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I want to talk a little bit about the immune system. And you know, when you mentioned the secretory IgA, I see some that are very, very low, some that are extremely, extremely high. And really what it sounds like is the root cause of that is just a lack of commensal bacteria that's actually speaking to that. And I know you've got multiple products and one of your products does include an IgG support, doesn't it does? Yeah, I want you to speak to that product and how it differs from maybe a spore based broader What are you doing there with the product differentiation? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, on your on your first question, I actually forgot to mention the role of the sports when it comes to the leaky gut, so I'll make sure to tackle that as well. So one of the products so there's a product called mega mucosa, the microbiome labs range, and then IgG by itself, right. So IgG is immunoglobulin G. Now that product has some IgM, and IGA in it as well. So it has a variety of immunoglobulins. These are bovine immunoglobulin. So these come from cows. The advantage here is that, you know, you've got all these ruminant cows that are out there, you know, in the grasslands, and eating, they come from good, healthy cows, fortunately, so they're in the grass or in the environment they're eating. And so their immune systems are producing antibodies against a lot of things, a lot of environmental particles are a lot of mold, and mold, toxins and viruses and bacteria and all that. So these antibodies neutralize a lot of these things, right, and we get the advantage of being able to take that that serum from the cow, concentrate the immunoglobulins, and then be able to take that as a dietary supplement, because what that does, is it provides our mucosal layer doesn't get absorbed into your circulation, it works in the lining of your gut, as these antibodies that are designed to neutralize things that can drive a toxigenic or inflammatory response in the body. Right. So it helps assist your immune system by reducing the toxigenic load of what's entering into the system. Because those antibodies will absolutely lock onto something specific. This is what's different about using antibodies versus let's say something like clay, or charcoal, right, which is all binder, but it binds everything, it just grabs on to everything and just takes everything out good stuff and bad stuff, what the use of immunoglobulins are really great, because these are antibodies that have very specific targets, they target, you know, alpha toxin, for example. And that antibody only binds Alpha toxin doesn't bind anything else, right? If there's no alpha toxin in the system, you're just going to put that antibody out. Right. So that's the beauty of using those types of immunoglobulins. It mimics similar to what what your system is supposed to be doing by producing antibodies and secreting it into the mucosa. So this is an assist for your immune system. Going back to the question of the spores now, why we even, you know, started working with spores and kind of came up with this idea of a spore based probiotic, is I always kind of look at evolutionary biology for clues to understand what we should be doing, right? Where should we look for therapeutics. And when I got in the world of probiotics, one of my first questions to myself, as I run through my own thought experiments is, you know, Where did our ancestors get probiotics from? Right? Assuming there are bacteria that you can consume that are going to confer a health benefit? Right, that's really what a probiotic is? Where did they get it from? Right? Clearly, they didn't have refrigerated sections of health food stores, and, you know, capsules of unique things wrapped with seaweed and all these other crazy delivery systems. Where did they get their probiotics from? Right? It's from nature, right? They essentially after they were born, they got their initial inoculum, from mom passing through the vaginal canal. And then from breast milk, you get a lot of bacteria. And then from close interaction with mom, dad and other community members in the first few years beyond that, most of your interaction with microbes is in the outside environment, right? Our ancestors ate dirt, they drank water from rivers and streams, they didn't sterilize their environment. So they had a lot of interaction with environmental microbes. So we started saying, Okay, what about environmental microbes? Are there any environmental microbes that fit the scientific definition of a probiotic, which means that it should be alive organism, when administered to the host confers a health benefit. So most environmental microbes, when you consume them will die in the stomach because your stomach acid is designed to kill stuff coming through to protect the host right in case there's pathogenic or dysfunctional things coming through. So most people die in the stomach, which means that they can't act as a probiotic because they're dead. Right? Then we said, Okay, are there environmental microbes that can actually survive stomach acid? That's when we honed in on the bacillus endo spores because these are unique microbes that have a way of wrapping themselves in an armor like coating. It's a it's a it's a calcified ArmaLite coating that allow
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cause them to survive through the gastric system. So he said, Okay, that's really interesting because nature has conferred on them a capability of surviving through gastric barrier, then the next question is, well, what do they do once they move past the gastric barrier? Right? Are they creating any sort of health benefit to the host. And we discovered that the spores have been used in the pharmaceutical industry, in Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia as a treatment for dysentery since 1952. Right? It's a probiotic bacteria that's been used to treat a gut infection, right. And that's where it became really interesting to us. Because in order for a probiotic bacteria, a single species of probiotic bacteria to be able to be administered at relatively miniscule amounts. In this case, all the drugs that treat dysentery are two to 4 billion CF use, right? Which is far less than most probiotics in our space. But this is a two to 4 billion Cfu of a single species that can go into your gut and treat an infection that's really bad that can kill somebody. Right? So how does it do it? Right? How can just 2 billion go into a sea of 50 trillion bacteria? Find the ones that are causing the problem and bring their numbers down without