Too Many Gut Fixes Can Undo Your Healing. What Helps It Last | Dr. Sabine Hazan

Welcome back, everybody. Once again, I'm super excited about today's guest. We're going to talk about a lot of cool conversations, topics that I think you're going to find interesting. And so after a brief introduction, we'll kind of hop into today's conversation. What if the reason you're still sick after all the specialists, after all the normal labs results and all the things being told you isn't actually what's in your blood? your thyroid or your head. It's an organ no one else is actually looking at or talking about. Trillions of cells, as unique as your fingerprint, quietly shaping your mood, your memory, your immune system, and whether your body heals or stays stuck. Today's guest is going to talk about all those things and more. Dr. Hazan is a gastroenterologist and microbiome researcher, board-certified GI hepatologist and internal medicine. She founded and runs Progenobiome, which is a gene sequencing research lab in Ventura, California. along with Ventura Clinical Trials. She owns the Microbiome Research Foundation and was the first woman GI fellow at the University of Florida. So, you got— if you're the first GI fellow at the University of Florida, you know, you're, you know, tip of the spear, you're making things happen. And served as a clinical or sub-investigator in between 150 and 300 clinical trials over 25-plus years. So, we've got a wealth of knowledge today on the podcast, and welcome to our podcast.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So, I wanna— we were actually having an interesting conversation about research and, you know, people that are pioneers. Could you talk a little bit about— my community's not gonna be familiar with you. I actually heard you speak at this past year's A4M conference, which is like the biggest integrative thing in the world. And could you talk a little about your academic and your journey and got you where you're at today, where you're actually doing things that are kind of outside the box?

Well, I think my journey, as you said, you know, being the first woman GI at University of Florida, I kind of started with a challenge, right? Like, we don't take women in GI. And then I said, okay, I'm going to be the first one, right? And then, you know, kind of a journey of, we can't cure Crohn's disease. It's not curable. You just have to take these anti-inflammatories forever. And going into the clinical trial route to say, what do you mean there's no cure? Let's look at clinical trials. Let's get involved in clinical trials. Let's see the data before it goes to the pharmaceutical, to the pharmacies, right? And then doing all these. studies on biologics, right? Understanding how biologics work. Um, you know, remember GI were the first ones to start biologics, right? Using biologics for Crohn's disease. It wasn't until, you know, probably about 5, 10 years later that pharmaceutical companies started saying, hey, why don't we do biologics for rheumatoid arthritis, biologics for psoriasis? So I was sitting, I remember sitting at a clinical trial meeting on psoriasis. And seeing the direction of pharma that we're going to start using these biologics now for psoriasis, arthritis, et cetera. And then kind of saying, wow, we're heading into biologics world for everything. So do all disease begin in the gut somewhere? You know, does it start with Crohn's disease? Right. That was kind of the first question. And then when I started doing fecal transplant for C. diff, I started my journey doing clinical trials for C. diff for pharma. When the clinical trials didn't work and I was using all sorts of antibiotics to kill the bacteria, I used fecal transplant, the process of taking stools of a healthy donor into a non-healthy with C. diff, because my colleagues were doing that. They were kind of the rebels, right? I mean, Neil Stolman, Colleen Kelly, you know, so many. Brilliant gastroenterologist Tom Borody spearheaded that field and believing that there was something in poop. When poop became a clinical trial in a capsule, one could say I went rogue and I said, wait a minute, we're in the poop business. And now I could see what happened with biologics was happening with every disease. We're gonna put— so my vision was, oh my God, we're gonna put poop capsules for every disease. And we have no idea what the hell we're doing in that field. So I remember calling Neil Stolman and saying, what do you make of all these stool tests out there? Because I really think we need to look at these stool tests before and after doing fecal transplant to understand the microbiome. And he said, they're not validated. They're full of it. So I started testing a couple of companies and realized that my stool test that was collected the same day The same time, 2 different names, 2 different samples gave me different results, but yet it's the same stool sample that came from me. And that's when I realized what he was saying. Yes, they are full of it because it's not validated. I need a stool sample. You know, it's like testing. I always compare testing a hemoglobin. And basically you're going to a lab and your hemoglobin is 6. You need a blood transfusion. Yeah. If your hemoglobin is 6 with one lab, but it's 12 in one lab, which one are you going to follow, right? There's no validation. Or if the same lab is giving you 2 different results, well, that lab is not validated, right? So that's the importance, you know, of being a CAP and CLIA lab. And that's what we are. We're a CAP and CLIA lab. So I started ProgeniBiome with that interest of more than, hey, poop is the gold and this patient's poop is the gold and let me push this poop as a product, let me understand the microbiome. And I think that's where we're at. So that's, it was kind of like a discovery for me.

