139: How to Heal your Gut From Mold Toxicity w/ Kiran Krishnan

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Hey, everyone, what's going on?

I'm excited for today's show. I feel like I say that all the time. Like, oh, I'm excited for today. So I don't know if that's like losing its luster, but I actually am. Not that I wasn't before. Anyways, today's gonna be a good show. So I'm talking to Kieran Christian. He is the co founder of Microbiome Labs. I know on previous episodes we've talked about how mold exposure impacts the gut and basically that that's a massive problem. Right. We haven't dove a lot into how do you fix that, how do you address that? Obviously, step one, stop being exposed. That's what we talk about a lot. How to fix it, how to find it, how to clean it up, remediate all that stuff. But once the damage is done in your gut, damage is kind of done. You got to fix that too.

Right?

It doesn't just necessarily fix itself. Sometimes it needs help to do that. And so Karen's an awesome resource. Like I said, he's a co founder of Microbiome Labs, which a whole lot of supplementation that's specific to the gut. There's bacterial things, there's probiotics, there's all kinds of stuff that they have. And I think that he can help us kind of talk through this stuff. So I'm going to let him kind of give a little more background than I did on himself and we'll get into it.

Yeah. Hey, Brian, good to be here with you. So, very, very relevant topic today. So I'm really excited to be able to talk about it. So to give the audience a little bit of a background, my background is as a research microbiologist. And something like 17 years ago, I parlayed my focus towards studying the microbiome and therapeutics that can impact the microbiome. Because it was clearly the forefront of science and medicine. We were finally discovering the other 90% of ourselves. Some people may have heard that before because really 10% or less of all your functionality comes out of our own genetics in our chromosomes, and the rest is out of the microbes in the system. And so it becomes very clear that if your microbes and the ecosystem that they, that they've created and inhabit, if those are off, then it throws off lots and lots of things, including your, in your ability to be, to a certain degree, resilient towards exposure of toxins like mold and everything else. Right. So that becomes a really relevant topic to what you're talking about. Because, you know, once someone remediates or in the process of remediation, if they're trying to remove the source of the mold, a, they've already been exposed and, and B, they'll probably continue to have some degree of exposure and C, in life, you know, mold is around us. Right. It's, it's just a fact of being human and living on this earth, which means that we can't be hypersensitive to mold. We have to be resilient to some degree because we're going to encounter it at some point again in our lives. So the gut plays an important role in all of that. So I'm happy to be able to talk about that today.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's just kind of get into it. So let's, let's just start at the top. I've done, we've done a little of this, but let's just say how big picture, how is mold impacting the gut? Let's just kind of talk there. What are some of the key things that happen in the gut? And then from that we can start talking through how do you address some of these things and possibly even build out some protocols or something in a.

Way to do that? Yeah.

Mold in a couple of different forms can impact the gut in a significant way. Number one, if the mold itself is colonizing in the gut, if you're thinking about mold that you can gain exposure to or that's already there and because of a dysfunction in the system gets to overgrow. So we consider things like Candida and so on. If the mold is in the gut and colonizing, then basically it's taking real estate from beneficial bacteria who conduct lots of important functions like talking to the immune system and training the immune system, or producing short chain fatty acids, which are important for your metabolism and immunological response and maintaining the lining of the gut. And so when it competes with these organisms, it's going to create a disarray in your microbiome. And As I mentioned, 90% of all your metabolic and other functions are coded for by the microbiome. So you start to lose real estate for beneficial bacteria. You start to lose their functionality, which means that your body becomes dysfunctional, right? And it may be something as simple as no longer being able to digest certain things because you count on a particular group of bacteria to produce the enzyme to be able to break that down. Now that bacteria is kind of overrun by the mold. You can't produce the enzyme, thereby you no longer tolerate that food, right? And then it goes down further than that. So there's lots of microbes, beneficial microbes, that speak to the immune system. That's called immune crosstalk. The reason they speak to the immune system is they train the immune system to understand what to attack and what not to attack. If the immune system doesn't have that communication, what the default mode of the immune system is is just to attack everything it sees, right? Which means even things that it shouldn't, like food particles that aren't harmful, or microbes that aren't harmful, or viruses that are latent that aren't harmful. So it starts attacking everything. So that means your body becomes hypersensitive, right? Everything you eat, everything you encounter gets a massive inflammatory response. Then you have allergies and asthma and respiratory disorders and eczema. All of these things come out of that loss of immune crosstalk and then finally just the inability to digest and assimilate nutrients, right? Because we count on these microbes to be able to break down food for us, assimilate the nutrients for us, and then also bio convert nutrients that are found in the food to other essential nutrients, right? So at least half of the nutrients we require to function as a human cannot come out of food directly. They have to be converted from nutrients that are found in the food into something that we need, right? I'll give you one example of that. Urolithins. Urolithin A is a very important compound that stokes the repair and regeneration of our mitochondria. Our mitochondria are the engines of our cells. As those mitochondria start to die and disintegrate over time, as we age, it causes the tissue to die, which then the organ that the tissue makes up starts to die. That's the best definition for aging, is mitochondrial dysfunction. This compound, urolithin, prevents that or slows that down. We can't get that directly out of food. We count on certain microbes converting components of food into that. If we can't utilize the nutrition properly, we become malnourished. And if we become malnourished, that leads to sickness, right? So having mold present in the gut gives you a Triple whammy, right? So to review one, it's taken up space from beneficial bacteria, which means that you're missing some of the byproducts of those beneficial bacteria, like enzymes to digest food, bioconversion of nutrients into other essential nutrients. You're also starting to miss the crosstalk with the immune system, which means your immune system is now going haywire and attacking everything. So now you have hypersensitivities. And then, and then finally, I would say that if it's not the colonizing type of mold issue, where it's a mold in your household, on the walls and so on, and you're breathing in the mold toxin instead, right? And the primary exposure is to the toxin. The, the mold toxin can create a massive amount of inflammatory response in the gut because your, your body sees that as foreign. It's a toxin, it can harm the host. So it's going to recruit lots of immune cells to that area. And your largest exposure is going to be through your gut, right? Because when you breed stuff in or things enter through your eyes or your ears or your nose, all of that actually ends up draining into your throat and then you swallow it, right? So even when you breathe stuff in, it gets trapped in the mucus in your lungs and your upper respiratory tract. Then you have this cool thing called the mucociliary elevator, which is a bunch of little hair, like things that move the mucus up. And then you, whether you realize it or not, you're constantly swallowing that, right? So a lot of the mold that you end up breathing into your system ends up in your gut. And if it's in the gut and your gut's not healthy, because we'll talk about how a healthy gut helps you neutralize and get rid of a lot of that. So it doesn't impact you if your gut's not healthy, your, your immune system is just going to bombard that with lots of inflammation. So, you know, you end up with leaky gut and damage to the lining of the gut. And then leaky gut becomes the biggest source of chronic low grade inflammation. Now you have chronic low grade inflammation through the body, and that becomes the foundation of most chronic illnesses. That exposure to mold or mycotoxins themselves will set up your system so that you are now much more susceptible to other chronic conditions, things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and so on.

That was a really good explanation.