damaging anything else? Well, this is where you get into the beautiful world of quorum sensing. Right, so quorum sensing is where some of this mystery lies, right, which is similar to quantum mechanics, like how do distant particles on either end of the universe instantaneously communicate with each other? Right? We know this happens, it's called quantum entanglement. But how does it happen? We have no idea. Same thing with quorum sensing, which is how do microbes read each other's signatures to map out who's there and who's not there. And bacillus is one of those environmental microbes that and when I say environmental, they sit in the environment waiting to get into the host, which is where they actually live, one of those microbes that does this quorum sensing in an amazing, beautiful way, which means that it has this capability of reading all the bacterial signatures once it enters into the gut. And when it reads a signature of a pathogenic organism, it makes its way over to the pathogenic organism and it sits next sits next to it. And it can destroy the pathogenic organism through a number of mechanisms. One is that it produces antimicrobials by itself. And it can release that antimicrobial in that micro environment killing the pathogen. Number two, it can flag the pathogen for destruction by your own immune system. Or number three, it can compete with the pathogen for for space, and for resources in that microenvironment starving out the pathogen. Right. So it has all these capabilities are doing that it becomes like the SEAL team, six of your gut, it can go in with precision, identify the specific, harmful organism, kill that organism not touching or damaging anything else. Right. So so this is what God is really interested in the spores, because to us, this organism has certain types of innate intelligence on what should be in our microbiome, what shouldn't be that perhaps not only can kill bad things in your gut, perhaps it can increase the growth of good things. As it identifies that there aren't enough prevalence, there isn't enough prevalence of good beneficial bacteria. So that was our hypothesis that we went into the world of probiotics with in order to start developing therapeutics around this concept of spores. I have a couple questions really quickly on the spores, safety for children and safety for those who are immunocompromised. I just wondered, does score base have any? Yeah, if you can talk to those two populations really quickly before you move on from that? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the biggest misconceptions of safety when it comes to probiotic bacteria, is that the category of probiotics will will in some way dictate safety, right? That lactobacillus means or you're safe Bifidobacterium means you're safe spore is it? Is it questionable? That's not what dictates safety. What dictates safety in an organism is does an organism have virulence factors? Right? Meaning genes that confer virulence, or, or an infectious capability of that organism, right? That's the defining factor of whether or not an organism is safe. It doesn't matter what genus, what species it belongs to. If it has virulence factors, then it's unsafe. So there's lots of lacto bacilli that have been known to cause infection, this bifida bacteria that have been known to cause infection because they contain virulence factors. So there are sports that have the valence factors. Absolutely. So one has to be careful. So you can't say in general, all spores are okay. Or all probiotics are okay. You have to go further and do a full genetic
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map of the organism to identify the presence of virulence factors. And that's the only way to know safety. Right? So so when we first started, that's the first thing we did is we looked at the full genome map of the organism to understand every single protein that the organism produces. And to run that against databases of toxicity and all that to understand, does this organism have any virulence factors as it produced toxins? Can it become infectious, and when you determine that, that it cannot, then it doesn't matter who you give it to whether it's immunocompromised kids, it doesn't matter, they won't cause infection, right? They don't have that capability. It's like domesticated animals versus non domesticated, right. That's the idea that genetically they're not designed to be infectious versus being infectious. So so the absolutely safe, right? And our largest natural interaction with organisms comes from these kinds of organisms. So you might imagine our ancestral babies were born, and then they were placed into dirt. And this is a very important feature of babies, right? If you think back, if you have babies or your own, or you've seen babies, I'm sure you both have handled babies in your past, one of the very weird things about babies, which is the kind of thing that I noticed, and I go, What the hell they doing, is they put everything in their mouth, right? They sample the world with their mouth, right? They can see, they can hear they can smell, but yet, everything new that they encounter, they put in their mouth, right at the mouth is not the primary sensory organ for humans, right? Adults don't pick up a thing that we see for the first time and go in, I'm trying to say, their mouth, right, you touch it, you smell it, you might look at it, and so on. The reason babies sample everything with their mouth is because they're designed when they're born, or when they're after they come out of the womb. And they they're put in the environment to get as much of the environment into their mouth, because studies show that early exposure to like spore based bacteria works with the commensal organisms that they got from mom to build the gut associated lymphoid tissue and all the immune cells that exist in the gut. And we know that 70% of all your immune tissues in your gut, right, so the development of the gut based immune system is dependent on exposure to environmental bacteria, working with the commensals that you got from your mom, this is why it's it's innate in our evolution, that as a baby, you sample the world around you with your mouth, you kind of get as many rocks and dirt and dried dung and all that into your system. So you can get all these organisms into the system. Right? As an aside, if you don't mind me saying there's another thing, another curious behavior of kids that I think I figured out why they do and that's eating burgers, right? If you're both honest with yourselves, you'd say you probably ate your burgers at one point. But my kids have I don't get