In Your Pants with Dr. Susie G - Butt and vagina-friendly lube 💦

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

What's toxic for a vagina is toxic for your rectum! Iso-osmotic lubricants (like those formulated by Wendy Strgar, founder and CEO Good Clean Love,) prevent transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, don't damage vaginal and anal tissues, and increases arousal.  Getting lube savvy includes learning about the vaginal microbiome, helping you better show up for intimate partners with awareness and support, and by nature learn about your own absorptive and delicate anal microbiome. . Wendy is an award-winning entrepreneur, author, loveologist, and sex educator whose work has helped thousands of people reclaim their passion and heal their relationships. Tune into her newest project: the podcast "Dear Sex," where she facilitates conversations with experts, researchers, and practioners that explore the human relationship to sex and answer letters from listeners.

Hey guys, it's Dr. Suzy G here and welcome to another In Your Pants podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me today. On today's podcast, we are talking about the vaginal microbiome, the little buggers that are healthy for us to have in our vagina, but there's also instances where these natural balances get disrupted. And so our guests and I today dive into her research, working with the vaginal microbiome and the impacts that certain lubricants have as far as your vaginal tissue health. And so without further ado, our guest today is Wendy Strigar. She's an award-winning entrepreneur, author, loveologist, and sex educator whose work has helped thousands of

people reclaim their passion and heal their relationships. She is the founder and CEO of Good Clean Love, a pioneer in the organic sexual wellness and personal care product industry. She's also an author of two books, and she's been featured as a writer of the award-winning blog Making Love Sustainable, and a sought-after guest blogger and speaker on topics of love, sexual health, and positivity. Her newest project is a podcast called Dear Sex, where she facilitates conversations with experts, researchers, and practitioners that explore the human relationship to sex and answer letters from listeners. I am so excited to introduce to you Wendy Strigar. Enjoy. Hi, Wendy. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Yeah. I'm so delighted to be here. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Oh, yes. I'm so excited because you've done some amazing research and I'm really, really interested in you kind of taking us through the research. But before we dive into the details, can you tell our listeners about what inspired you to do this work? Yeah, so I always say that necessity is always the best mother of invention. And I kind of am sort of the classic case of woman that had all the problems and would go to doctors and nobody could actually give me any answers. So just like we had said when we were chatting before, that many women go 10 years of having different kinds of sexual pain and pelvic pain before anybody tells them anything that verifies their experience. So I had four children, and I had them all vaginally, and my third one was 10 pounds. That's the biggest baby I could ever actually birth.

um but it really uh wreaked a lot of havoc in my uh vaginal canal and you know I think that it's really seriously underplayed how how significantly a woman's body is impacted by birth um even a single birth um and uh and many women don't know that they can get help as I didn't um so you know and then I just went on and had more children um and um and so by the time I was done having children not only was I dry all the time like I never had any moisturizing myself um which kind of gives you the idea that you never really feel turned on because that wetness is one cue that we have when we're really sexual that we're aroused so there was that but also pain was super painful I mean, sex was hyper, hyper painful because, so, you know, the doctor would give me, you

know, propylene glycol, KY, astroglide, all the freebies that they get pushed on them. And I would like be on fire. I would have to soak in a tub for like three hours. So the one place in my marriage that was always really functional was my sex life. and so many other places were really a mess especially when I had four small children so that I knew even when we had to stay up real late to have sex that if I completely was like I'm not doing this anymore which the pain would sometimes be telling me no I really don't want to be sexual but but I thought if I give up the sex the rest is going to come apart so I was really

driven to try to come up with something. And, you know, of course I tried the olive oil in the kitchen and could not quite get the olive oil in the kitchen and the bad room to work. And, um, uh, so I tried a lot of different things myself. And actually the very first thing that we found that really like helped and leveled up our sex life was a love oil, um, which was made with essential oils um you know very erotic blend of essential oils and that's what started our company good clean love and i had amazing sex for a good six months and i thought wow we have gotten our shit together and um and then the love oil was gone where'd it go well we used it up and it was like a like a discount kind of discontinued item at this little local shop and so i spent about eight