Great work. So I feel, I mean, I don't know this. I'm not a doctor, obviously. I feel like most folks are probably dealing with the second example that you gave where it's more of you're getting exposure either to the mycotoxins or the fragments or whatever that's triggering the inflammatory responses through the drip reflex that you guys, that you were just talking about.

And that, and when you talk about low grade and you're talking about chronic, you know, symptoms.

It'S, it's like those are the harder things to figure out, it seems. So, like, is it when, when people have like a fungal infection, let's say, for example, like you mentioned Candida, like Candida shows up. Like you can get a feel for Candida. I feel like more easily you get thrush on your tongue. There's some other like, symptoms that are pretty, like there's something going on here type of deal that's going on. Whereas when you're dealing with like this chronic low grade thing, it's like a slow burn, you know, it's like, oh, it doesn't feel much different than it did yesterday. But if we had the capacity to see how we felt today and compare it to how we felt like five years ago, and we were, we were at five years ago and all of a sudden how we feel today just hit us all at once. Instead of like a gradual fraction every day over five years, you would be like, whoa, this is like a big thing, right? But because of the slow burn on it. So why I don't feel like I look any younger because I look at myself or older because I look at myself, but then I look back at old picture, I definitely look older.

I know the feeling, you know, and that's a, that's a, a great point to bring up. Because we are, with chronic low grade inflammation, we are like those frogs in a boiling pot of water, right? We are, we're sitting there, we're not really realizing that the temperature is going up one degree at a time, slowly, slowly, slowly to a point that you're all sudden cooking and literally cooking on the inside with the amount of inflammation. And like you said, if we were able to put ourselves how we felt five years ago to now, we've noticed a difference, but we are really good at adapting to new conditions, right? So, you know, even things like your memory slows down a little bit, but that occurs slowly over a period of time. You know, your vision gets a little bit worse, your, your reflexes get a little bit worse. So things like that start to happen, but you don't really notice it. And that's why chronic illness is so prevalent, right? Because it's constantly occurring from a Relatively young age. And it's driven by all of these drivers of chronic low grade inflammation. And mycotoxin exposure is a big part of that because mycotoxin exposure is pretty prevalent. I'm sure you guys have gone through statistics and things like that. Most people's guts aren't healthy enough to deal with it. And so you're being exposed to something that your already dysfunctional gut does not know how to handle effectively. And then I would go a little further to say if your gut is dysfunctional, the exposure to mycotoxins can actually get amplified and the impact that the mycotoxin would have on your system gets amplified because of a dysfunctional gut. And one of the things I always try to put forward to people to understand is that your gut microbiome is of course your biome, right? It's your ecosystem. It's what you, you know, have been developing all these years. A bunch of it you got from mom and dad when you were born. A lot of it is shaped through choices and things that have happened to you over the years. You know, depending on how many rounds of antibiotics you took, what your lifestyle choices are and all that. Right? So all those things impact your microbiome in a significant way. So here you are today with your given microbiome, which is your set of organisms and all the genetic elements that live in and on you, and then focusing in on the gut microbiome. The gut microbiome is either a, your best friend or the other end of the spectrum. It's the biggest driver of disease in your body, right? So it's working somewhere in that spectrum. And if you're really healthy, and you've got a really healthy diverse gut microbiome, it is absolutely supporting you, providing you resilience, detoxifying you from all these things you'd be able to encounter in life, protecting you essentially all the way to the other end, where not only is it not protecting you, but it's a source of disease. And if you ever encounter something like a mold toxin, it actually amplifies the negative effect of that. Right. And we could talk specifically about what that looks like on this end, what does the microbiome look like on this bad end, and then what does it look like on the good end? And then the good news is you can, it's an ecosystem, you can always shift it back, right? It's not genetics, it's not like fixed, it's. It's things that, it's an ecosystem, it's a garden, if you will. You Know, people have heard that analogy. There's a way of tilling that and helping it to get back to the good. And when you're at the good, you can get exposed to mycotoxins and be okay.

I, I do want to talk about what like a healthy gut looks like versus a not healthy gut. But real quick, you said something.

So there's more than one microbiome that we have as people, right? So do you think that the gut is the most impactful of them? Like, is this the one that, that is kind of driving the majority of sort of what's going on?

Yeah, for, for a couple reasons. It is, I, I call it the central command center for how the rest of your ecosystem behaves. In your body. All the ecosystems are connected, right? Your biome in your eye to the biome in your, in your mouth, to the biome in your brain. All of those are connected with each other and then also with the gut. And in large part, how these biomes and the associated cells and immune system that are associated with them, how all of them behave, is based largely on the signals and messages they get from the gut, right? So there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one is the largest percentage of microbes that live in your body live in your gut, right? So that's when you have the biggest diversity, the biggest set of population. And so you have the most complex ecosystem. So a lot more chemistry and biochemistry and biology is going on in your gut compared to other biomes in your body. And then those microbes feed a lot of the microbes that are in peripheral areas of the body, right? So the biome in your brain is not necessarily fermenting in your brain to produce energy or byproducts. It's counting on things that the gut is making and sending up there to feed on, right? Because microbes have to feed on something. So that's one reason is because it's the largest quantity of microbes. It's also the biochemically and microbiology microbiome, biologically the most active number two is because the largest portion of your immune tissue is in your gut, which means that the microbiome in your gut or the microbiota in your gut, so when you're talking about individual biomes like your, you know, your eyes, your mouth, whatever we call it microbiota, right? So the microbiome is a totality microbe. So the microbiota in your gut gets to engage, which with huge numbers of immune tissue. And that's where a lot of that crosstalk happens that I talked about. Right. So. And that's where the learning of the environment comes from. Because your immune system doesn't have an outward facing component. You don't have immune cells on your skin trying to detect what's going on in the environment and what viruses are around, what antigens, whether it's ragweed, pollen, all of those. That information the immune system gets from the microbiome. Because for anything like a virus or bacteria or pollen or environmental particle or mold toxin to make its way to the immune system, it first has to go through a mucosal layer and then to the immune system. And in that mucosal layer is where all the microbes live. So the microbes are translating to your immune system what this thing is. Right. It's trying to tell your immune system, hey, this is a bad thing. Attack it or it's not a bad thing. We need to be tolerant of it. Right? So. So that crosstalk predominantly happens in the gut. And if you lose that communication in the gut, then the immune system in the rest of the body basically goes haywire and just attacks everything. Right. Because it's not getting signals from the central command center to say what is good and what is bad. So this is why you have allergies, this is why you get chronic sinusitis, this is why you get chronic upper respiratory infection, or in women, you get chronic bacterial vaginosis or yeast infections, because everything that's entering these other parts of the body gets a massive inflammatory attack. And so you're inflamed and itchy and all that all over the place. Right? So yes, absolutely. Your gut is a central command center, and those are the reasons why.

Yeah, that's a great explanation. It's. It sounds like what you were just describing sounds like autoimmune responses, but it wouldn't. It doesn't sound like it's necessarily diagnosed as like an autoimmune disorder in a way. Or should they be? And they just aren't.

