Introduction

I always had a connection with skin, health and the desire of helping people. From 1996 I studied skin therapy at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. Immediately after graduating Skin therapy in june 1999, I started my own skin therapy practice 'Huidtherapie Haaften,'. This is where my interest in understanding the origins of certain skin conditions began to grow.

 

The first years working as a skin therapist I focused mainly on skin therapy from the outside, not from the inside! This included edema therapy, ambulatory compression therapy with bandages,

scar therapy, acne therapy and laser treatment (hair & vascular).

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My attention was quickly drawn to the influence of the gut, and thus digestion and food, on the skin. One thing became clear to me: what you eat and how you feel about it has a significant impact on your health, particularly on your gut and your skin. In 2009, I pursued training in gut therapy. After that, I began helping my clients with skin conditions such as eczema and acne through gut therapy. I had their stool analyzed to determine the composition of their gut microbiome, allowing me to develop a treatment plan. Gut therapy proved to be the solution to genuinely freeing my clients from their skin problems or achieving visible improvements. The key lay in a different diet, an improved lifestyle, and the restoration of the gut and its microbiome.

After witnessing many successful outcomes, I wanted to find scientific support for this gut-skin relationship. Consequently, I immersed myself in scientific literature for over six years, reading hundreds of published articles and books, and documenting my insights. This endeavor culminated in the publication of my first scientifically substantiated book, "The Skin-Gut Connection" (April 2019, 632 pages).

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A couple of months after publishing my first book, I moved to another town and decided to close my practice to focus 100% on sharing my knowledge about the skin-gut connection through lectures, training sessions, webinars, podcasts and writing articles and, of course, my books.

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I had long wanted to create a 'simpler version' of my first book, so that people who are not working in the (skin) care field could also read about this fascinating subject. Four years after publishing my first book, I found the time to write this second one. It became an easily readable summary of the first book, incorporating several practical examples, including a short course on stool analysis and general tips for maintaining healthy skin and a healthy gut. This second Dutch-language book was published in July 2023 under the title: "De wonderlijke samenwerking between skin & gut" (= 'The amazing collaboration between skin & gut') (July 2023, 340 pages) and has since been a great success in the Netherlands and Belgium. Due to this success, I decided to have the book translated into English so that I can share this important knowledge about the 'gut-skin axis' with people all over the world. For a better and healthier world.... and above all healthier people!

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