months trying to find that love oil or the woman who made it finally did. And then that's how I started my company. I began doing my own experiments to make oils like that. And that's when I started learning all the things about how many women suffer with painful sex and actually turn away from wanting sex with their husband frequently after childbirth or multiple children. And I think i want to say that a lot of things happen right like people stop communicating in the ways they were before children people stop showing up for each other because they're stressed you know we start to have bad thoughts about each other we blame it all on sex it all falls to sex but really it's the whole life right but i was always extremely determined that uh that i needed

that reset as a Scorpio. So I wasn't, I wasn't going to easily give up my sexuality and I did really fight for it. So that's how I got into, into making sexual health products. And, and then I went on and learned a lot and made, I feel like the most important contribution I've made really was in uh in feminine hygiene and physiology and because so many products are so like that that section of the market has been controlled by a couple of multinationals for decades like since before you were born since before i was born and they claim to be health companies but really they don't they they don't use health as a guidance in anything they do um so they're actually quite toxic for women most products on the shelf right yeah and there's a great study

that talked about that and comparing different types of products um as far as yeah what's okay for vaginal tissue and anal tissue and what's not so okay yeah which brings me to speaking of research. Let's talk about all the awesome research and connections you've made as far as this journey and your company related to the microbiome, vaginal tissue health. Yeah. Yeah. So this is actually my favorite part of my job, actually. This is what I love to do. And it's really actually remarkable to me how far we have yet to go in understanding women's reproductive health. Like I was saying to you earlier, I was close to 40 years old when I learned for the first time about the clitoral organ structure. So for decades, I would have

these orgasms, which like we said before, sort of verge on pain and pleasure, very profound, completely like throw you off the bed kind of experiences. And I could not understand why I would have them. I thought, what is wrong with me? How am I having this thing? And it's kind of hitting me in my pelvis. Is my uterus okay? I couldn't understand it because I didn't know about female anatomy. So I just want to say that what we have yet to really fully comprehend is that not only is there this really complex and beautiful organ structure, which is much more similar to men's physiology than, than, I mean, it's much more similar than it is different. And, and that, that, that whole area is actually a biome, just like the gut is a biome and the

eyes are a biome and the mouth is a biome. And so, you know, I think when doctors really fully comprehend that that the vagina is a biome, they're going to be much more reticent about throwing a ton of antibiotics at it which is the first line of defense for everything which now they know they don't want to do that in the gut right like we're reticent to give antibiotics but why do we think that that's okay in the vagina it's very weird so i um yeah so so that's i so i first learned that because um our first lubricant so for a long time i was in love oil and then um and i did all the things i made the love oils you can kind of see this was my old workshop here where i actually did the blending um and uh and then uh one of our very first big

customers said wendy you have to have a lubricant a water-based product you know and this was in the very early 2000s and so uh i tried to do it in my kitchen and you cannot make safe water-based products in a kitchen and then um spent quite a while developing what is now our best-selling water-based or it's actually aloe-based which is a water-based product our almost naked lubricant and um and that really was the product that put us on the map it wasn't the love oils people still really don't understand the magic of love oils and i kind of take take fault at that i but but people always understood lubricant largely because they knew about KY, they knew about, you know, many astroglide, all those propylene glycol based products. Um, uh, and, you know,

still to this day, you know, many categories of shopping, whether it's hair care or face care, you know, natural and organic makes up 15% of the total sales in a category. Um, but in sexual health it's less than three percent wow crazy so a lot of growth to go a lot of room um and so that's why you're seeing actually kind of surging a lot of people everybody wants to play and the and the whole market really is going to natural and organics and really truthfully i love organics of course i live that way but what we know from the vaginal biome research is that much more important than a specific ingredient is the quality of being iso-osmatic. So this is where research gets really interesting because I was always dedicated and said, okay, this is the bad