it. Okay, keep going. I did, right. I remember eating them. Yeah. And my kids, both my kids when they were a certain age do now you notice that's another thing that's very innate for kids up to a certain age. And then of course, they stop, right. And this really triggered my thought when my son was, I think, three, three and a half. And he was in a playground, and he was having kind of a conversation with a few other kids. And they were talking about eating their burgers. And they were talking about how my mommy says I shouldn't eat my burgers, but I my burgers do Yeah, I eat my burgers. And I was like, No, that's so innate for them to do that. Why is it that they do that? Right? Like, why do we have that instinct? Well, as it turns out, it starts to happen at a certain age, like usually around two and a half or so. And you come out of it by six, seven years old. Normally, right? Now, what is really important during that time period, so around two and a half, you've already started to develop your adult like microbiome, right? From that point on your microbiome is really starting to interact with your immune system, to build out your profile of tolerance to the environment around you. And to start to understand what the environment around you looks like. Right? Keep in mind that the immune system doesn't have any forward facing sensory organs, right? You don't have immune cells in your eyes in your skin and all that looking out to see what's in the environment that it has to protect the host from, it counts on inputs from the microbiome and things coming through the digestive tract to figure out what is coming in from the environment, right. So that age from two and a half to about five or six is a very important developmental period for your immune system. Now, what is a booger? A booger is a vaccine. Right? So it's a natural vaccine. So you're breathing in viruses and bacteria, and dust and environmental particles and all that and you've got all this mucus in your upper respiratory tract that tracks all of that. Right? And then you've got these beautiful cilia, these hairlike particles that move all of that trapped mucus that contains all this
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as potential antigens and pathogens and all that up your respiratory tract and down into the back of your throat, and then it starts to crest up in places like your nose. Now, when you pick all of that and you swallow it, you're essentially sending to your immune cells and your microbiome, a sample of what's in your environment that you're breathing in. So your immune system can build a tolerance against it. Right? So so it's absolutely critical for kids to eat their burgers and allow that innate interaction to happen. But it's thinking about stuff like that, that really gets you to start to learn how nature's intended us to work. And if we're just smart enough, we can learn those things and then facilitate them rather than trying to outsmart them with our own little mechanics and chemistry and all that stuff. Yeah, I love the way you think that's genius. Yeah.
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Back to Basics, right? It's just a simple stuff that you think that it is. And it's amazing when you can observe and learn, and then really start to integrate, I think that people continue to understand things on such a deeper level when it says a relatable topic like that to really respond to, and I know, you mentioned that when I had the privilege of seeing you speak when I was in New Zealand, you know, specific spores and specific strains. And one of the ones that we talked about, and it's something I'm hugely passionate about some helping can dive into this a little bit, is the connection with the gut in the brain and how the specific strains can really impact our mental health, it can really impacts all anxiety, but it also can really boost happiness. And I think this is a huge topic, you know, the, the connection between serotonin and how that's produced in the gut. So can you kind of expand a little bit on that for our listeners? Yeah, absolutely. So So there's two categories in which bacteria will will have a significant impact on what you're talking about the gut brain access, right? Number one, it's really important for people to note that the gut and the brain are intimately connected. In fact, they're more so than connected, they're actually two parts of the same system. From a physiological standpoint, there's a lot of similarities between the nervous system that covers the gut, which is called the enteric nervous system, and then the brain itself. And then there's free communication and collaboration between the microbes in the gut and the brain, and then the brain and the microbes in the gut, right. So it's a two way highway between the two. And so there's a couple important things to keep in mind. Number one, when you look at the relationship between the gut and the brain, there's a spectrum for that relationship. And this is a very important point is that your gut and your brain are somewhere on the spectrum, on one end of the spectrum, the gut is the most protective, supportive thing for the brain, right? It's going to maintain sharpness, in your brain memory, cognitive function, repair, all of those things, it's going to feed the brain, all the nutrients, it needs, all of the hormones and all that for the for the human, the host that has the brain to feel happy, delighted, you know, have sadness when you need to be sad deal with stress, all of those things, right? The gut can will do all of that for the brain. On the other end of the spectrum, not only is the gut not doing all those things we just described, but it's also creating a significant amount of toxicity to the brain. So not only is it not supporting the brain, it's actually damaging and killing the brain over time. Right. So your God is somewhere on that spectrum of being the best thing for your brain, or the worst thing for your brain, right? And your level of anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, cognitive dysfunction, mood disorders, brain fog, all of those things dictate to you where your gut brain relationship is, your level of digestive disorders, like IBS, like food intolerances like allergies, and all that also is an indication of where your gut brain relationship may be. Because anytime your gut is dysfunctional, your brain is going to be dysfunctional as well. And anytime you feel dysfunction in your brain, it's oftentimes related to what's happening in your gut, right? So we cannot separate the two, the gut and the brain are intimately connected. Just a quick example of that take IBS, right, IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. It's, of course, a massive syndrome that encompasses lots of different disorders. But one of the things that now seems clear is that IBS is predominantly a gut brain issue, right? So it doesn't matter if you have IBS, C, where you have lots of constipation, or IBS, D, where you have lots of diarrhea, it's a gut brain issue. It's in fact, an hyper activity of your enteric nervous system, the neurological system that covers your gut, and it's driven in part by the relationship between the enteric nervous system and the brain. Right. So if you take IBS individuals of any age cohort, right? They have upwards of 70 to 80% of them have definitive anxiety or depression. Right? If you take the same age group of non IBS people, it's less than 19%. So having IBS means you