They can be. So autoimmune conditions are triggered in very similar ways because of the loss of tolerance. Right. So here's the most common way in which autoimmune conditions are triggered. And this can be triggered by mold toxin as well. Right. So here's what tends to happen. Let's say it's a virus, or in this case, a mold toxin lands on a piece of tissue, right. There is an inflammatory response that occurs in that area. Because now your immune system is trying to neutralize or protect not only the host from that compound, but Also the local tissue from being infected and penetrated by that compound. Right? But the immune system has two phases. It has the innate immune phase and then the adaptive, the innate are the faster responders, they get there quicker. But the problem with the innate is they're nonspecific. They know where the problem is, they can get to it, they. But they don't know what is causing the problem. So they just blast everything in the area. Right? So the equivalent, the equivalent analogy I always give people is imagine your body is a big house and there's tons and tons of windows all over and they're all open, right? And there's a bug problem. And from time to time you're going to get bugs flying in through some window in the house, right? The innate immune system are like Olympic athletes who can sense, and we could talk about all day long about what that sensing molecule is, but we won't get into here. But they can sense on the third floor in this part of the house, bugs have entered in the window. They can get there faster physically. The only problem is they're equipped with blowtorchers. They get to the site and they're going to blowtorch everything. They're absolutely going to kill the bugs, but they're also going to burn the wall a little bit. The adaptive actors are slower, much more methodical. They have very specific tools, but for very specific bugs. So once there's a signal that says, hey, what kind of bug is this? Is it a mosquito, is it a fly? Then it triggers the right responder from the adaptive immune system to come with the right tool to capture that bug without damaging anything else. But it takes the adaptive immune system about 48 hours or more, two to three days to start to respond. In the meantime, the innate immune system is there. Blowtorching stuff, right? So it's causing lots of damage. Now, I give you that whole analogy because what it's really important to understand is that when you have, let's say this is a piece of tissue, the lining of your gut, your respiratory tract, whatever it is, a mold toxin lands on there, it's going to trigger those innate immune actors. They're going to make their way over here and they'll start blowtorching everything in this area, which means your own cells are going to get damaged as well. And there's going to be debris from your own cells all over this area, including parts of the mold toxin and so on. The cells that shuttle your immune system from innate to adaptive are called antigen presenting cells. What they do is they come along after the blowtorchers have been blowtorching the area and they start eating up all of the debris that's around the area, right? And then they make a calculation to present the debris to the adaptive immune system. This is the selection process to go which is the right adaptive immune cell for this problem. Now, sometimes what they accidentally do is they actually present your own tissue, your own protein, which is some of that debris, to your immune system. And what you don't want is an immune response being mounted to your own tissue. Then there's something called a Treg system. These are regulatory T cells that are monitoring this whole process. And the moment they see your antigen presenting cells presenting your own tissue, they shut it down so that you don't develop an immune response to your own tissue. That's how you can get infected, your immune system can respond and you don't develop autoimmune disease. Now where this whole thing goes awry is if your microbiome is dysfunctional, it doesn't upregulate those T regulatory cells because the T regulatory cells are dependent on signals from the microbiome. If you don't have these cells monitoring the whole system, basically what happens is your antigen presenting cells will constantly accidentally present your own tissue. Your B cells that make antibodies will come along and start making antibodies against your own tissue. And then any part of your body where that tissue looks like that, your body's going to attack it inevitably. All of that was started by the presence of the mold toxin sitting there. But the problem, the reason why it went from mold toxin to autoimmune or viral infection to autoimmune or bacterial infection to autoimmune, whatever the trigger is, is because of the missing Treg function. And the missing Treg function is because of a dysfunctional microbiome. This is where I mentioned earlier that if you have a dysfunctional gut exposure to mold, not only is it going to cause the inflammatory response of the toxin creates, but it can amplify the problem by driving your system into things like autoimmunity and so on.

That was such a good explanation. I've been talking to people for years and that is the best explanation I've heard on how autoimmune is started and why.

Yeah, it's called. It's called, and this is a very appointed name, it's called the bystander effect, where your own tissue becomes an innocent bystander in the fight and accidentally gets presented as the culprit.

And that's the predominance of how autoimmunity develops, it's always done by a trigger. You have to have an environmental trigger that sets the process off. Covid is a great example of that. Right. People are now suffering from COVID long hauler syndrome. This 25, 30 million people in the U.S. it's estimated, that have Covid long haulers. What happened with COVID is it started infecting lots of different cells in the body, including neurological cells, and basically creating an autoimmune like response in your neurological system because of the amount of inflammation it created. And the people who are most susceptible to that effect of COVID were people with dysfunctional gut microbiomes.

So would I be right in saying that if somebody develops an autoimmune disease, Let me switch it the other way. If someone has a healthy gut microbiome, they, it's a very low probability that they could develop autoimmune disease.

That's exactly right. So Fasano, who's one of the preeminent researchers on autoimmunity at Harvard, basically as said that autoimmunity, the development of the disease, is really a three legged stool. Right? There are three things that really have to happen for you to develop it. Number one is you have to have some sort of genetic predisposition, some SNPs. Right. And those SNPs are very prevalent in population. So a lot of people have them. But having them doesn't mean you're going to get it at all because these other two things have to happen as well. The second thing is having a dysfunctional gut microbiome because then you lose that crosstalk with the immune system and you lose the functionality of that Treg system. And then the third part of the stool is what we call an environmental trigger. That environmental trigger could be mold exposure, it could be a viral infection, something that gets the cytokine response and the cytokine storm going in the body, which, which can then be the scenario that sets the body off into an autoimmune response. Right. Here's the beauty of it though. Here's why I think we live in a very exciting time. It used to be that if you had an autoimmune condition, there was nothing you could do about it. Right. If it got really bad, you could do immunosuppressants, which basically suppresses your immune system in general. Now the autoimmunity may not kill you, but you'll probably die of a cold. Right? That's, that's the trade off.

Right.

You know, and, and, and what we're finding out now Is that at any time you can upregulate those T regulatory cells, even if they weren't present when the autoimmune response developed five years down the road, you can upregulate them and they could still circulate around looking for these unfavorable responses.

They know they have the intelligence and there's two hours I can go into explaining how they know. But there's something about they have a ability to recognize certain characteristics on our own tissue. There's something called the MHC complex that all our tissues have. The moment you bring these T regulatory cells up, they have this ability to recognize our own tissue and they survey everything. And the moment they find this B cell here producing your own tissue antibodies, it's going to go and shut it down. You can start pushing the system back to deregulating and removing or regulating and removing these really dysfunctional immune responders. This hope that you can reverse a lot of these autoimmune conditions. We've done a study on rheumatoid arthritis, for example, where we've seen a really significant amount of improvement in their symptoms and the swelling and so on.

Here's another thing to think about. This is if you have a healthy gut and you know how to modulate it to make it healthy, you can bring the T cells backup. They can help you remediate some of this issue with the autoimmunity. If you don't have a healthy gut, you can create more and more and more different autoimmune responses, right? Because almost anywhere that your immune system responds to the presence of something, there's a chance your immune system will develop a bystander effect autoimmune response to that new tissue. So in the last 30 years or so, 35 years or so, we've created new diseases that we didn't have before, right? Like 30, 40 years ago, we had like 30 defined autoimmune conditions. Now we have over 110. In just the last few decades, we've created like, you know, 80, 90 new diseases that we now have to contend with that did not exist. And a lot of that is driven by how dysfunctional our guts have become in the last three to four decades.