ingredient, right? Like we always want to know what's the thing, the one thing. But my teacher scientist friend scientific advisor um dr richard cone worked with us and he um he was a great gift to me um he's 86 now so i don't get quite as much time with him but um but uh he was like 78 when i met him still riding his bike to his lab every day and he had done so much work over time um but never saw anything come out that actually really made women's health better so actually that's why scientists are frequently mistrustful of companies because companies don't necessarily take science to do the right thing with it but I was so driven because of my own health needs that that was my story right like I didn't really I didn't make money ever at this company so I didn't care about

making money I cared about making products that worked and so so uh so what happened initially was that um you know we were a love company always first because having grown up in a divorce and then trying to save my own marriage because I didn't want to do that to my kids um and then realizing how many women were like really leaving their husbands sexually and then watching the number of people getting divorced and what happened to the kids after that. I was very devoted to the idea of sustainable relationships, of doing the work to figure out how you keep your promise to love somebody over a lifetime, which is the hardest work we do, a whole different kind of science. So I would always donate. If anybody asked me to donate, I would say, yes, of course,

I'll donate. So in this particular instance, HIV Alliance asked me to donate. So of course, I would donate to HIV Alliance, but it's a science group, right? So they tested our lubricant almost naked and sent us a very nice letter saying, this product is the isoosmatic, the closest to human tissue. And I thought, oh, no wonder it doesn't burn me. So I had a scientific reason to understand why the lubricant worked for me. So Wendy, when you say isoosmatic, for those who don't know what that means. Could you explain that? Yeah. So I didn't know what it meant when the HIV people sent that to me. I just thought, oh, good. Okay. But so then what happened is that there was a study that was being done right at that time that was involved with the HIV Alliance because

the numbers of HIV was going up, even though the government felt like they were doing things to really make a difference. In fact, it wasn't really impacting the caseload. And so the NIH, the National Institute of Health, decided in about 2008 to put $50 million into a study to try to develop a buffer gel to prevent the transmission of HIV. So the scientists who were involved with this, they were biophysicists. And that's how I met my biophysicist at richard cone at johns hopkins he was one of the scientists leading that scientific charge to develop a buffer gel to to try to prevent the transmission of hiv and other stds so that's how they came to looking at lubricants that's how they heard about mine

um from hiv alliance okay okay and so for a period of about two years they were buying tens of thousands of packets from us at cost um but they didn't say oh we're doing this study i didn't know what i'm just like science i'm all in so it wasn't until 2012 when the results of this study came out where osmolality became the key feature of safety in lubricants and i actually didn't understand it except for that letter that i got um in 2008 um where um we were the safest product in that study yeah we were the iso-osmotic product in that study so if so now in order to understand osmolality basically go back to osmosis in chemistry 11th grade so we know that um cell the cell's job in any part of the body is to balance what's inside

and outside of the cell and so if something that's coming from outside of the cell is way heavier the cell will give off all of its water right so that it can balance what's inside and outside and basically the cell sloughs off the vaginal that in this case we're talking about the vaginal lining so when you use a lubricant and we went on and did the first study once we learned about this and we took all of the lubricants that were in the initial analysis and we put them on in vitro vaginal tissue so that we could see the histology of what happens to the tissue within four hours, single application, four hours. And basically the entire epithelium is destroyed the higher the osmolality. So the reason that's important is because we, again, if we think about

the vaginal area as a biome, then we know that there's no parts of it that are just superfluous, right? So we know, then we think, okay, well, why would you have a vaginal lining? Well, so we have a vaginal lining because it's our first line of defense, right? It's actually where the immune function is really like keeps us safe. So to give off the vaginal lining, which is what happens, like i said when you use a product that's hyperosmolar but it also happens for a lot of other reasons so we know that in a feminine cycle the female reproductive cycle we grow the lining and then we slough off the lining so there's a cycle of um uh what would you call it um inflammation that's normal in a woman right and so and so you you know and it describes actually

what happens you know and how we can reproduce right that's the whole point but um but women who have bacterial vaginosis because they use bad products or because they never have the right lactobacilli. Basically, they have inflammation cycle throughout the whole month. The lining is always shed. And so interestingly, there's some research going on right now in New Mexico where finally we're analyzing the thickness of the lining of the vagina. Oh, so initially you were just aware of like, okay, the lining is being sloughed off and it's impacting the epithelium, but now you're going into the thickness of how much is being impacted of that lining? Well, it's like when that happens perpetually for women who are constantly going in