So, I want to talk about something that's interesting. When I was doing some of my research on questions to ask you, things like censorship came up, questionable things popped up. Could you talk a little bit about, like, just the whole poop thing, for example? You know, when was the first stool transplant in history done? Maybe 2000 BC, you know, using camel dung to treat, you know, um, cholera in China. You know, in the, um, I think it was a textbook in the 18— no, 1600s in German on fecal microbial transplant. You know, I think in America, the university, I might get these numbers off a little bit. This is, you're the experts here, but, uh, Georgia, I think the University of Georgia in the 1950s was doing stool transplants. So this is not a new thing, but it's controversial. Could you talk about, and maybe even bleed into some other controversial things that we've experienced recently. Like, how does that, as a leader, as someone who's at the front of the pack pushing forward and not looking back, right? How— talk about medical censorship.

So I think the first thing we should do is stop the censorship and be open-minded and be unbiased, right? That's very hard to do in science, right? Because you're kind of pushing an idea, you're pushing a product, Right? So how do you stay unbiased? How do you stay humble? Right? We saw with the pandemic, there was a censorship on treatment. And yet some people believed that treatment worked. I mean, I myself lost no one during the pandemic. And when people tell me, well, you know, people died from COVID you know, the first response that I have in my mind is, why didn't I lose anybody? How come I treated thousands of patients? I'm still standing and my patients are standing, right? And remember, I'm on the forefront analyzing stools of patients. You know, I was talking to a patient, to a doctor just yesterday who was basically keeps having viruses. And I told her, I said, look, just by your history, you're telling me you have a dysbiosis, right? And she goes, well, I feel pretty good otherwise. I go, but you're having continuous virus. viremia, you know, viruses, right? So, and I, I gave the example of people in my office, right? I go, how come my people in my office that are exposed to poop all day long and are basically, we were exposed to COVID patients all day long, have not gotten sick during the pandemic? What, what happened there? Right? What happened to me? So we have that data in the microbiome, right? So we know You know, we kind of, I kind of understand a little bit the microbiome, but I wanna stay humble to say, am I understanding? Is this what I'm seeing? So that's the hard part of, you know, when you talk about censorship, we should not have censorship. Everybody should come to the forefront and give an idea. What should not be happening is that one person should not be bullying another person because they feel that their idea is the one, right? So, and, and that's what I think happened. And that's why we lost medicine and science during the pandemic. It's why are those people that are having success in treatment not being heard? Why are there so many lies, you know, going on about COVID or about the vaccines, et cetera? So that moment that there is a censorship, that one group of people are just censoring another. Is a problem because it slows down research. Think about the things I learned during the pandemic, right? I mean, breakthrough. I mean, one thing like, you know, the bullet— I'll go back to the hydroxychloroquine. I know it's a, it's a bad topic because everybody's kind of gotten on the fence because they made it political, right? They got Trump to talk about hydroxychloroquine. That was a lobbyist move, you know, directing the narrative, right? Um, to criticize hydroxy, to in a way divide it so that it was so controversial that nobody wanted to even try it, right? But yet you had doctors at Cedars-Sinai that, you know, were not politically in favor of Trump, for example, and had it in their cabinets in their kitchen because there was like, well, some doctors have told me it works, right? So, you know, there is that word of mouth PR that happens in the medical community where we talk to each other and we're like, hey, this is working and this is working. And then what do we do in medicine? We try to copy each other to reproduce the data, right? So when you talk about fecal transplant, it started in 5th century China, but nobody was gonna swallow yellow poop soup to treat cholera. So they came up with a better idea to fix cholera, right? It revived itself in, you know, during, you know, I can think about World War II where actually, believe it or not, Hitler had a fascination with poop. And his doctor was giving him poop capsules from the villagers, right? For his Parkinson's. So did that make him crazy? Was that the right poop? Was that the right donor? You look at, again, World War II, the soldiers were in Morocco and they developed diarrhea. The treatment was camel poop, right? Nobody talked about it, but I can tell you nobody wanted to go to Morocco at that point because they're like, we don't want to get sick with diarrhea. So. You know, viruses and bacteria through centuries have been a problem for humanity, and we have tried our best to attenuate those, you know, and that's where the discovery of vaccines came on. And vaccines were an amazing discovery. You imagine you take a piece of the microbe, you inoculate, and then next thing you know, you see the microbe and you're immune, right? The problem is with technology, with poor quality, those vaccines have kind of taken a different direction. And now we're— and overdoing, right? And which is really what the microbiome teaches us. So we're back to fecal transplant in— so it started in 1957. Dr. Einzmann did 2 Fleet enemas for patients with C. diff and found that they improved. And then in the 1980s, Dr. Borody started doing a lot of research on fecal transplant and noticed that it was improving other things. And then they wanted the GI community as a whole said, hey, let's make it a pharmaceutical product. Pharma came into the game. We had OpenBiome, which was the company that was selling poop to the doctors. So it became kind of like the new kid on the block, like, hey, the microbiome. And then all of a sudden. The price of poop was on the stock market, you know, Finch, Ceres, Rebiotics, they were all competing for that. Who's got the best poop, right? And, you know, I stand at this junction. I stood when I was seeing all that. I stood at this, at this point in my life where I said, what are we seeing in poop? What is the microbiome? And I think COVID kind of opened up all that. And then there was censorship. And what I realized was the censorship was trying to, to remove the, the discussion of poop, to make it into a pharmaceutical product, to make it into a product. But, you know, that's why you have to kind of like look at it. You have to kind of say, why is there censorship? Censorship is usually because it's, we need to suffocate one person to bring out another product. And These days, everything is about a patent. You know, you have to patent in order to own the product. And then once you own the patent, you can develop a product and then you can raise money and then create a pharmaceutical company, et cetera. It's, it's sad, but unfortunately it's the, you know, necessary evil that you need to kind of like get these, these big trials that are costing $90 to $100 million. So you could imagine a treatment like a cheap drug is not going to go very well, even if it has a patent, because how much can you sell compared to a product that you can sell $17,000 a month for, right? So I think, you know, we're in a junction where science, you know, business have kind of joined together and medicine and science have become a business. And it's the unfortunate part because now the price of a stock matters more than the price of a life. And that's what we saw during the pandemic. So the censorship, all that was what was needed to kind of push that price of that stock to increase the economy and at the risk of people's lives. So that's how I see it. I try really hard as a scientist to be objective. I try really hard to be unbiased and I try really hard to see both sides. Of the narrative. Um, that's, that's it. So I don't know if I answered your question, but I certainly went on a very long—