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Over four times more likely to have anxiety, depression, right, these conditions go hand in hand, because they're driven by the same thing. So then let's unpack the two different areas that we have to pay attention with when it comes to bacteria, probiotics and the gut brain access. So the first one is leaky gut that we talked about, as you mentioned, you know, most of your serotonin is made in your gut, most of your dopamine is made in your gut, most of the tryptophan, which is an amino acid that your brain and central nervous system uses to make serotonin that's used in the central nervous system. This is outside of the serotonin, it's made in the gut. And most of the melatonin that's made in the brain, right for sleeping and relaxing and all that, that tryptophan is also made in the gut, right. So basically, everything your brain needs to be calm, rational focus, and all that is made in the gut. The other thing that's made in the gut is something called BDNF brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is another very important compound that repairs the brain every night when you go to sleep, and repairs all the damage that occurred to the brain during that day, right. So you can wake up the next morning with the exact same brain you started off with the day before. And you're not waking up every morning with a slightly more damaged brain than the day before, right. So all of those critical components are made in the gut. Now, if your gut is leaky, as we talked about earlier, it means you've got an imbalance of microbes in the gut, which means that you're likely not making enough of any of those things in the gut to begin with, because those commensals that also prevent your gut from being leaky, or part of those comments. Those are also responsible for stimulating production of all of these compounds we just talked about, right? So if your gut is leaky, you're not only are you leaking in things that create inflammation, but you're also not producing all of those brain supportive compounds adequately in the gut. So leaky gut right off the bat is a problem for the brain, right? The second reason why leaky gut is problem for the brain is one of the primary things that leaks through a leaky gut is a endotoxin, which is a toxin that's generated the lining of the gut called LPS lipo polysaccharide, that endotoxin a bit leaks through, makes its way to the brain often and embed itself into serotonin and dopamine receptors in the brain, thereby interfering with the function of serotonin and dopamine in the brain, which dramatically increases your risk for anxiety, depression, mood disorders and attention deficit disorders, long term issues like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and so on. Right? So it's a triple whammy here, right? Your gut is dysfunctional. So it's dysbiotic. Because of that, it's leaky. Also, because of that, you're not making enough serotonin, dopamine, tryptophan, BDNF. Also, because of that your gut is leaking in a toxin that neutralizes the ability to even use the dopamine, serotonin and all that you may make at small levels, right. So that is a gut that is incredibly toxic and damaging to the brain. Right? You've got lots of neuro inflammation, you've got lots of inflammation in the brain constantly. You can't utilize your happy hormone, you can't utilize your dopamine, which is your motivation, reward center hormone, you don't utilize BDNF, so you can't repair your brain, you can't sleep because you're constantly stuck in a fight or flight response. Because the lack of serotonin keeps you in the fight or flight response. Your brain is constantly inflamed, which means you're activating cortisol to be released, which is your stress hormone. So you're constantly in the stress state. And that happens to be the condition of the vast majority of people in the westernized modern world, right? We've got this leaky gut, we've got a damaged brain, we're constantly stressed, we can't sleep well, we can't repair our systems are constantly inflamed. Right? So it's really find that really hard to find happiness. It's really hard to find passion. It's really hard to be tolerant of people and other stressors and all that. And life just becomes a series of misadventures and Miss events, right, because you cannot found ground yourself on anything. Your your brain is all over the place. You're constantly in fight or flight mode. Now, stopping leaky gut becomes an obvious thing, right? Because you want to stop that cascading of dysfunctions using the spores, you can absolutely stop leaky gut. So in New Zealand, Australia, the product gutsy, you know, in the US megaspore biotic, those are the same products that we just have it in New Zealand as a as a brand called gutsy. And so those are the products that are designed to stop the leakiness in the garden. We've published studies on this before now the second part of it as a psycho biotics. This is where it gets super interesting, right? Yeah, because there are microbes that naturally live in the gut, that are designed by nature to produce carbohydrates that stop all of the inflammation that goes on in the central nervous system. And in fact that can go as far as shifting your brainwave patterns, right? We don't
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know exactly how that works. But we know that when you expose yourself to these microbes, they can bind the receptors in the lining of your gut that will change your brainwave function. Right, let's talk about what that means. Well, we'll talk about the anti inflammatory aspect of it as well. But let's talk about the brainwave function. Because this is so fascinating. This again, goes back to that quantum physics type of mysterious stuff.