Wow, that's. This whole conversation is, is really awesome for a few things, but for one, because a lot of people that listen here or they're dealing mold issues, they have autoimmune things, right? A lot of times autoimmune is something that's going on. Mold triggers it, right? You have your exposure, that does it. There's your trigger. Now you have fill in the blank on whatever your autoimmune thing is that you have going on. And so if you're listening to this and you are, that you have to look at your gut. I mean, that's what it sounds like if you're not. This whole bystander effect thing is, like, the mechanism of how it happens. And having it explain makes it so much easier to understand why you have to take action. It's really funny. Like, this stuff is kind of complicated.

I mean, not.

It is complicated. You're very good at explaining it in a way that isn't. I try to do the same thing on my side of the fence to try to make it easy. And once somebody is able to sort of attach, like, normal person logic to a really complex concept, and we can kind of create like, a bridge that makes it seem like, oh, I get, like, what that means now. Now all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, if I don't make a decision now because I know how this works now, it's on me. It's not that I didn't know it before. There's like, almost this, like, innate accountability that comes along with understanding something to where it's like, I don't have an excuse anymore. I can't say my doctor couldn't figure it out anymore. I can't say this anymore. I can't throw my hands up and say, you know, I need to go live in a tent somewhere. Like, I can't do anything stuff, because now I know how it works. And it works because I have two. I mean, I literally can speed this back. And I feel like it 100 makes sense in my mind, and I feel like anybody else will be able to say that too. And now that you know that, it seems very clear. It's like, all right, well, if I want to stop all the stuff and the fact that you're talking about how you can re integrate these Treg cells and then have them kind of go back and say, oh, no, this part's actually bad. Like, we missed that before because I wasn't here, but now I'm back. It's almost like you had workers that were on vacation and they like, your. Who office went. Went to crap. Then they come back in, they're like, why are we doing this? What the hell happened when I was in Hawaii, like, what is going on?

Audit what's going on in your system and. And start to repair things, you know? And this is the beauty of. Of having the burden of knowledge because now you have it and you, and if you know better, you should be, you should do better and no more is it. Ignorance is bliss. Right? You can't just kind of wallow in your ignorance and go, I don't really know what's going on, I don't understand. But now that you know, you know exactly what you should be paying attention to. And the beauty is we have amazing tools to be able to help the microbiome get back to that end of the spectrum where it's helping you and protecting you, rather than that end where it's not only not protecting you, but it's hurting you. Right. There was a 20. And I, and I want to exemplify that thought by quoting a study from 2015 in the Frontiers of Immunology. They basically went through. It's called a meta analysis study. If you're not familiar what that is. It's basically a study of all the studies that are relevant to a topic. After a while, after there's a bunch of research on a particular topic, some researchers will go through and review all the papers on the topic and then come with a consensus. What they concluded that today the biggest driver of mortality, so death and morbidity, which is dysfunction and disease, is dysfunctional microbiome in the gut. And the resulting leaky gut and chronic low grade inflammation that comes from that, that's the number one killer in the world. Right? And so it's, it's, it's mind boggling when you think about that, because it's a ecological switch in your gut that becomes your number one killer. And, and the, but the good news is, like we said, you can reverse it, right? You could switch the ecosystem at any time. It doesn't matter if you're 80, 90 years old or if you're 15. Right. It's never too late to start remediating it and improving the ecosystem.

Yeah. This is awesome. Okay, so we've said, I think a pretty good kind of understanding of what we're dealing with, how it's all working. So I'd love to kind of get into the rest of this. So talking about.

How do you know, what does it look like, what do you do, what are some of the things you do? And I'll give you a couple of my own personal examples of if I had this reaction, what does that mean? Like different things like that. So let's, let's get out. So let's start. What does a, what does a healthy gut look like and how do you know that it's healthy? Slash what does an unhealthy one look like? And how do you know that it's unhealthy if we're dealing with this like low grade chronic thing that we don't ever really feel?

Yeah. Okay, so some of the key features of a healthy gut, and this is absolutely well validated by 20,000 studies on the microbiome. Number one is high diversity in the gut microbiome, right? So the more functional species you have, the more resilient your gut is, the more functional it is, the more talks of the immune system, the more functional your immune system is and so on, and the longer you will live. Studies are absolutely clear. Not only do they show high diversity, protective against lots of chronic illnesses, that also translates to longevity. Right? So people who are 90 years old, 95 years old, and have very low rates of chronic illnesses and living very active lives have the diversity of 30 year olds. Right? So that's really, really important to know. So it's diversity. The second part is having high levels of certain keystone strains. These are very protective species within the microbiome. They protect not only the rest of the microbiome, the rest of the organisms, but then they also very specifically protect the host. The way they protect the host, which is really, really important, is they are the ones that manage the lining of the gut, the mucosal layer, the tight junctions in between cells and all that, so that the gut lining can act as a true barrier. We should point this out because people may not know this, that for something to officially be inside your body, it's not sufficient that it goes into your mouth or your nose, right? If you eat something, it's not actually inside your body. It seems like it, but it's not. The reason is your digestive tract is a tube that's open on both ends, right? So the only way something is truly inside your body is if it goes through the lining of your digestive tract into circulation. And this structure that protects the lining is called the mucosa and the epithelium, that's a mucus layer and then a layer of intestinal cells maintaining that structure as a dynamic barrier, meaning it has to let certain things through and then it has to prevent lots of things from getting through that. Maintenance of the dynamic barrier is outsourced to a number of different microbes in the gut. Many of those microbes are considered keystone protective strains. If you start to lose those microbes in number, what you start to see is a diminishing functionality in that lining of the gut. Then the gut becomes leaky and most people have heard of leaky gut. Leaky gut becomes the number one source of chronic low grade inflammation, thereby the number one driver of disease and mortality worldwide. You need high diversity, you need high levels of these protective keystone species. Just those two things alone will mean that you have a pretty healthy, resilient gut, right? So we can just focus on those. And, and then of course, they result in no leakiness in the gut. You know, a strong barrier, production of lots of useful compounds like short chain fatty acids and so on. But those are the two, two key things, right? Cool.

Okay.

Now you said, how do you know then if you have that kind of healthy gut or if you don't? The, the, the best way to understand that is of course, if you have any chronic disease, you likely have a very dysfunctional gut, right? So anything under cardiometabolic syndrome, so obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, polycystic ovarian syndrome, there's like 60 conditions under that. If you have any GI symptomology like IBS or food intolerances or just severe bloating, SIBO, all of these things, then you have a dysfunctional gut microbiome, right? If you have anxiety, if you have stress throughout the day and you don't manage stress well, if you can't sleep well at night, you likely have a dysfunctional gut. There's lots and lots and lots of studies that show that anxiety and depression start from having low diversity, low levels of protective strains and a very leaky gut that is the foundation that is required to have anxiety and depression, right? So if you have mood disorders, you have that, if you have energy issues, like you wake up, you feel groggy, you can't rest appropriately. You know, you eat food, you don't really digest it well, you feel kind of bloated and full throughout the day. All of those things are a signal of a dysfunctional gut. If you are susceptible to illness, right? If you're in a room with people and somebody has a flu and you feel pretty sure you're going to now get it too, because you're susceptible to these things, right? You absolutely have a dysfunctional gut at the other end. The functional gut that's healthy, the way I described it, provides you a significant amount of resilience.