Well, it's, it's kind of interesting because I have a patient I'm working with right now who's had C. diff 3 times. It's been recurrent. Um, her GI doctor is kind of like waffling on what to do. And so I'm like, you know, I got her stable. Her calprotectin became negative again and her C. diff. But I want to get her on Rebiota, which is a capsule. It's the microbiome capsule. And the price tag is like $50,000, $60,000. And so prior authorizations, and I'm kind of like, You know what? I don't know if this is going to get paid for by insurance for 3 days of pills. And it's just, but to your point, like, is, is $50,000 for poop? Is that, is that a reasonable price?

Um, yeah. Is that a reasonable price? And is it going to work? I mean, do you have a, I mean, if you're spending $50,000, there better be a guarantee with your money back or your money back. You know what I mean? But the fact is, if you look at the data, the data is not that great, you know, for even for C. diff. I mean, I was getting better results with using poop of the spouse than what I'm getting with these pharma products, right? So is there a compatibility component? I really believe, and I've said that, and I've said that to my colleagues from day one, I really believe fecal transplant route needs to be more like the blood transfusion, right?

Yeah.

We don't have a blood capsule, right? That's sponsored by pharma or that's in a patent. There's a compatibility problem. There's a compatibility issue. I'm not going to give— yes, we discovered— so remember in the 1800s, they discovered hemoglobin, right? You discover hemoglobin, you find, and then it took like 10, 20 years, 100 years to figure out hemoglobin M6 needs blood. And not every blood is compatible. Some people get, you know, are getting A positive, A negative. You got to look at the type of blood. And then we discovered, you know, hey, wait a minute, viruses are in blood. Hepatitis C, hepatitis B, HIV. Wait a minute, we got to screen for that before giving the blood. So, you know, blood banks was never a pharma product. Fecal banks cannot be a pharma product either, in my opinion, in my humble opinion, because there is a major compatibility issue that I'm seeing. And that my colleagues are seeing. Why do I say that? When you look at the cases of Colleen Kelly using poop to improve alopecia areata in 2 patients, and the patients grew hair, but then somebody does a big clinical trial with a university and the alopecia doesn't improve with the poop. Did they use the wrong poop? Did Dr. Kelly just stumble on the right poop to give her patients? You know, and therefore, you know, they grew hair. Was there a component of her doing the procedure or something she did that nobody else is doing that helped grow hair in those patients? So I think this is why we're so at the beginning of this. And I think, you know, companies rush into doing, hey, pill poop for Alzheimer's, pill poop for Parkinson's, but Is it the right pill poop? Shouldn't we study the genomics and the signature microbiome of Parkinson's first or Alzheimer's first and be more precise so we don't just give poop that could change the path, the direction of a patient? Imagine the patient that's anxious or has IBS. It's not a deadly condition, but now you're giving them a poop that has a bacteria that brings them to colon cancer, right? So now you're swapping that anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome for colon cancer, right? I think we're far from understanding that. That's why I went into this field. You know, I had close family members that I wanted to do fecal transplant on. And my idea was like, what if I'm giving microbes that can cause cancer on that patient? I don't want to play God. I need to understand it better. And so, you know, what I undertook when I started Progena Biome, and I didn't realize at the beginning, I was like, oh, it's not a big deal. You know, I'm going to start a genetic sequencing lab. I'm going to write 61 protocols on the microbiome and disease. I've certainly done that with pharma. Easy, right? No, not so easy because I didn't, I didn't realize that science was captured, that science, if you're not in the group, of the stockbrokers or the, you know, the people that are making the decisions on the price of the stock, you're going to be censored. That if you're, you know, also trying to bring out something that's new, you're going to be censored. You know, if you're bringing up something that's controversial, you're going to be censored. You know, um, I'm the girl that brought vaccines to market with pharma. You know, I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I brought vaccines to market. I vaccinated my kids, right? So the fact that I saw the messenger RNA killed the Bifidobacteria and I spoke about that, that was not something I wanted to do. It's something that killed my clinical trial research with pharma, but it was something that I had to do because I saw something. And, you know, this is what we need to see. We, we need to be objective and unbiased and, and Reproduce the data. You know, I've said the whole pandemic, prove me wrong. I'm the first person that if you show me data that is reproduced and you prove me wrong, I'm the first person that's going to say, whoops, I was wrong. I'm a scientist. You know, we have to be wrong and we are wrong sometimes. You know, most of the times we find out, you know, like think about digoxin was good for the heart, then it wasn't good for the heart. You know, H. pylori, you know, kill the bug and then no, save the bug because otherwise you have reflux and then. No, kill the bug because it prevents, you know, gastric cancer. So every scientist has an idea that becomes a narrative and that becomes a stock price. But we have to come back to being humble again and say, what if I'm wrong? You know, the whole pandemic, I, I was that girl that said, what if I'm wrong? What if I'm wrong about hydroxychloroquine? And in fact, I was wrong about hydroxychloroquine. It was great for the people that were like, debilitated, you know, were about to die. I needed to kill the virus quickly, but it was not great for the person that is young and has a lot of Bifidobacteria because it also kills your microbiome. And it's a pain to restore. So is that why people were having long COVID? Because they killed their microbiome with hydroxychloroquine? Is that, you know, so the same thing as I showed that the vaccine killed the Bifidobacteria. Hydroxychloroquine did the same thing. So we have to be unbiased, ethical, humble. You know, I made a, I created a patent on hydroxy Z-Pak, vitamin C, D, and zinc. And I spent a lot of money on patent attorneys and it's basically just in a wall and I've never sold it and never did anything with it because I wanted to see the research. And when I saw that it killed the microbiome, I'm like, nope, I'm out. Even if it's, I spent hundreds of thousands on a patent. So I think that's how we have to be. If we, we have to keep being humble and we have to keep doing the research. You know, I wrote a book, Let's Talk SHT, not to be funny, but because I said, hey, I could be full of it or I could know something, but let's talk about it, right? At the end of the day, that's what we need to do. We need to talk about it.