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Right? We're nerding out we're really nerdy out there, right? So so with your, for your listeners that are listening, your brain can function in high frequency brainwaves or low frequency brainwaves, right? This to high frequency brainwaves is to maps of low frequency brainwaves. Now, what tends to happen is when you're really diligently working on something, if you're reading and you're working, you're working on numbers, you're doing art, whatever it is you're working that requires high cognitive capacity. You're typically in a high frequency brainwave, right? You're in like a beta wave, for example. And that's great. You want to be in high frequency brainwave, because you want to tap into lots of different regions of the brain and your high functioning at that time. If you encounter a stressor in the middle of that, someone that is very calm and can deal with stress, well, what their brain does, is when they encounter that stressor, it shifts to a low frequency Brainwave. Because you're much better off dealing with stressors in a low frequency Brainwave. Right, because what happens when you deal with a stress and a high frequency, brainwave, is you start getting runaway thoughts, right, your brain is actually dissecting and dismantling that stressor in a very unhealthy way. And in fact, amplifying the impact of that stressor in a very high in a very unhealthy way. And it becomes really hard to rationalize and deal with the emotional impact of that stressor. When you're doing it in a high frequency, Brainwave. If you're somebody that in the face of stress can tap into a low frequency brainwave, you're somebody that's even keeled balanced and has a very low propensity for anxiety, mood disorders, stress, depression, and so on. Right? Now, one of the classical ways of training your brain to tap into low frequency brainwaves is meditation, right? That is a primary advantage advantage of meditation, right? When you're meditating, you're going into low frequency brainwaves, right? So when your brain quiets down, and you can kind of get all this enlightenment and all these wonderful things happen, you can affect body functions and all that. That's because your brain has quieted down, you've got a much deeper Mind Body brain connection, you've got a capability of your emotional centers or your brain, the reasoning centers are your brain to work through things that shouldn't impact you, you have a much more calm approach to life in the world around you, right? Now, if you meditate and you're good at meditating, you can get into that state when you're meditating. But it also trains your brain to touch into that state when you experience a stressor. Right. So that's, that's how your brain is supposed to work to protect you. However, most people tend to be in a high frequency, brainwave all the time, and find it very hard if they can at all tap into the low frequency Brainwave. Right? This is why meditation is so hard for people, right? Because you cannot get yourself into the low frequency brainwaves, you know, and so that in itself becomes a struggle. What we found is that these psycho biotics that are naturally derived that exist in some people's guts, can actually create a neurotransmitter signal from the gut to the brain, within a two week period train your brain to go completely into low frequency brainwaves, when you encounter a stressor, so it's changing how your brain pattern works in some amazing, mysterious way, right? We have great published papers on this from the most preeminent scientists on this, which is a researcher out of out of Germany that does a lot of work on this low frequency and high frequency brainwaves. So that's one way in which a psycho biotic protects your gut in your brain. And keep in mind, this is a natural organism that nature is created, and is part of our evolutionary adaptation, right? Think about early humans that did a really poor job of dealing with stress and then ended up dying from it versus humans that did a really good job of dealing with stress and rationalize through it and work through the problem and solve the problem versus freaking out and panicking and going nuts, right? And then remember early on, and I promise I will tie this back in. I mentioned that that paper that talked about the meta analysis paper that showed that leaky gut was a primary driver of mortality and morbidity worldwide. Remember I mentioned that they showed stress induced leaky gut was a primary driver, right? Because stress if you cannot control stress, stress creates leaky gut. It creates leaky gut by allowing the proliferation of opportunistic pathogens.
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There are lots of pathogens in your system that lay dormant until they detect elevation and stress hormones. They know the host immune system is compromised. That's when they start expressing their virulence factors in their toxins. That's when they start to overgrow. So multiple bouts of stress on a regular basis is like taking a bunch of antibiotics on a regular basis, it increases the growth of pathogenic organisms, it causes that dysbiosis eventually causes leaky gut, and then all the risks that come come along with it. So imagine, from an evolutionary standpoint, the least healthy people were the ones that could not deal with stress, right? They're the ones that got sick and died off. The ones that could deal with stress are the ones that survived, thereby selecting for organisms that these people Harbor that helped the hosts deal with stress. But then you come to the modern world where we're dismantling our microbiomes all the time with antibiotics and pollutants, and microplastics, and herbicides, and pesticides and all that, and we start killing off these organisms that help us deal with stress, we start getting an elevation of anxiety and stress, but those people don't die off because we got all this band aid medication to keep them functioning, right. And so they can still reproduce and all that they still have that capability, but it doesn't allow for natural selection anymore. So now what we have to do is go back and look for the organisms that allow humans to deal with stress naturally, find them in the guts of certain people, bring them out, study them and then make them available to other people. Right. So that's the advent of psycho biotics, psycho biotics are probiotic bacteria that specifically have an impact on your brain. And not only do they protect your brain from acute stress, depression, anxiety, and all that they also protect your brain from long term damage of stress, which is what leads to things like Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, and so on. So they're so important, right? Because they deal with acute issues of stress and mood disorders, and then long term damage of the brain as well. I have two questions. So would you recommend actually three and I'll just combine it and we can piece it apart? But so the Zen biome, I'm assuming is the product that is the psycho biotic, do you recommend that taking with a probiotic with the megaspore in patients that are, you