That healthy gut provides you resilience in ways that you wouldn't even expect it. For example, resilience against bad choices. There are some people that can sleep very little for a few days in a row and be going out late and consuming bad things. You know, having 1:30am pizza and so on, right? Doing all that and still function fine, right? The reason is because they have a healthy gut microbiome that helps them detox, reset, repair the inflammatory damage, do all of that important stuff, right? Some people, you go one night without appropriate level of sleep and you're messed up for the next couple days, or you have a crouton or some gluten accidentally, and maybe you have a drink and then you're out for two days. You have to recover, right? The differences in that resilience is largely dependent on your gut microbiome. So just, if you're listening to, just think about where you are in your resilience, right? How many foods can you actually eat without them actually impacting yourself in a negative way? You know, how long can you go putting stress on your body before your body shuts down? You know, how easy is it for you to adapt to different environments? I give you go to Europe, you know, how do you adapt to that environment? Or does that have a negative impact on you? How many. You know, how many things you have that. That trigger sensitivities in your body, right? Whether it's environmental or food or personal care products that you put on. So resilience is really the true measure of a really healthy, functioning gut.

Love it. That's really. I mean, it's not like super defined, but it's easy. These are things you can start thinking about as you started describing, like that night. And I was. God, that was when I was 20, 22. That was my. That's my night.

No, and the reason why we could do it, you know, at 18, 19, 22, is because our guts aren't quite as messed up yet. Right now there are 18 year olds and 20 year olds who have gone through, you know, lots of antibiotic treatments for other conditions and have had some degree of Crohn's or colitis and all. They could never do that, right? I know, you know, 18, 20 year olds that if they have a slice of pizza, it's going to wreck them for two days, right? So the difference is that our guts were more resilient at that time. Now, because of those kind of behaviors and because we didn't specifically try to repair our guts, we come to our 30s where we no longer can do that anymore because our guts are less resilient, more messed up, right? So, so that's. It's just. It's an easy way to think about it. And then you think about. And okay, here's the other thing we. I want to dispel for people we, we excuse age as a reason for the way we feel, the way we.

I say this all the time.

Exactly. Yeah. You get out of bed and like things are stiff and your energy is low, your brain is a little bit slower than it used to be in remembering faces and names and things like that, right? And we go, I'm getting older. You know, in your mind you say that, right? But that is not actually what is causing. It's not just chronological time. The reason why chronological time has that impact on you is because your rate of recovery from things that damage your system is slowing down compared to the rate of damage. That's the only reason. And the biggest driver of that is a dysfunctional microbiome. And so I brought up earlier an example of a nutrient that the microbiome has to make that is critical for our cellular function. That's urolithins. Right? So the best biological explanation for aging and age related dysfunctions is something called the mitochondrial free radical theory of aging, Right? Not the easiest thing in the world to say, but let me explain what it basically means, right? So in your cells, in your cells you have something called the mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of the engines of your cell, if you will, right? That's what keeps the cell going, whether it's a muscle cell, a brain cell, you know, eyeball cell, whatever it is that keeps the cell going and gives you functionality. Now, every time those engines are producing energy to keep the cell going, it's also producing byproducts no different than your car's engine producing exhaust. Right? So it does produce an exhaust. These little mitochondria produce exhaust. Now, if those exhausts aren't quenched appropriately over time, it starts to create dysfunction in the mitochondria, no different than on your car's engine. If you had it sit garage and you're not exposing and disseminating the exhaust, it's going to be toxigenic. And then also, if you're not putting oil and doing and helping the, the engine, it's going to become dysfunctional over time, right? So the mitochondria require maintenance because they are like little engines, right? The maintenance are things like glutathione and glucuronic acid. A lot of those things are produced by the microbiome. And then the urolithins that I talked about are really good at finding dysfunctional mitochondria that are now damage and then flipping them and creating new mitochondria, right? So if those things aren't happening what tends to happen in the cells is the engines start to become dysfunctional. You start to lose more engines because they die. And then you start to have the cell now being dysfunctional because it's not producing enough energy to function. So the cell dies. And as a cell dies and you have more and more and more of those cells die in a particular organization, then the function of the organ declines. Right? That is what we're seeing as aging. But it doesn't have to happen that way. That only happens because our ability to maintain the mitochondria over time goes down, because our microbiome becomes more and more dysfunctional.

So we can't excuse these things to aging. There's no reason why today at 45 years old, I shouldn't be able to run the same amount I did 10 years ago at 35 years old, if I've maintained myself and my resilience and my microbiome for the last 10 years. Age itself is not the driver. It's not chronological time. So we want that to be an important thought in people's mind, because what is happening over time is your microbiome is going from here, which is super protective and resilient, and it's moving down the spectrum to being completely toxigenic. Right. And when it gets there, then you start seeing this amazing snowball of chronic conditions. It may have been autoimmune and things you're dealing with sensitivities, you know, so on. And then all of a sudden, boom, you've got, you know, diabetes, and then, boom, you've got Alzheimer's and you've got Parkinson's. You got all of these really massive, scary conditions. But the pathway, the inflammation highway to get there is the same.

Yeah, that's super. Again, you're just crushing. Crushing the podcast, Karen.

So that's.

That's amazing.

I mean, again, you think about this. You hear this stuff, you think about it. I don't know if you know the answer to this. I'm throwing this out. You can say you don't know if you don't know. You mentioned age is not chronological age. I know that there are different tests that you can do that kind of identify your biological age, whether it's like telomere testing or if there's other things that go along with that.

Is.

Is the gut portion of it, if, you know, is that, like, part of the equation when people are defining, like, biological age?

Yeah, it's. It's in fact, one of the most accurate ways to do it, because just measuring the diversity of the gut microbiome is a key aspect of predicting what your biological age is, right? I mentioned if you were 90 years old, but you had the diversity of a 30 year old, you are biologically 30, and you have all the capacity and the resilience and all that of a 30 year old. And there's studies that have shown this, there's studies that help predict an individual's chronological age by what their microbiome looks like, not only their biological age. Doing a microbiome test, like the biome effects, which is a highly accurate way of looking at your alpha diversity, which is a number of functional species in your microbiome, is a great way of keeping track of, of how you're doing on your resilient resilience and your biological age, right. I would do it like once every year, once every six months or something like that, just to see where, which, what your trend line looks like. And then that becomes an easy thing to start going, okay, I gotta dial this back in. You know, I gotta up the, the diversity. Now. One thing I want to clarify for people because they get really confused about this. As your diversity declines, it sounds like you're losing organisms completely, right? In the world of microbiology and all that, you can't, you can almost never lose a hundred percent of any organism, right? This is why when you look at all the household cleaners, it says kills 99.9% of germs, right? And that's because unless you're doing something really, really, really aggressive, you really can't say you've killed 100% of germs. There's always, could be one single cell there, and that one cell of bacteria can hang on forever, right? But it's just not functional. It's not producing enough of its byproducts and so on to be functional. So as your, your diversity declines, what that actually means is the functional number of organisms is coming down. They may still be there, but they're, but their population is so low that they're not really helping you, right? So you, so by doing certain things and we'll talk about exactly what you do to bring back the diversity, what you're really doing is kind of reinvigorating these microbes and letting them come back. Because when they go down, then the other thing that happens is opportunistic organisms that are sitting around going, hey, I'm waiting for the real estate to clear up a little bit, they start prevailing, right? And they are not being friendly to the host. They're producing toxins, they're driving inflammation. They're not helping you digest food. And, and you know, in fungus, like a Candida is like that. Right. Or an Astragillus could do that as well, but lots of bacteria to that also. So, so we want to make sure people understand that. As you're measuring your diversity, right. You, you're looking at a score that looks at not only the number of organisms, but also the uniformity of the organisms. Right. And, and as the score goes down, you're basically seeing the uniformity declining and the number of functional species declining.