And just to connect the dots for the audience here, there's clear literature now that you're Bifidobacteria count, which is higher in kids, it gets lower as you get older. There's a direct correlation with systemic inflammation in general, but particularly with COVID with acute COVID and long COVID. So, things that actually diminish Bifidobacterium in your GI tract probably are not the best idea. And as to your point, hydroxychloroquine in the vaccine. So, just taking that into account, you know, vitamin D status, how does vitamin D status affect these things? There's a whole host of different things. But one One thing you said that really kind of, kind of, I want to go down this pathway is the gut association with other illnesses. So you kind of alluded to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, the gut associated with autoimmunity in general, you know, obviously the connection with COVID long COVID, autism, which is, you know, coming to play depending on what state you're in, maybe 1 in 30 kids have autism. Could you like start with the association with your gut? And your brain, whether it's inflammation, white matter inflammation, or degeneration, what is that associated with? What diseases is it associated with? And then, so what?

Yeah. So we were the lab, remember, we were the lab that found COVID in the stools. We were the lab that discovered that people with, that were exposed to COVID, never got COVID, had a lot of Bifidobacteria compared to people that had zero Bifidobacteria and had severe diseases. We were the lab that also, and you've attended my lecture at A4M, where I show Um, you know, loss of Bifidobacteria in autism, Alzheimer's, bipolar disorder, depression, um, anxiety, um, Crohn's disease, long COVID vaccine injured. We published actually that vaccine injured and long COVID is loss of Bifidobacteria. So Bifidobacteria, as you said, is, appears in the young, disappears in the old. And there's data now that the young population, um, is not born with as much Bifidobacteria as they used to be born. We have the database. in my lab of kids that were born before COVID And let me tell you, they had much higher Bifidobacteria than the kids born during COVID and after COVID, and certainly the kids that were vaccinated for the messenger RNA. So, you know, when you look at that and you look at Bifidobacteria, and when you look at Bifidobacteria with autism, we showed that kids with autism have low Bifidobacteria compared to their siblings. And then compared to the healthy kids out there. So when you restore the Bifidobacteria in those kids, and we showed that in a, in a paper, in an abstract where we published on 2 twins, 2 identical twins where they had the same exact microbes at baseline. We modulated the gut, decreased those microbes, and then increased the Bifidobacteria. They resumed speech, right? Wow. Is there a connection in the gut? I tend to believe it starts with the microbes. When you lose a microbe that's supposed to break, and again, this is my thought process. That's how the direction, this is where my train's taking me. That doesn't mean I'm right. It's scientific hypothesis. Prove me wrong. But my train of thought is basically we lose, we start with a lot of Bifidobacteria. That microbe helps us break down food. To get the sugar into the cell, right? And, you know, other microbes are important in breaking down foods to get, you know, calcium, copper, selenium. So that's how I think about it. It may be wrong, but that's how I'm thinking about it. So if you think about a kid that's born with zero Bifidobacteria, how is he going to break down the sugar? Is that why the type 1 diabetic kids have zero Bifidobacteria? Are they not breaking down the foods to get the sugar into the cell and therefore require insulin, you know, because they have a lot of sugar in the blood, right? So these are the, that's my thought process on that. Yes, there is. I'm seeing it, you know, when I see a kid with 100 seizures, okay. And I've witnessed it in my lab. Okay. And my staff has witnessed it in my lab. Where we have a kid with 100 seizures, we mod— they have zero bifidobacteria. We modulate their microbiome, we improve their bifidobacteria, and then all of a sudden the seizures stop. I mean, I have a doctor who refers to me who will remain nameless. He's a pediatrician in town in Beverly Hills. And he sent me this patient who was the patient who was the daughter of a prominent neurosurgeon. And the neurosurgeon, when I said to him, this is what I want to do with your kid. He said to me, you want to use my kid as a guinea pig? And I said, the kid is comatose, bedridden on rectal diazepam and rectal Depakote. What else are you going to do on this kid? I mean, you know, we can always, this is nutrition. This is like modulating the gut microbes. It's like you're giving him foods, et cetera, and removing the things that have, that kill the bifidobacteria. So we modulated. And right away they saw a decrease in seizures. And the seizures went from 100 to 50 to 0 during the day. And then at night, 150, 0. And I haven't seen the kid since 2024. He no longer, the kid doesn't have any more seizures. And I have a testimonial of the mom that did that just in case the FDA decides to show up in my office. But this is research, right? These are, these are the discoveries that happen. On the frontline of research. And here's the thing, everybody says to me, well, how do you increase Bifidobacteria? It's not a one-pill solution. It's not a one thing. It's really the art of medicine. It's like, I'm taking, you know, my staff laughs because they go, how did you come up with this product to give this product? I go, I don't know. I just kind of figured it out. You know, it's a, it's really a gut feeling. Where, look, when I started giving vitamin C, D, and zinc to patients, I was giving it for 3 months. And then one of my patients says, guess what? My lactose intolerance disappeared. That was the discovery that zinc, that's part of the vitamin C and D compound, is increasing the Firmicutes, the, the phylum that helps break down the calcium to get into the cells. So. You know, these are the discoveries we make. You know, when I had a long COVID during the pandemic, I had some, some bovine immunoglobulins that I was using for Crohn's patients because I said, well, maybe long COVID is like Crohn's disease, right? And Crohn's disease, I had