and out of bacterial vaginosis, then they never really have the lining that they started with. In fact, we never actually have even the same kind of lactobacilli after we have multiple cases of BV. Our lactobacilli turns into a whole different kind of inners lactobacilli. But still, there's at least as many questions as there are answers about this situation. But what I would say is that many doctors, many healthcare providers have yet to really learn about the concept of vaginal volume. Right. Right. And so it sounds like too that those changes that you're talking about with BV might be similar to what a woman might experience in perimenopause menopause because of the... They know even less about that.

Okay. Because of the vaginal tissue changes that if you looked at under the microscope, yes, you have tissue changes, blood flow changes, and that's going to impact the robustness of vaginal tissue. So I'm wondering if you're, even if using the type of lubricant that you guys are working you working with and your research if that would be somewhat preventative or yeah so actually um yeah of course i could tell you that it is curative but it's against the law for me to say so but um uh so i'm constantly always the rule breaker par excellence i'm trying to figure out how i can really give real cures so we actually have a breakthrough product coming out and so let me just say that it started with our lubricant, but then when I was working with

the biophysicist over time, he actually made a statement in the initial study where they showed sort of the safety of isoosmatic versus hyperosmolar. And one of the key things he said is that basically all lubricants should be rethought. And I thought, all right, well, what's that mean? So I went to him and I said, what does that mean? And he said, well, you're pretty good on the chart and I said but meanwhile you said everything should be rethought so what did you learn in this study that like we should be doing better so actually they probably would have achieved their goals in the study had they learned this one fact earlier but the way those studies are run if you don't achieve your goal within the time frame they don't let you say okay

now I learned this thing. Let me apply that. You know, like the money goes away and then nobody's looking anymore. But what they learned actually at the end was because they studied 5,000 women. So that's actually a pretty big study. That's how $50 million goes, right? $10,000 per woman. And so what they, what they found in that study of women, which wasn't what they were actually looking for was that there were percentages of women who had a robust response even to a hyperosmolar product that didn't get BV right so you know we're always trying to learn from the healthy subjects what's different than women who are in a cycle right right and because actually the reason we keep talking about BV but I do think it's important that

we make the link. The reason bacterial vaginosis matters so much in terms of the biome is because it's an immune function. So when you have a perpetual immune problem, which is what bacterial vaginosis is, right? It's an out of balance. So you have more bad bacteria that are having a party there than good bacteria. And so that's why a lot of women don't know it, right? It's not like UTI. They don't have a lot of pain, but they probably might have an odor, but because they have such low vaginal self-esteem, they think that's normative because it's just, they have it a long time or they'll cover it up with summer's Eve or something, which just gives them more BV. But when you have BV in that kind of perpetual cycle, you're 60% more susceptible to

HIV and STDs, and three times as likely to transmit those diseases. So, you know, it's a very serious health risk, you know, to have BV unattended and 80% of the time it goes undiagnosed. So it's, I, this is my soapbox. Do we know why, Wendy? Like, do we know why is it because the tissue is, it break, I would, I don't want to say break down, but more fragile, whereas. so here's the thing like how a good vaginal biome works is that you have healthy lactobacilli and that lactobacilli is fighting off bad germs and so in order for those things to be true a few things have to happen first of all we have to not fuck up the biome right but there are just things that do mess it up right like you bleed you have sex you wear tight yoga pants too diet

you know you you know all kinds of things like like it's a balance thing just like with your gut balance right but we know if we're only eating processed food and we're only eating sugar and we never take probiotics and we don't ever eat any greens i mean we are not going to have a good biome in our gut same thing in the vagina right so we know that we it's really important for us to keep a low ph in the vaginal biome and not use products that pitches the ph up which many of the products that we named before also do so not only are they not healthy for the osmolality but they're also ph not friendly both of those things will make you you only have to be a little out of balance to be way out of balance you don't have to have a ph of seven you just have to have a ph of