Awesome. Cool. I might want to go do that and see what it looks like.

It's super interesting. It scares you a little bit, too. I'll just give you a little bit of a background on it. We've been, you know, we work with the Papua New guinea tribes. I went through one of our researchers that we work, we work closely with. The Papua New guinea tribes are some of the, you know, hunter gatherer tribes and foragers that still exist today that are living the way we did, you know, 50,000 years ago and so on. And their typical diversity is around 400 species in their gut microbiomes. We've run about 12,000 microbiome tests on North Americans. Our average diversity is around 125.

Wow.

We really squandered a lot of the microbiome over the last several couple centuries. A lot of it has accelerated over the last 50 years because of, you know, the advent of broad spectrum antibiotics and pesticides and all that stuff that drive it even more. But, yeah, we've lost a lot of capability. And that's the kind of stuff that kind of keeps me up at night.

Yeah. So let's talk about how we get it back. So first off, that tribe is lifting living like we did, you know, however many years ago. Is it possible to get to 400 if we wanted to, or is that not a realistic goal? Like, where's the goal that you want to get to consider yourself as? Like, I have a healthy, resilient guy.

Yeah. If you look at the typical US population, you know, if you are above 180, 190 on that score, you're doing really well because you're at the, you're at the, you know, it's kind of like a bell curve, right. When you look at the total population. So you're now on the very other end of the bell curve. You're on the 90th 95th percentile. You, of course, do not want to be in the 5th or 10th percentile way at the bottom here and everyone in this, in this curve, in the main part of the Bell curve, are not resilient. They are on the disease highway. Right. If you're on the other side of the curve, if you're down in the 40th percentile and lower, you absolutely have chronic conditions. You're already dealing with them and you're struggling, and you probably have multiple chronic conditions. Right. If you're above the curve. So if you are in the, in the 60th 70th percentile up to about the 80th percentile, you're likely have risk, but you're relatively resilient. And if you maintain good habits, you'll probably live a long time and be healthy. If you're in the 90th, 95th percentile, then you are really doing a good job. Right. You're resilient, you're happy and all that. Can you go from the fifth percentile to the 95th percentile? Right. That's an important question. We don't know yet. We don't have enough data to know how far you can go. But we do know that you could probably go from the fifth percentile to the 50th. You could probably go from the 50th to the 70th. Right. You can make big leaps which will be realized in your outcomes. But, but can you go all the way to the other end of the spectrum? It's. It's unclear yet. But let's talk about how you do that. Right. So there's really two things, like I mentioned. You want to focus on. You want to focus on diversity and then bringing back the keystone species, the, the protective strains. Now, when you do that, you also want to seal up the lining of the gut, and you want to start rebuilding the thickness of that mucosal layer as well. That helps the diversity and the keystone species. So the things you can do that are outside of supplements, and then I'll tell you what kind of supplements you can add in to accelerate all of this. So number one is get exposure outside in natural environments. The studies are clear, right. If you spend more time in natural outdoor environments, where I am in the Midwest, there's lots of forest preserves and all you can go riding your bike through, you can walk, you can hike and so on. So that is the kind of outside environment. I don't necessarily mean just sitting out in your front porch or your front yard, even though that is actually better than being inside. It's not quite the therapeutic improvement. Right. So what I would do if I had A really low diversity. I would prescribe myself time in a natural environment as if it's like medicine. I would say three times a week, 30 minutes at a time, I have to be in a natural outdoor environment. And here's how you would enhance that experience. You would eat something when you're there, right? So if I went on a hike, for example, I would take a piece of fruit with me, an apple or sandwich or something like that. No hand sanitizer of course. And as I'm walking through the, the forest, hiking on the path, I would touch trees and leaves and pick up sticks and rocks and just explore things around you like humans normally do. We're curious creatures, right? And then you reach in and you grab the piece of food that you, you brought and you sit down in that environment and you eat it. Right. That is the most fundamental relationship we have with the outside environment. And that's been a big part of how we have shape microbiome. Right. And this is why the hunter gatherer tribes have such high diversity is because they eat and live and all that within the natural environment, right? They're not, and they're not sitting in the dirt and then about to eat something and then hand sanitize themselves, right? They don't do that. And so that exposure becomes really important. So that's the first simple thing you can do. The second thing is adding in some intermittent fasting. You know, whether you can fast 14 hours to 16 hours throughout the night and part of the morning, that can be really beneficial because fasting increases the growth of organisms that only prevail when there isn't a bunch of food coming in constantly. And fasting also increases one of the key protective strains called Akkermansia. That strain helps protect the lining of the gut, protect the metabolism, is very, very powerful anti inflammatory strain, keeps your body lean, keeps sugar metabolism under control. So that organism is extremely important and it gets upregulated when you fast, right?

So I, I fast every day. So I fast, I do an intermittent fast every day. For example, you know, for me it's 2pm right now. I haven't eaten for the day yet, right. And my last meal of last night was probably around 8 o', clock, 8:30, 9 o', clock, right. So I'm already at my, my 16 hour because of the timing of this interview, I was kind of like, well I'm just going to eat after rather than before. So normally I would take myself to around noon to 2 o' clock before I eat my first thing. And if you can do that every day. That's great. Now some people may not be able to do that right off the bat, but you can build up to it. Right? So you can go from 8pm to 8am, make it a 12 hour, right? And then for the next week, go from 8pm to 9am so push it to 13 hours. So slowly keep pushing it until you'll get to 14 to 16 hours. And that's kind of the magic zone, right?

Yeah. And, and so, okay, so fasting, going outside and getting exposure. The other thing would be trying to increase the diversity of the foods you eat. Right? The more diverse the foods are, the more diverse your microbiome becomes because it triggers different bacteria to break down these different structures of foods. So our ancestors, our hunter gatherer, foraging ancestors, ate about 600 different types of foods annually. Right. And that's between animals and things they forage for and roots and tubers and things that they dug for and so on. 600 different types. Your average Westerner eats like 15 different types of foods, right? In a whole year.