seen bovine helped in some of my patients to restore the gut in some of them, right? It's not a one pill for everybody. But I had a couple success with, with Crohn's and bovine. So I said, why don't I give it to this patient with long COVID? He improved right away. And I said to myself, let me see what more patients. So we started testing 20 patients on bovine before and after. We didn't change anything else in their diet. We kept them on the same diet, same meds and everything. And we discovered it increased Bifidobacteria, decreased Bacteroidetes, decreased Proteobacteria, increased Baciata. When we saw that formula, I, my, my head started spinning and I said, well, maybe that's what I want to give to people that have that formula of microbiome, right? So these are the discoveries on the front line. When I drank, when I killed my bifidobacteria and I drank kefir and I noticed my bifidobacteria didn't go up, even though my kefir said bifidobacteria on the back of it, I said, why, why isn't my bifidobacteria? Let me test the kefir. Maybe they're lying on the label. And sure enough, I tested 23 probiotic products and only 3 of them had Bifidobacteria, yet all 23 of them said Bifidobacteria. Now, I got a research award at the American College of Gastro for this research, and it got a lot of attention and videos usually go viral when I say those things. But you would think the FDA would say, hey, should we monitor these yogurts to see who has Bifidobacteria and who hasn't? And the Yeah. And so it's like the public unfortunately is lost and because they trust the media, they trust the PR, they trust the influencers, and nobody's doing the research. And so we're in this big mess in a way because when we're, we're censoring the research that's being done, we're not reproducing it when we should be reproducing it. And on top of that, we're not advancing. And in order to fix all these kids who have autism, because I can guarantee you, so to get back to your question of, you know, how do you know there's a gut-brain connection? Because when I fix the gut, the brain gets better. When I, my first case ever that I published was a case of Alzheimer's where the patient ended up remembering his daughter's date of birth. after fecal transplant. And what happened was, um, that was a breakthrough for me to say, what's happening when I'm changing the microbiome? Did I alter? And back then I didn't really have, you know, a sequencing lab or anything, but that was the question that I had. What am I changing in the microbiome that helps that patient with Alzheimer's? Right. But in order to help grow those microbes that are missing in Alzheimer's, because I told you, well, Bifidobacteria is one of them, right? But there's other microbes that are lost in Alzheimer's, and there's other microbes that are increased in Alzheimer's. So it's really a formula of bad microbes over, you know, taking the gut and going and secreting toxins that are going to the brain, and then loss of microbes that are not suppressing those bad microbes, right? So in a perfect world, and to treat these folks, you really need to know what microbe is the culprit. You gotta get rid of that microbe. You know, think about what we do with C. diff. We give vancomycin first to kill off the gut, kill off as much Clostridium difficile as possible, and then regrow the gut, right? We give a new microbe. It's like gardening. You remove the weeds and then you plant new seeds, right? So I think, you know, that's, that's the way we should start looking at medicine to begin with. And yes, there is a brain-gut axis. I'm seeing it when I restore the speech of twins with autism. But what I'm also seeing is that other twins with autism, I'm, I'm able to reach the Bifidobacteria level, but they're not necessarily improving the speech. And my question then becomes, in those kids, is there a colonic mucosal Damage. Is there, and then if there is no colonic mucosal damage, they don't have inflammation, ulcerations, you know, colitis picture, which a lot of these kids, by the way, with autism have. They have a microscopic colitis or a colitis. And a lot of them have a fecal calprotectin that's elevated, which kind of tells you they've got Crohn's on top of autism. So is autism the extraintestinal manifestations of Crohn's? You know, like all these other extraintestinal manifestations of Crohn's. So when you see that it's not Crohn's and it's not a microbiome, and you've tried to fix the microbiome and these kids are not restoring the speech, then you have to kind of say, is this a genetic? How do I fix the genetic? Is this a neurological? How do I fix the neurological? So that's why I work with the pioneers of all these fields. You know, I work with Neil Reardon, you know, from Panama with stem cells. I work with Kevin Murphy, RTMS. I work with Dr. Jordan, Sheldon Jordan in Beverly Hills to look at the brain, right? Because it's not, it's not a one organ problem in a lot of these kids. And I will tell you, the kids that come to me early and have not been touched by any other doctor. Are the ones that are doing so much better right away. Like I have a kid right now who I started 3 weeks ago. She's already speaking and saying words and, and making sentences. The family is besides themselves, right? But this kid was never touched by anyone. You know, she never did, you know, all the stuff that every parent does, you know, because they hear the social media and they're hearing, try this probiotic, try You know, uh, Leukovorin, try, and, and by the way, Leukovorin, I have no problem with that. Try Leukovorin first. You know, that's the first line of treatment that I would try on your kids. Safe, you know, effective in some kids, go for it. But it's when you start nuking the gut, like, well, try this antibiotic and try this antifungal and try, you know, these procedures. And what happens is you mess it up so much that you're giving The kid started off with loss of Bifidobacteria, most likely, but now you've nucleated the gut and the gut is full of ulcers and good luck fixing the ulcers in order to implant the microbes. And I think that's something that nobody, you know, even gastroenterologists are not really privy to this yet, that there's a 2-part component to fecal transplant. There's actually 3 parts. There's the compatibility component. There's the colonic mucosal component, and then there's everything else.