know, or you know, people running a clinic and things like that, that are under a lot of stress, prone to freak outs. Also, my next question is, do you recommend rotating even your own so that we aren't proliferating the same guys all of the time? And the third one is in specifically with akkermansia? Does your you know, there are some there is a specific probiotics specifically for akkermansia? Not in your product line? And so does your product line proliferate? akkermansia? Because that, you know, is directly involved with that mucosal lining. Yep, so those are kind of three questions bundled into one. Yeah, yeah, really, really important question answer in that backwards order. So let's tackle akkermansia. So akkermansia is absolutely a keystone species really, really important, inversely correlated with everything under cardio metabolic syndrome, which is lots of diseases like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular, disease, Polycystic ovarian, and so on. It's also really important for the maintenance of the mucosal lining, like you said, right, so we have to have good levels of akkermansia in order to just survive and be protected against some of the most prevalent chronic diseases. The thing about akkermansia is two things. Number one is it's called acromag, teyssier mucin, a Filia. Because it lives deeper in the mucin layer than any other organism, right, it's good at living in the mucin layer, so you don't shed a lot of it, it doesn't come out as frequently as other microbes. Number two is that it is an obligate anaerobe, which means oxygen is toxic to it, it cannot live in an oxygen environment, which makes it really, really hard to increase your own akkermansia By taking it as a probiotic. Right, because the probiotic akkermansia thereby is not the same as the Necromancer that lives in your gut, and cannot survive through the gauntlet of the digestive tract and survive through the oxygen in the environment. Right. So what you're getting if you take a probiotic and Korematsu is you're getting a lot of dead akkermansia. And some of that data commencer may have an impact metabolic advantage, but it's not going to increase your endogenous akkermansia. Right. So that hasn't been shown at all. Even with the Sacramento probiotics, it doesn't increase your knowledge of the Sacramento area. So you do need other techniques to increase your endogenous Sacramento and to me, that is far more important than taking an acro Mansi a supplement and getting a bunch of dead akkermansia going through your system on a daily basis. Right, we have to increase our keystone species. This becomes extremely important as you get older too, because one of the hallmarks of aging is this reduction in diversity and reduction in keystone species. So we have to be very active at continuously up regulating diversity and upregulated keystone species. So how do you grow achromat? Here naturally? This in part answers your first question, because we have shown studies where the we're taking the spores and a combination of spores and pro and prebiotics, in particular or legal saccharide. prebiotics will increase akkermansia, endogenous achromat to your own akkermansia 100 to 1000 fold in as little as three weeks. Right? Again, the spores are fascinating because they can seek out dysfunctional bacteria and bring them down, but at the same time, they can also increase the growth of beneficial commensal bacteria. Because when you take the spores in that same study that we showed that the increased growth of akkermansia we also show that taking the sports for three weeks increased diversity of all beneficial organisms by 25 to 30%. Right. So they're reforming then we have terraforming if you will, the gut microbiome, right. So that's one way taking the prebiotic and the spores. Number two is by taking poly phenols, right and Command's your love poly phenols. So especially read in a berry based poly phenol, so cherries, blackberries, blueberries, and so on. So berry based poly phenols. And citrus based polyphenols will feed achromat tcea. The other thing you can do to increase akkermansia is fasting, you know intermittent fasting will increase akkermansia because it gives them a chance to proliferate by eating the top layer of the mucus while no food is coming in. Right. So just those things alone will dramatically increase your akkermansia Without the hope of taking a bunch of dead stuff through a probiotic. Right. So that answers question number one and the question and three question number two, about rotating. The idea of rotating really came from the thinking that okay, yeah, I've got a set of probiotics, we're going to, you know, increase the number of these microbes too much. So we should go to a different set and try to work on those numbers. That's not actually how true you know, probiotic bacteria is supposed to work. Most probiotic bacteria are going to be transient. In fact, all probiotic bacteria is transient, right? Almost, I can't think of a probiotic bacteria that goes into your gut and lives permanently. If it's truly a probiotic, meaning it's alive, and it's functioning alive in the gut, it's going to leave after a period of two or three weeks, right or in the case of the psycho biotics what actually happens to them. So it takes them biome, the peripheral longer than 1714 Psycho biotic what's actually happening with them, is when you consume them, they make it past the stomach acid, make it past the beginning part of the small intestine, they move to the pair's patches, which is in the terminal and of the small intestine, your dendritic cells reach across, grabbed them and bring them across the lining of the gut, and digest the probiotic bacteria on the inside of dendritic cells, and spits out all the carbohydrates into circulation. So the carbohydrates can make it into your neurological system and your central nervous system and your enteric nervous system. That's where those carbohydrates go to work on your gut brain access, right, so your own immune cells see them coming. And specifically bring them across the lining to expose them into your circulation. Right, that's a very intimate relationship that those types of bacteria have with our immune system, spores, they're transient, they'll go in, they'll fix the gut, they'll do all kinds of stuff, they'll do all these metabolic activities, and then they re sporulate. And then they leave the gut in a matter of a couple of weeks. So you could take 100 billion spores every single day, you won't increase the number of spores in your gut beyond a certain level, because as many coming in the equivalent amount goes out. Right? They balance themselves that way. Because just think about our ancestors got lots of exposure to spores in the environment on a regular basis. And the goal of the ecosystem is to maintain diversity. So if you're getting lots of exposure to some organisms, you're going to lose diversity, those organisms stay and colonize forever. So, you know, evolution and nature has designed it were exposed, our organisms maintain a certain threshold level, and they don't exceed that. So you don't develop these dysfunctional cultures.