Yeah. Because if you think about, unless you're a really good eater, right. You take your average American, on the standard American diet, a lot of what they're eating is a grain based substance. Right. So they're eating like breads and pastas and things like that. Right. Most of those are produced by the same thing. Most of those are produced by wheat, for example. Right. Wheat flour is predominant in majority of the foods they eat as a main part of the macromolecule. Right. And then, and then they may need one or two vegetables that they like throughout the week. Right. They don't really diversify and go crazy with the vegetables. And a lot of people maybe eat one or two protein sources. You know, they, they're, they love red meat, so they eat beef all the time. Or they're like, I hate red meat, so I eat chicken and fish. Or you might eat chicken and egg. You know, like different things like that. You don't diversify your protein sources that much either. Most people don't eat enough legumes, don't eat enough resistant starches, don't eat roots and tubers. You know, they don't eat a variety of fruits either. You know, like, I know people that go, I hate bananas, I hate mangoes, I never touch them. You know, the only fruit they'll eat is an apple. So it's, it's really, when you audit it, it becomes really fascinating to see how few categories of foods that the average person eats. Right. And so what I Encourage people to do is there's ethnic grocery stores all around people's neighborhoods, right. I have an awesome one called H Mark here, which is like Southeast Asian grocery store. Just go into there once a week and pick like a fruit or vegetable or protein that you don't get at your normal grocery store and add it into your diet, right. You don't have to know how to cook a big fancy Southeast Asian meal. Let's say it's like a particular type of yam or it's like a star fruit or something like that. Just eat it, add it to one of the meals, cut it up, saute it, whatever you're doing, steam it, eat it. The diversity in the structures of these foods increase the diversity of the types of microbes that are prevalent in your gut, right? So it's pretty simple, straightforward. Just try to add a new food every week into your diet and maintain that food as a consistent component in your diet. So by the end of the year you would have hopefully added in 50 ish new foods into your diet, right. And you'll find it's actually easier than you think if you are deliberate about it. So, so those are that, those are three things so far. A fourth thing would be reducing your exposure to things that kill microbes, right? So reducing your exposure to pesticides and herbicides by going organic, right? Improving the water filtration in your house because your water is full of chlorine and pesticides and so on, right? So you want to get really good RO systems, whether it's at the tap, the water that you drink, or like for me, it's a whole house system. And these are not expensive anymore. You know, you can get as, as little as something that goes on your tap or right under your sink for one faucet, or you can get a whole house system, RO type of system. Those are really, really effective. And it reduces the amount of these antimicrobial compounds you're swallowing in every single day, right. And then another option is getting a dog. Studies do show that dogs in the household increase the diversity of the household. Households with dogs have kids with reduced incidence of asthma, allergies and so on. Right? So, so it, it can be a real benefit. And of course there's of course a lot of, you know, emotional benefit to having a dog as well. So those are some of the free things you can do, right? Easy things you could start adding in. I guess they're not free if you're buying a water filter and all that, but those are non supplement things to do now with supplementation, it's super straightforward. Number one, you have to get a probiotic that, that not only seals up the lining in your gut, but it suppresses the growth of dysfunctional microbes that have taken over because your gut is dysbiotic. And then it increases the growth of beneficial bacteria. That's why we started working with very particular spore based probiotics. So that's where Megaspore Bionic comes in. We've published studies, so we have, I think 13 studies on megaspore alone, right. Where we've shown that not only does it seal the lining of the gut, which is really, really important, it actually suppresses dysfunctional bacteria that are overgrown and it increases the growth of beneficial bacteria. In one study, we showed that just with Megaspore alone, you can increase the diversity of your gut microbiome by like 20, 25%. Right. So that can be a very powerful tool, especially if you add it on to some of the other things you may start to do like we just talked about. So that's one supplement. The second one would be Mega Pre. This, this is an oligosaccharide based prebiotic. Prebiotics, if you find the right ones that are oligosaccharide based, really feed these keystone protective strains. Right. We, we showed when you combine Megaspore and Megapri in a three week study, we could increase Akkermansia, one of those really important keystone species, by a hundredfold. Right? 50%, not 100%, 100x increase in the numbers. The other one, Fecalum bacteria Prosnitzi, another protective keystone species, also 100x increase. Right. So the combination of the prebiotic and the probiotic is extremely powerful. The last thing I would recommend is an immunoglobulin, an IgG immunoglobulin. We have a product called Mega IgG. You can get it in capsules or powder to add it to drinks. Igg, it binds to mold toxins in your gut and your gut lining. Right. And it binds to a dozen or so mold toxins, alpha toxin and so on. And it reduces the toxic and inflammatory load on your gut, which improves your immune function, allows your gut lining to heal, and overall just kind of helps you decrease detox from the exposure to mole, whether it's ongoing or it's happened in the past. Right. So IGG prebiotic, Megapri and Megasporbiotic, just those three things alone will be extremely powerful, especially if you do some of the other behaviors we talked about early on. You add all those things up, it becomes a really profound approach to revamping your gut, your overall health and, and also remediate. Remediating your body from mold exposure.

That's awesome. So I have a couple questions. So I have these as well as some other, like, particular strain ones that you guys have. Like, so I was kind of like.

Playing around with stuff.

So when I took the megaspore and I wasn't like loading everything, I was just kind of like trying certain things. When I took megaspore.

I think I took. I think it says to take two on it as a serving, right? So I think I took two and I felt like I was gonna die the next day.

Why?

What happened to me? What does that mean?

Yeah, so that's called a Herxheimer reaction. So what's happening is I mentioned earlier that what one of the things that the spores do is they start to bring down the growth of dysfunctional bacteria, right? So they go in there and they're like the gut police. They actually battle other bacteria in your system. And what some of these other bacteria do, depending on which ones you have and how much you have them, is as they're trying to fight against the probiotic bacteria, they'll release a bunch of toxins, right? That's kind of their Hail Mary to try to survive. Right. And so in some people, they can release a high amount of toxin and that can make you feel temporarily like you're. And it can be as minor as like, you know, cramping, loose stool, two, you feel flu, like symptoms, you know, and you feel inflamed. You might even have a low grade fever. But that's a Herxheimer reaction. But the positive thing about that is it indicates that it's doing what it's supposed to be doing, you know? But what we found in the first thousand patients that started taking the product is about 10% of people have that experience. Right. And what we do is titrate it. Yeah, you're special. You're one of ten wonderful 10%. But, and, but it was. What was interesting about it was it's very, it was very hard to predict who would have that response. You would see certain hypersensitive, frail people and you think, okay, they're really going to have a bad response and they don't. They tolerate it just fine, right? And then you see certain people that don't look like they're too frail. And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, my God, my gut hurts. So what we started doing was titrating everybody up and There is a titration dose that we send to people where you start with as little as like a half or quarter of a capsule. You can pull the capsule open, mix about a half of it in any kind of food or drink and consume it. So if you titrate it up slowly, it negates most of that response. But you know, keep in mind 90 of people can go two caps from day one and be okay.

I read that because it's on the bottle too. It has like a ramp up on the bottle, right. And I. But it was like lower, like so I just read like, oh, serving size. Like serving size. And then I felt like that night I looked, I was like, oh, it says like take one and then wait and skip a day and then like take another one. So like work yourself back up. Like, oh. So it's interesting. Okay, so 10%, not great.

I'm not like a frail, broken looking person. I don't have.

You know, very obvious chronic severe stuff that's going on. So I've had a kind of flares up and down of like eczema stuff which I know is tied to this. I've always felt my gut was kind of what was causing. I shouldn't really know how to properly address it.

So essentially like if that's happening, then I almost. It sounds like I'm diagnosing myself as someone who fits into that like chronic low grade thing we were talking about up earlier, right?

Yeah.

And it's like that's kind of what it is. So like if somebody's taking this stuff, they should feel fine in theory. Like if their gut is okay, then they should feel fine. Like, like is that kind of not.

