming experts. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day and I'll talk with you soon.