Unknown Speaker 34:14
Thank you. That was super, super informative. I'm super curious. I know we're diving into so many topics. And I'm also mindful that we are taking up a lot of your time. So I appreciate. I'm wondering if you could leave our listeners with just a few key takeaways. I feel like leaky gut has been one of the biggest things we've spoken on really dives into that root cause approach type healing. What would be some of like maybe your top three things aside from obviously taking a spore based probiotic that you would really recommend for people that are listening to be able to go on action right now? So are they preventing any of this or even healing from this? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a number of things. Let's boil down to three things right and, and I'll cheat a little bit on the three things because I'm
Unknown Speaker 35:00
Each of the three kind of a category of things to think about, right? Right. So know that your ecosystem is the biggest determining factor of your outcome, right? What your microbiome looks like, is the absolute key to your disease risk, how you recover from things, how resilient you are, how long you're gonna live, how your what mood you have, how you interact with people around you, all of those things are dictated by your microbiome. So for example, your skin microbiome is now shown to be an independent risk factor for chronic disease of non skin disorders, right? In fact, there's a lot of a huge Longitudinal Study of Aging called the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging that showed over a 50 year period, that the number one predictor of whether or not somebody was going to die of chronic disease or get sick from chronic disease was what their skin microbiome looked like, and how leaky their skin was, right. So your microbiome is absolutely important, which means that you have to be absolutely cognizant of the choices you make that either harm or help your microbiome, right? So category number one of things to think about is minimizing the things that you know will harm your microbiome, right? So take personal care products, for example, right, we all use all kinds of personal care products from soaps, shampoos, lotions, and so on cosmetics. And all that the vast majority of personal care products will harm your microbiome on your skin will get absorbed in harm microbes in other parts of your body as well. So starting to clean up your personal care products is a huge advantage to your health, right. And this can seem daunting and overwhelming to people, it was to me as well even thinking about cleaning up my personal care regimen. But I started with one thing, you know, I started with a yogurt, I was like, I'm gonna find a natural clean deodorant that works for me, you'll probably try five or seven that don't work for you, you're gonna feel like you stink, right? But you will eventually find one that is aluminum free and free of this, that and the other things that you don't need for your preservatives, and, and so on, that will work for your chemistry. So once you find that deodorant, great. Now next, look for a lotion, that's very clean, right that has three or four ingredients, not more than that, that doesn't have all these preservatives and all that that's going to kill microbes in your skin. Right? So starting with the personal care products start to clean up one by one. And over time, add a regimen of things that are really good and safe for your microbiome. Right cosmetics become one of the biggest sources of not only toxicity, but also things that damage your microbiome, right? So there are fortunately more makeup lines and all that coming out that are cleaner, that are designed to be a little bit more natural, a little bit safe. So start leaning towards those things slowly, right. So that's the stuff we put on us. What about the stuff we put in us the things we eat and drink. Again, simple idea is that moving away from things that are heavily processed, that have lots of ingredients, have lots of preservatives have lots of pesticides, and all that, which means processed packaged things, right. So the faster we can move away from those things and go towards organic, real food, you know, food that's going to perish, assembling your own meals, cooking as much as you can doing those things are going to be a significant improvement to your microbiome. And then thirdly, in terms of what you don't want to expose yourself to we tackle personal care products, we tackle food and drinks that you consume. The third thing is your environment, your ecosystem in your home and all that you don't want to sterilize these environments, right, there's certain aspects of the environment, maybe your toilet, you want to sterilize from time to time or something. But most surfaces do not need to be sterilized people over clean and over sterilize their ecosystem. And that allows to the proliferation of the more dysfunctional organisms, right? Most surfaces in my house are clean with a spray bottle of water and a couple of drops of essential oil, just to give some fragrance, right? If I bring home a chicken or raw chicken, you get raw chicken juice on the counter, I'm going to sterilize it because that could be salmonella there. Right. So certainly things like that. Sure. But for the most part, don't sterilize your home environment. Right. So that will reduce then your exposure to not only chemicals that will harm your microbiome, but also reduce your exposure to potential microbes that will overgrow in your own home that are that are pathogenic and cause more problems, right. This is why hospitals are one of the most dangerous places you can be is because they're over sterilized. And then there's all of these pathogenic organisms that do well in that environment. Right. So three things there about reducing exposure to things that harm your microbiome, personal care products, foods and drinks that you consume that are overly processed and packaged, and then your home don't have a sterilized home, right. So those that's reducing exposure to things that harm your life.