Having the Herxheimer reaction doesn't mean that their gut is fine. It just means that they didn't have a level of prevalence of a certain organism that would have created that toxigenic release. Right. So you were probably just lucky enough to have like a high level of let's say klebsiella or something. And that happened to be the type of organism that when the spores battle them, they go crazy and they do this Hail Mary release of toxins. Right.

H. Pylori be something that reacted like that.

It could, yeah. Helicobacter pylori is one of those things that does that as well. So. So it really kind of depends just the luck of the draw of which is your most prevalent dysbiotic organism. And we find about 10% people have the kinds that will do this really profound Hail Mary response that could give Them this Herxheimer reaction.

Got it. So for people that are starting, do you start all three of these @ the same time or should you start with a few? Like, do you start with IGG first? Do you start with the pre first? Like, how would you do it if like people are really like, I don't want to do a.

Branded. Yeah, so. So what we would recommend people is start with the probiotic and the IGG first. So the IGG just helps you from day one buying stuff. It can actually reduce the intensity of some of the Herxheimer reaction, if people have that right. Because the Herxheimer reaction is release of toxins by pathogens. And this IGG binds to all those kinds of things. And so what I would do if for, you know, almost everybody, because you, you won't be able to tell if you're someone that will have a response like that. I would start everybody with a half a capsule every other day for the first week, right? So you just open up the cap, mix about half of it and then with that you actually take three to four igg capsules, right? So three to four will give you about two gram dose, which is a really good clinical dose of the IgG, and then you skip, and then you skip a day and then you go another half a capsule. So you do that every other day for the first week. The next week you go every day with half a capsule and with each of those capsules you do an IGG dose, right? Then after that, instead of a half capsule every day as you go to a full capsule, then you go to two full capsules taken at the same time by the fourth week. Week. But each time you do the IGG dose with it. When you get to the 2 cap per day level in the fourth week, that's when you add in the prebiotic as well. But maintain the igg, maintain the probiotic and you can take the prebiotic at the same time or you can take it with any meal of the day. That shouldn't really matter. You can just space it out if you wish. You don't have to. You can take it all at the same time as.

Well. Awesome. That's super helpful. Two more questions and we can wrap it up. But we've been kind of going for a while, so sorry about that. Difference between it. So I've taken other probiotics and didn't have reactions like.

That.

So. Difference between a spore probiotic and some other probiotics that you would.

Take. So a lot of probiotics that you take will die in the stomach. Right. And, and if they still have an effect, it's because there's some component of their cell structure that's triggering an immune or metabolic response in your body. So, so what they're doing, there's actually a name for it, it's called metabolic response modifiers. So they are just triggering a response in your body. They're not doing anything to the pathogenic organisms or the dysfunctional organisms. Right. So you don't have this die off response. So that's one key reason the spores are different. They survive whole, they're functional in the gut. And one of the key things they do is they go after these dis functional organisms so you can get the die off, which is what you're experiencing. So that's a big fundamental difference in how these.

Work. Got it. And then wrap with the last thing I mentioned earlier, I saw that you guys just released your kids version of your Megaspore probiotic. So then the question is, what is the difference in the adult versus the kid? Is it just the amount or is it actually like a different concoction that's in there for kids versus.

Adults? No. So the.

The formula is basically the same. It's, it's basically it. Well, so okay, in the adults there's five strains, right. The fifth strain is called Bacillus, like the formis, it's at the lowest level in the, in the formulation. But the reason we have it is that's one of those microbes that are very strong at competing against certain types of dysfunctional organisms. Right. So, so we have it in there as an important part of the adult strain. Now the kids, this product doesn't need that, that same strain because kids don't typically have really severe dysbiosis just yet. Right. They, they have dysfunctional microbiomes, they can have low levels of keystone species, they can have low diversity, but they don't typically have like a massive overgrowth of pathogens. And so that fifth strain is not as important. The other four strains are really important at shaping the microbiome. So that's the formulation different. The key, the kids one has four strains, the adults one has five strains. Grains. Now the other difference is, well, actually this is the similarity. The adult product is 2 billion per cap. The kids now is 2 billion per gummy. Now your typical kid dose with Megaspore, the adult version of megaspore is 1 cap per day at about 2 billion. So we wanted to make that uniform and want to make it easy where kids can just consume one gummy per day and they're good to go. Right. And in fact, there's 45 gummies in each bottle and not 30. And the reason we did that is we've given them 15 extra gummies. Because some kids, depending on what's going on with their lives, whether they're going through an infection or they're taking a course antibiotics or, you know, there's something going on in the school, you can double up and take two. There's no reason, there's no bad reason why the kids can't do 4 billion. They just don't need it on an ongoing basis. Right. So if you're traveling or your kids are feeling well, you can have them take two for a period of a couple of weeks and that bottle will still service you for a.

Month. Got it. That's awesome. It's really good to know if they take an antibiotic for an ear infection or something, then you give them an extra.

One. Exactly. Yep.

Cool. Well, this was really awesome. I'm really glad that we did this. Thank you for coming on and chatting about all this stuff. It's really super, super informative.

I. I noticed I wasn't muted all the time. I was typing, so. Anybody listening? I literally feel like I just wrote out like 10 pages of notes. So that's what's.

Happening. It's awesome. Yeah. Well, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Because to me, one of my big passions is about empowering people with knowledge. You know, the more you know about how your system works and what's going on in all of it, the more action you can take. And I truly believe that we have to be are our own biggest advocates of health. Right. It used to be before the age of the Internet and getting access to this kind of information, we used to always lean on our doctors for our health, but we can't do that. That doesn't work. So we have to be our biggest advocates. And this kind of information and programs like yours is what empowers people. So it was a pleasure to be able to be on with.

You. Awesome, thanks. Just to wrap it up, where do people. Where can people find all this stuff or whatever you want them to find that they should should be finding? Just kind of throw it out there real.

Quick. Yeah. You know, number one, reach out to me on social media, on Instagram, my handle is Kieran Biome. So K I R A N B I O M E On Facebook, I think it's just Karen Krishnan. If you want resources, you can go to microbiome labs.com we have a lot of resources on there, but actually even more resources on the microbiome and all kinds of topics in the microbiome from videos and articles and all that is on a. On a website called better biome.com B E T T E R B I o m e.com we created this as a separate, unbranded site with no. With no product brands on it so we can have unvarnished education along the microbiome because FDA is very strict about what you can say about even the research and the science if you have products on your website. Right. So this is a unbiased, you know, non. Non branded, no non e commerce website, just purely for education. We have about seven or eight microbiome experts on there that have expertise in particular areas and they do articles and videos and all kinds of stuff. So check out betterbiome.com as.

Well. Awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, thanks for sharing all that stuff. Well, hope everybody, you know, stuck it out. I'm sure they did. This is awesome. Thanks again. And we'll, you know, do something again sometime, hopefully. I'd love to talk to you.

Again. Yeah, I'm sure we'll chat soon. We'll have to get our spirit animals together, the rhino and the. The line. I think they're.

Buddies. Those of you that can't see, there's a giant picture of a rhino in my office behind my head and Kieran has a big one of a lion behind his running joke at the beginning before we started recording. So. All right, guys, enjoy your days. Have a good one. We'll talk to you next.

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