So, going back to something you mentioned a little earlier, are you developing, or is there developed, or is there a database that's been developed of fingerprints, of like these bacterial fingerprints for this is what, you know, Crohn's look like, this is what autism looks like, this is what Alzheimer's dementia? Are there those databases? And if so, Are they being used clinically at all, or is it more like at your research level this kind of stuff is being used?

So it's a research level. We have a database, we have databases. They're not anything that anybody can hack cuz we have like, you know, cuz we live in a, in a crazy world right now. And unfortunately the technology is, uh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of bombs in my, in my databases to kind of like trap the hackers. You know, we live in a world where unfortunately a discovery can be good for humanity, but can also harm humanity. Imagine knowing the fingerprint of Alzheimer's and somebody decides to destroy humanity and puts it in your yogurt, right? So this is, you know, I feel very responsible in a way for this. I feel that this needs to be protected. You know, we've been, I've been offered a lot of money to sell Progena Biome and I didn't because I feel that it would, in the wrong hands, it's just going to be on a shelf somewhere and nobody's going to develop it. You know, to me, this technology needs to be understood. Um, this is something that needs, we need research in this and we need research that, that's done properly and that's righteous and that's unbiased. And so, yes, we are developing the database. But I'm also trying to use those, more importantly, I'm trying to use the database to figure out the formula to fix rather than the formula that causes the problem, right? I'd rather figure out the formula that fixes than the formula that causes damages, if that makes sense.

Is one of your goals eventually, because I'm just thinking what you're saying here, to take a person's stool sample. To look at it compared to their database and then put some individualized, like, hey, for your gut, here's your, you know, calprotectin, here's your lysozyme testing, here's your, okay, we've, we've done some genetic stuff on you. Like, this is your individual microbiome, realizing there's more complexity to it than just putting poop in your mouth. Right. So are you, is that like a plan or in the works or that one that I'd be interested