Unknown Speaker 45:00
microbiome. What about the second category, which is increasing exposure to things that are beneficial for your microbiome, probiotics and prebiotics aside a diversification of your diet, right, the more diverse your diet is, the more diverse your microbiome is going to be, the healthier you will be overall. Number two, being outside and being prescriptive about being outside, right. So being in natural environments, it is fine to sit on your porch, it's not quite the same as going for a hike in the natural environment or going to the beach, and sitting in the sand and so on, it's still better than being inside. So being outside as much as you can. Now the other thing to step up, the effect of being outside is to eat outside as much as you can, right? That is the most natural way in which we interact with the environment is eating food outside. So one of the things I encourage people is like, if you're going for a hike or something like that, you're going to be outside, you know, take a snack with you take out an apple or you know, whatever you might want to eat, take it with you and during your hike, touch and grab lots of stuff, right? Remember, humans are designed as curious creatures, we pick up things we look at things we touch texture of things, right. So as you're walking through a trail, touch your trees and pick up rocks and sticks and all that feel the leaves and feel how this leaf feels different from that leaf, right? All the things we were curious about when were kids gaining exposure to the environment. And then at some point, sit down in that natural environment and pull out your you know, sandwich or Apple or whatever it may be and eat it right and don't sterilize your hand with a hand sanitizer before doing that. That is the most natural way of interacting with nature and the environment. And you will absolutely diversify your microbiome, right. So exposure by getting out in the natural environment, and then improving the diversity of your diet, you can also improve the diversity of your home by improving getting a pet like a dog, especially an inside outside animal. There are studies that show that dogs in household reduce allergies, asthma and viral infections in kids, right and increase longevity as well. And another way of increasing exposure is to deliberately be affectionate with people. Right. I'm a hugger. I like to hug people, I like to be in environments where there's lots of people, you know, try to make it a point to be in person with people and hug them. So we actually know that that kind of interaction increases the diversity of individuals. microbiomes. Right. So one category of things of how to not harm your microbiome. Another category is simple things of how to enhance your microbiome between those two, if you start adding in all those behaviors, it'll cumulatively add on to a huge impact of your microbiome, then you add in therapeutic probiotics, and prebiotics and supplements and all that, and you'll be doing well. And the final thing is stress maintenance. Right? managing stress, as I mentioned earlier, stress becomes one of the biggest drivers of dysfunction, and managing stress, whether it's a just, you know, honestly taking a look at your environment, your relationships and things that actually create stress in your world. Do you need all of those things in your world, right? The scrolling through social media, does that relax you? Or does that stress you out, right? That's watching certain things and all that stresses you out? Or does it relax you you have to be honest with yourself about those things and start to reduce your exposure to things that stress you out, start trying to build practices that improve your mood. And then using things like the psycho biotics, that can really give you an edge in managing stress, but we have to manage stress, that's one of the most important things and when you manage stress, you'll automatically sleep better. That's another very critical component. But those kind of go hand in hand if you're stressed, you cannot sleep and if you're sleeping well it means you're probably not that stress.
Unknown Speaker 48:50
This has been amazing. I feel like what was what did you say with the bacteria that quorum signal like I vessel bacillus? Yeah, that does all the quorum sensing right? I feel like whatever is in me is in you like my narrative. The nerd in me season around you. And I have absolutely thrived listening to this conversation. I've been taking notes, because I think I'm gonna apply some of the things that you clarify to the protocols that I and the the verbiage and the message that I send out to my own patients and clients and followers because you really do a beautiful way of explaining things in a way that I think people can understand to very complex process in our body. And I love your curiosity and how you just boil it down to like, what's naturally happening. Let's get out to that I really, really loved this conversation. I so appreciate the time that you've spent. And yeah, I'm like, I want to have your your texts, texts questions all the time. It's so amazing. So thanks again for all that you've shared with us as practitioners and with everybody listening is it's just been really, really clarifying. Yeah, it's my pleasure. And thank you so much for having me because one of my big goals is
Unknown Speaker 50:00
To, you know, empower practitioners like yourself that are on the front lines dealing with the most complicated of cases, and with the right information that will really move the needle for your patients, right? Because I know it's equally frustrating for you when you don't see the progress in your patients, and you take all of that stuff on, because most of your practitioner practitioners, because you're supremely empathetic people, and that can be harmful to your own being, you know, picking on all of the things that come with, with seeing patients. And one of the things I realized that often gets forgotten in the practice of medicine is is the importance of the basics, right? We can do a lot of fancy supplementations, and tests and all that stuff in this, you know, 1000s of dollars with a test that you can put your patients through. But you know, what is their home microbiome looks like? Are they going outside enough? Right? are they managing stress? What is their diet look like? You know, just those basic things to think about, that really will move the needle. And if they're not doing those things, all the supplementation, all the testing in the world may still not help them, right, because those are the foundations of existing as a human. So for me, that's my goal. So I greatly appreciate any opportunity, I get to share this information because it does nothing for anyone sitting in my head. So I
Unknown Speaker 51:18
think you brought up a really great point that's really been on my heart lately is to simplify things. Because I can see back that people get stressed out with like a food sensitivity test where now all of a sudden, you got these random things you can't eat and how to keep track of that. So I'm trying to eliminate that even don't even allow that as an option in my practice anymore. But also the bag of supplements too, for this and that and this and that. And I really have been trying to focus in on how can we simplify this. And it really does come down to honing in first and foremost on digestion and detoxification and allowing those capabilities. And really, that can be as you shared, very simple. And getting back to the basics and really honing in on some very targeted not humongous amount of supplements, but integrating lifestyle with some very few amount of supplements that can really help proliferate that and improve those systems in our body. So thank you again, for really tapping into the simplification, because I think people need that. I mean, and it comes back to we are just human beings. And if we were meant to thrive without any of these sexy technology, things still meant to thrive without all the sexy, expensive things. There's a place for them, but I don't think they're absolutely essential. So yeah, thank you for kind of boiling it down to that. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Yes, I could pick your brain for hours. So we may have to get you back on the podcast.
Unknown Speaker 52:40
I feel like there's so many things we could dive in.
Unknown Speaker 52:44
Yeah, I would be happy to anytime just let me know my whole goal right now is sharing this information. So I appreciate the opportunity for that. Thank you so much. And I have all of our listeners got so much out of that I know I'm gonna I'm going to be going back and taking notes and notes and notes. Yeah, thank you so so much for letting us pick your pick your brains and just being here today. So appreciate you and wishing everyone all the best. So take care guys and
Unknown Speaker 53:09
thank you bye