five and then bad bacteria can thrive so um so you want to have products that are helping you maintain low pH. And what our products do, the magic sauce, if there was one, is that we provide a racemic blend of lactic acid that it matches the lactobacilli that healthy women have. So what they learned in that study of 5,000 women is that if you only have L-lactobacilli, it won't keep you healthy. If you only have D-lactobacilli, it won't keep you healthy. you have to have a blend of dl lactobacilli which is human that's classically human and there's no way to make that kind of lactic acid except synthetically and only one company in the world makes it so um so we use that in all of our products which is what allows them to bio match

to the conditions that make that vaginal biome sustainable. Wow. That is a lot. That was a lot that you just unpacked there. But it's also so simple, right? Like we, we, we just want to know what the body already knows how to do, right? It's biomatch. It's biomimicry, right? So to the degree that we know what the body does and how it does it, then the smartest thing that we can do as humans is to not disrupt that, to support that. I mean, it's really barely scientific, truthfully. You know, when people say, oh, you're so scientific. And I'm like, I'm not that scientific, you know, but, you know, I think when we listen, right, like when you were talking about

working with men um uh and just having them feel what it is to have a body right like and so same thing with so many women who have such painful relationships with their vaginal parts you know all kinds of vaginal parts sometimes because you know endometriosis like i want to know how could we 40 years later not understand why vaginal urine tissue is growing outside the uterus i feel like So many women have that. Why do we not know? That seems ridiculous. I'm trying to figure that out now. So what would you, well, on that topic, I would say, what would be the greatest hurdles to, I guess, what you're doing currently as far as barriers and challenges to where you see your company going? Like where, where do you, where do you? Yeah. So anyway, so I just want to say that

Dr. Cohn helped us develop some products that we sell as vaginal moisturizers, because there's many many women like we said who opt out of sex but still have issues with their you still have to maintain your vaginal biome even if you're not being sexual and actually there's so much interesting research going on about the ways in which you know there's this idea of the gut brain and how the nerve endings in the gut are actually informing the brain as much as the brain is informing the gut. Well, there's actually some very early research that suggests that all of this searching for the pill that will raise up arousal has more to do with the vaginal biome than it does anything else. So if your vaginal biome is continuously inflamed,

why would your body send T cells to kind of create a immune barrier to have sex? If you're not having sex, there's no conversation between your vaginal brain and your brain to turn on arousal. Duh. Right. Yeah. You need neurochemicals for that. Dopamine, norepinephrine, the stimulators, right? But here's the thing, the vagina would be messaging the brain if there was an environment that that could happen in. And so I think it's actually revolutionary. I don't think I'll live to see all of this happen. But I'm working on research on arousal and vaginal biome. I'm working on research on the use of pessaries and vaginal biome, because that affects like some 20% of women, you know, who have to use sort of a foreign body in their vaginal cavity to hold space.

So we're doing a lot of really interesting research. But what we're about to come out with is a product that is kind of like a hygiene regimen. So it's like a daily use wash that provides that really magical lactic acid that is the DL match. And every other day use gel that helps maintain the pH on the inside and gives you that good food for good lactobacillus to let show up. But because there's 30 to 35% of women who never get that right lactobacilli, it also has the bio-matched lactobacilli suppository that you put in every third day. Wow. And so that's all part of it. That's one kit and caboodle. That's one kit. Yeah. One kit and caboodle. You can buy those things separately, but I'm really hoping that people will buy this flourish kit, especially

women who have suffered for sometimes decades with BV, you know, because basically the standard care now is that you go to the doctor, they recognize you have BV, they give you a round of antibiotics, and then they kill everything in your vaginal biome. And then they don't do anything to reestablish the vaginal biome. And then you have BV again in 60 to 75 days. um vicious cycle yeah so um so what the kit does is establish the biome and give you not only the food to maintain the biome and set up like the the best environment for a good biome but also gives you the lactobacilli which we have developed a strain that is bio-matched to the kind the healthiest women have. And then if you do that, the same way you wash your face with all your