in? So my plan is actually understanding what all these nutraceuticals and products are doing to the microbiome. I, I'll be honest, the reason that I speak at all these A4 and meetings and everything is to kind of catch the diamond in the rough. You know, the physician that basically is innovating, is seeing some success with some protocol and understanding what that product is doing to the microbiome, right? So for example, a lot of times people will come to me and say, you know, I'm doing this and it's improving kids with autism. So I will say, please give me the stools before and after because I want to see what that's doing. I'm more interested in finding different modalities of healing. You know, think about my, my background, right? I'm the girl that brought clinical trials to market. I'm not the girl that believes Crohn's disease is one biologic. Otherwise, I would have stopped that one biologic clinical trial, right? I'm the girl that does clinical trials to give multiple options, right? Because I really believe that there's more than one way to heal autism. And we need to understand all these ways, right? So I'm the girl that's doing the research on frequency, sound frequency and healing. I'm the girl that's doing the research on light frequency. What is light doing to the microbiome, right? Red light, blue light, you know, different spectrums of light. What is that doing to the microbes? Is it killing some? Is it improving some? So that's my interest because here's the problem. You cannot treat in a vacuum. Even if I give you the formula for Parkinson's, okay? And I say, this is the formula to fix Parkinson's. Now, your patient is going flying on a private jet. He's getting radiated every time he flies. Are you killing that new microbe I gave him? Right? Because he's flying up and down. So should I give him something before flying on his private jet so he can Yeah. So I have to optimize his gut so it doesn't kill what I just gave him. So also, so it's very important. It's more important than the formula. It's more important to understand what all these things are doing to the microbiome. Think about why I did the research on the messenger RNA during COVID the vaccine, because I wanted to know, is it improving my bifidobacteria or worsening my bifidobacteria? Because I want my bifidobacteria in my gut. To support me, right? And is it improve— damaging it short-term, but then it picks up later? Maybe in some people, in some people they're flatlines, right? Same thing with COVID What is COVID doing to my microbiome? So we need to understand everything. We have a lot of work to do, by the way, because it's not just what are vaccines doing on the microbiome? What are antibiotics? I was shocked and I'm not going to say the data because it could have been an N of 1, but I had a potential donor for one of my kids with autism, uh, who was a sibling. And the mom was freaking out that the kid was no longer a donor because he had an ear infection and she gave him some antibiotics. And she freaked out. She's like, oh my God, I've killed— because the kid had a lot of good Bifidobacteria. Lo and behold, the kid's Bifidobacteria went by like 20 points on that antibiotic, right? Is that a, you know, is that a weird N of 1? Is that an incidental finding? Or is that antibiotic, that specific antibiotic, actually improving Bifidobacteria? Right? Because it's microbes, again, microbes fighting with microbes, or it allowed maybe to get rid of the bacteria that was in the ear infection and allowed the Bifidobacteria to grow. Who knows? So there's, So much to learn. And we need to start with understanding the microbiome before and after every one of these products, you know, biologics, what are biologics doing to the bifidobacteria? Um, you know, what is, what did Paxlovid do to the bifidobacteria? What did ivermectin do to the bifidobacteria? Not only short-term, but long-term. And so that becomes an extra expense for pharmaceutical companies. Nobody wants to do that because these tests are extremely expensive. But unfortunately, it needs to be done. And then you gotta know, well, what light, what environment? So again, I can give you a formula to fix your Parkinson's, but if you're going back to a house that has mildew or mold, or if you're going into a field full of radiation, or if you're flying up and down every day, you're not gonna improve your microbiome. So there is more. It is more important. So to answer your question, it's not of my lifetime. I'm trying to do my best to do the research properly. I created the foundation, which I have no say in the foundation. The board decides who we take, who we don't take, which study, which patient, you know, et cetera. And, you know, all the funding of all the products we created that are safe, we put them in the foundation to raise the money for the foundation. Not because I need to sell, you know, nutraceuticals, but because the foundation needs to continue. And this foundation needs to continue after I'm dead, you know, because it needs to be protected and it needs to be righteous and it needs to continue the way that I started, which is if something is good, which is how I started with clinical trials. If a product was good, it goes to market. But if another product comes out that's better than that product, then guess what? The other product needs to go and the new product comes on. But when the new product is trying to come out and is being censored, we have a problem. And so in a perfect world, yes, there would be formulas. There would be data written of all my findings, but we need to fix that system because that system, but you know, it's being fixed little by little because Those who created the damages are becoming my patients. So, you know, because we ultimately all become patients, you know, and we have to be righteous to understand the microbiome. And we have to, and I tell them, I say, well, you were sure about this and you put your money on this, but you were wrong. Guess what? Time to look at another way now. Right? And I think for the most part, most humans You know, have in them that humility. They just need to kind of come out with it and less ego, more humility.

So. Hey, Dr. Azam, lots of interesting stuff. I feel like I've gotten more questions I want to ask you, but I want to respect your time. It's coming to the top of the hour now. If people want to learn more about you, what you're doing, some of the things you alluded to, like where can they find out more about you, the testing, you know, some of the things you're doing, books coming out, and what are you doing next?

