A Bacteria That Guards Your Gut Lining with Colleen Cutcliffe, Ph. D.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. It's been frustrating for me because I have spent, oh, at least a hundred thousand dollars over the last couple decades on probiotics of all sorts of different flavors. And I didn't have a lot of results in the early days, and I have had much better results lately. And it's probably because I focus on making sure I take a prebiotic as well.

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And some of the things that you're doing is a. You have a species I couldn't have tried when I was really working on my gut because we didn't know about it. And then it wasn't available commercially until very, very recently. You just came out with it. So that would have been off the table. But even so, no one was really taking prebiotics. So you guys use inulin or chicory root as a prebiotic for it. Can you talk about why that one versus all the many other prebiotics and just kind of define what the prebiotic is for people who don't know the difference between prebiotic, postbiotic, and probiotic?

Oh, boy. Yes. Let's define terms. And new terms are constantly being made up. So the probiotic is the actual bacterial strain. The prebiotic is the food for the probiotic. So that's the inulin, the fibers and things like that that the strains eat, and the postbiotic is what the bacteria produce. So, you know, in the case of pendulum glucose control, the prebiotic is inulin. The probiotics are all the strains that are in the capsule, and the postbiotic is the butyrate that gets produced by those strains. And so the important thing to note is that we have actually tried to increase prebiotics through good nutrition. And so prebiotics you can actually get from your foods much more easily than you can get probiotics. And I think about the pairing of prebiotics and probiotics or the pairing of nutrition with food, nutrition with your microbiome as fuel and an engine. So if you're putting great fuel into your car, but you've got a crappy engine, you're really not going to have this humming car. What you need is both the great fuel, the great nutrition and prebiotics, and the great engine, the great microbiome with all of the bacteria that are helping you, you along the way. And so when you pair a prebiotic with a probiotic, you're actually bringing these two things together in order to have your car or your body really optimally performing. And the reason we chose inulin is because that is the prebiotic that best feeds the strains that are in our formulation. But there are a variety of other prebiotics that also help feed other beneficial strains.

I finally arrived after years of doing intermittent fasting and keto for longer or shorter periods. Longer periods appears to be bad for your gut bacteria. Who would have thought to where I do intermittent fasting most often with a prebiotic? So even though I'm fasting, my gut bacteria are still pretty happy. So I think that's where we're going to end up. Where you need a source of low toxin food for your gut bacteria, and you need a source of good quality fat and some good quality protein and aminos, and magically you can perform pretty well.

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