fancy stuff every day, you should have a pretty healthy vaginal biome. That's awesome. So was this just for women who have BV or other issues going on down there? Would you still recommend this to those who have just a healthy... Yeah. I mean, I think that the amount of use would depend on whether you're one of those lucky women that maintains a vaginal biome but certainly after you have sex or after you have your period or you know um if you're traveling for me travel really does it a lot not that anybody's traveling right now but someday when we travel again um you know there's a lot of things that the balance can get set up so it's not like um being out of balance is a bad thing. I think the key is realizing that in a biome, we want to try to maintain balance

and we want to think about that space, not as a disease space and killing something, but as a space where we're trying to maintain balance. And so that's, you know, like in every part of our life, in our brain, you know, we're always trying to kind of balance competing forces and that's true in the vagina too so i think it's a great product for everybody but you know some young women who have a really robust lactobacilli might not need it as much um and i think actually even lubricant is something that we should at least mention because a lot of people are like oh no i don't need lubricant and you know so much pornography is like uh if you need lubricant something's wrong right yeah negative squirting all over so i just want to say fiction real life

and entertainment and uh and you know and and in real life using a lubricant that's like you that's bio-matched gives you more time to try more things helps you slow things down so you don't have to perform for anybody lets people catch up to each other right like slow cooker microwave love that right like you know it takes time for women to cultivate i'm not going to say to find but to cultivate their arousal and their orgasmic response but if you're lucky enough to be sitting there with somebody doing that that is like a lot of fun there should not be a rush to leave the room or pain and you know that pain pleasure space very interesting thing to explore in couple you know it's where all fantasy comes from truthfully yeah all fantasy comes from that

line um and a lot of women actually shut off their fantasy their own i mean everybody has their own fantasies, right? But they're very rarely politically correct. Or sometimes when it first happened to me, I thought, oh my God, is this like memories of something that happened to me? I mean, we don't know how to, so much that's about us mysteriously sexually, we don't know how to interpret. Right. Yeah. There isn't a very sex positive message about self-exploration and being free to just find out what, what pleasures you and, you know, what that means for you or partner or solar. Yeah. I think that it's growing and I think that, you know, your generation is increasingly opening up that dialogue. But it's, it's surprising to me how much we still won't

really say the thing, you know what I mean? Like ask the really hard questions. Um, and so, um, so I think fantasy is one place where, um, where we have actually a, a storehouse of rocket fuel inside of us. And, uh, and if we could learn to tap that in a way that, uh, that feeds us and nourishes our sexual exploration, um, you know, that doesn't mean you got to go to a dungeon, right? That just means that you could let some things unroll in your head. Maybe that will make you want to go to a dungeon, but even just looking at it, um, uh, is a big thing. I think. That's great, Wendy. Thank you so much. This was amazing. I'm so excited that we had this conversation together. And so if our listeners wanted to get in touch with you, your product,

can you just kind of let us know where we can find you? Sure. So goodcleanlove.com. And I have tons of blogs there. And we have a new podcast that Susie is going to be on our podcast too, Dear Sex. So we really try to do a lot of education work that you've been talking about on and we have a whole array of products there at goodcleanlove.com so yeah just uh any come come look and instagram you have a great instagram page as well yeah we do all that social stuff and i do uh instagram live videos we're gonna have a little one coming up um so so yeah i you know i'm a little behind the times but i think when it comes to sex there's really so much not only so much more that there is to learn but there's just um there's just so much more

conversation to be had that is not pornographic that is not you know that's just real conversation so that people can own um what a huge and and uh flourishing part of their body their sexual reproductive organs are oh that's wonderful what an awesome note to end on wendy again thank you so much for being on the show today and to all our listeners there watching and listening. Thank you so much. And as always, in loving wellness for your pelvis, this is Dr. Susie G. Until next time, my friends. Bye. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Be sure to head on over to drsusieg.com where you can get more information, show notes, and related articles on today's topic. Also, if you like what you're hearing, head on over to iTunes, subscribe to the podcast,

and leave us a rating and review. We'd love to hear your feedback. Thanks again.