So progenabiome.com is essentially what we're doing. Uh, there's every publication that we published, even the ones that were censored and retracted, we republished and they're still there. Um, podcast, your podcast is going to be on the, on the website. So everything is on the website. If you want to contact us, you have questions, you want to be part of a clinical trial. So those that can, you know, want to test their stools, they have to understand it's a research protocol. We don't give reports. You know, I say this to everybody because I don't want to be the person that gives you a report and then you take my report and you think, oh my God, I've got Bacteroides vulgatus. I need to kill this Bacteroides vulgatus when maybe Bacteroides vulgatus is a good bug for you, right? So there's so much of it is research. And so people that want to take on that and just, you know, spend the money to test their stools, they're welcome to do that, but just, they have to understand this is research and this is what I'm seeing. Um, people that can't afford stool testing or anything like that can join our clinical trial, our proto— our, uh, sorry, database. We, we, my, my staff Ginger is really good at, you know, collecting the names with the conditions. So whenever we have a company that says to me, hey, uh, like we did a study on manuka honey. We needed volunteers. So we went into the database and said, hey, we're doing a study on manuka honey. Anyone wants to partake, you'll get your stools tested before and after manuka honey. You know, lactoferrin, we did a study on lactoferrin. People, we had about 25 patients that we tested for free. So that's how we do it because we want to include everybody. You know, same with autism, you know, those that have the means to support the research, we need to raise $3 million right now for the research because So everything I do, whether it's my clinic visit, whether it's my, you know, my book that I'm selling, my vitamins, it all goes into the research. Um, we need to hire, we need to have 4 sites in New York, Florida, Texas, and California. We need monitors in those sites. We need coordinators in those sites. We need pediatric GI, pediatric neurologists, and regulatory personnel. So, you know, the protocol is expensive. Um, to run and we need to do 30 kids essentially. So we need to raise money. So anybody that wants to support the microbiome research foundation.org, please do because every dollar goes towards those kids. Um, you know, sometimes kids come in and we start working with them and we manipulate their work, their, their guts, and they can't afford, you know, the supplements or they can't afford the treatments, et cetera. And the, the coordinators, et cetera. So we basically use the funds for the foundation, from the foundation to continue. You know, everybody, that's, that's basically my mission. So microbiome research foundation.org also has videos in there of all the prominent physicians and scientists that have led this field. You know, Scott Jackson at National Institute of Standards talks about standardization of stool tests. Uh, Neil Stolman, the Microbiome ABCs, you know, he's a big lecturer on the foundation. Uh, Colleen Kelly gave a lecture, Paul Fuerstadt from Yale. So there's a lot of doctors that have given lectures and that are part of the, the Biome Squad, I like to call it. Um, so the Biome Squad is really a league of doctors that want to try to understand the microbiome. There's a lot of doctors out there that are doing amazing things. Right? I mean, think about the stem cells and you see them at A4M, right? The peptides, the, that whole world. It's nice to kind of bring them together in the microbiome space to see what are they doing? How are they improving the disease with this peptide or this peptide? How is cancer being modulated or changed, you know, with certain drugs, combination drugs? So I think it's important to all come together. I think the microbiome, you know, is really the place where everybody comes together. I invite every doctor, every scientist to be part of my Biome Squad. I invite everyone to have that discussion. I invite everyone to challenge me, please, progenobiome.com. Just, you know, I answer all my emails, even though I get like 1,000 a day. We try, you know, I try. Um, I'm also on X. So people can reach out through me on X, although I have to say X is a little bit censored these days as well. Um, I'm on Instagram, so, you know, there's a lot of ways to reach out to me. Um, we want this research and we want the word out on this research. You know, autism affects Republicans and Democrats. It affects Jews, Christians, Catholics, uh, Muslims. It affects Black, white, poor, rich. We need to really look at our kids. You know, 1 in 12 boys in California have autism. It's not a small number. It needs to be looked at. And we need to be humble enough to say, what are we doing? Are we overdoing it? You know, I can tell you overdoing is the number one way that people mess up their microbiome. You know, they're doing this, then they're jumping to this. They're not getting better. Anything, if anything I've learned, and that's probably a pearl. on your podcast, if anything I've learned is once you start going in the right direction of improving your gut, you got to continue it. And then it's going to take you 9 months to a year and a half to continue that improvement. When we look at kids with autism, yes, we see some improvement with the speech within, like that kid I told you, 3 weeks. But we're not going to see engraftment for like a year and a half, 9 months to a year and a half. So I'm going to be with that kid following her. On a week to week till she gets better because of the fact that it took time for these microbes to engraft. And I'm gonna retest her stools on week 1, month 1, month 2, month 3, month 4, till 9 months to see, am I still in the right direction? Because unfortunately, that kid doesn't live in a bubble. She goes to school, gets infected with viruses. Now she took a hit with the virus again, right? She goes, she eats a hamburger that has E. coli, right? Now she gets hit again on her microbiome. So we got to follow that to make sure that it's steady consistency of increasing Bifidobacteria and that it doesn't jump back to zero. And then we got to follow the engraftment. So is that why your probiotics world is not working? Nobody's following the engraftment, right? So There's a lot to know. There's a lot to learn. So I encourage everybody to support us and to talk about it and to challenge me and challenge us, you know, and challenge all those that are rebels. The definition of a scientist is to be a rebel, is to not accept what everybody is saying.

Well, it's supposed to be the definition of a scientist, but I'm glad we got people like you out there pushing the borders that, you know, again, you know, we were, before we recorded, we talked about, you know, these people that You know, the people that are doing cutting-edge things, they have to be willing to push against the grain, which means sometimes they say things that people don't like. Usually they say things people don't like, and we need to— that's how inquiry works, and that's how science is advanced. And I really thank you for your time today. We'll make sure we put all the links, information in the show notes below, and actually where this pops up on social media as well. So thank you so much for your time today.

My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you so much.