How a Probiotic Strain Calms Your Body & Brain Stress | Kiran Krishnan, Ph.D. | 927 | Dave Asprey

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. I promised that this year I'm going to tell you exactly what you're going to get in a podcast so that you know that it's worth your time to listen to it. Today we are going to talk about psychobiotics. And as you know, I'm kind of a fan of probiotics and I'm an investor and advisor to companies who are quantifying the human biome in new ways. And what we've learned over the past 20 years is that it's not just having a healthy gut, it's that there are specific species in your gut that make specific compounds if they get the right foods. And this has given us the ability to now say, I'm going to choose the strains in my gut, I'm going to create an environment where they will survive and then I can have onboard manufacturing that's different than what my mitochondria does, different than what I do in my endocrine system. And that you can get profound anti aging benefits or what we're going to learn about today is the cognitive benefits and the brain modifying benefits of certain species of gut bacteria. So if you want to cut your stress, have less anxiety and better moods, this is the episode for you. Especially if you're interested in how the gut works with that. So welcome to the episode. Our guest today is a research microbiologist named Kiran Krishnan. He's a PhD and he's looking exactly at psychobiotics. Kiran studies something called gut commensal spore bacteria microbiology and he is partnered with a company called Just Thrive who's been on the show before. And he's been on the show before to talk about the latest stuff going on with gut bacteria. And the last time we talked about inflammation and immune function. This time we're talking about the gut brain axis and specific things you can do to hack it. So, Kieran, welcome back.

Dave, thank you for having me. It's awesome to be back and exciting to have the collective in audience as well.

It's really fun because they're getting some extra time to learn and they get to ask questions and a lot of times they're giving me a little reminders like, hey, ask them about this. So I'm kind of crowdsourcing some of the questions I'm asking you. It's one of the many benefits of being a member of the Upgrade collective. You can go to daveasprey.com and there's more info on how you can join I also teach all of my books and things like that as small classes, so you can really go deep on biohacking. But our episode today is going to be available for everyone because it is part of a podcast with, at this point, about somewhere around 275 million downloads. So it's going to reach a lot of people. What I want to do is understand the new stuff that's happening with gut bacteria, because everyone knows, yeah, you should have a healthy gut, you should probably take some prebiotics, you should probably take some probiotics. People don't really know which ones, but I want to laser in with you on what are the things that people don't know about that can change the brain. So what's new?

Yeah, you know, a couple of things and one really important message that I want people to really wrap their heads around and understand when we're talking about the gut brain axis is of course, the gut. A healthy gut is incredibly supportive to the brain. It supports the brain in a number of really important critical functions like recovery, for example, or production of serotonin and dopamine and all these important neurotransmitters. But on the other end of the spectrum, an unhealthy gut is not only not supportive, but it's arguably one of the most toxic things for the brain. Right. And that's not talked about as much when you talk about gut brain axis. So I want to make sure we cover both spectrums where we can talk about how the psychobiotics and new things in probiotics and the gut microbiome and help the brain in a significant way. But then what happens if your gut is unhealthy? How is that actually toxic to the brain and arguably the most toxic thing to the brain. So both of those things play in the same pod. So if you, if you're, as someone listening and you're thinking to yourself, oh my God, I have some digestive issues, I've got some IBS like symptoms, I've got loose bowels, I can't eat certain foods and all that. You've got gut dysfunctions. Right. And not only may that be affecting your mood and your ability to sleep, but it's actually acting in a toxic manner to your brain for, for a period, over time and driving all kinds of long term neurodegenerative conditions. So what you may be experiencing now as indigestion and bloating and discomfort, and then the corresponding anxiousness, mood disorders, inability to sleep are actually early symptoms of much more serious issues that are coming down the road. So such an important topic to be talking about and grateful to be here. Do it.

So if you get bloating after meals, or you have room clearing gas the way I did when my gut was really wrecked years ago, it means your brain's not working well or you're experiencing anxiety.

Exactly. Yeah. And then if you're experiencing those things acutely, you also know that the same pathologies are in place that drive long term conditions like Alzheimer's, dementia and so on.

Even Parkinson's. Parkinson's and Alzheimer's are tied to bad gut bacteria from years before.

Exactly 100%. So whatever we're talking about today, not only is it applicable for how you feel and function at the moment, but as you improve those things, as you improve your gut brain connection, and you get your gut to be supportive of your brain, you're actually protecting your brain from long term damage that's occurring from a dysfunctional gut. And that's where psychobiotics come in. Right. So psychobiotics are incredibly powerful organisms that seem to have a natural capability of modulating brain function and very importantly, modulating stress response. And that's a new exciting field because what we know is that stress response, normal innate stress response that everyone experiences, you know, the flight of fight, turn on the sympathetic nervous system, kick on the cortisol increase. When we experience a stressor, that's all normal. But whether or not we can come down adequately from that stressor is the, is the key. And psychobiotics and certain microbes within the gut make that determination.

Okay, so there's the baseline bacteria that we need to have for a healthy gut, and that removes some inflammation. But are there new species or is there new research about specific ones that will turn anxiety down? Or is it just, oh, I have less inflammation, therefore I have less anxiety?

No, there are new species. For example, one of the ones that we're working with, I think we've published now four or five studies on it, it's a keystone species. It's a Bifidobacterium longum. But what's unique about it is it has an exopolysaccharide covering. And this exopolysaccharide is made up of a compound called peptidoglycan. And as it turns out, natural commensal bacteria that produce high levels of peptidoglycan are critically important not only for balancing mood reducing inflammation, but negating the negative effects that cortisol has in the gut. We could talk about what exactly happens when cortisol increases and ends up in the gut. And then it also has the capability of sending signals through the enteric nervous system, the nervous system that covers the gut all the way up the vagus nerve to the brain to change brain chemistry and brain waves. We've studied and published on all of that. These psychobiotics are amazing modulators of brain response to the environment around you.

Okay, that's making some sense. You've got five new studies that are showing the specific species and it's a subspecies. How do you pick that out? I actually don't understand this. So there's all kinds of bifida longums that are out there. I don't know how many in total, like how many different species of them are there or subspecies, whatever you want to call it.

I would venture to guess over 150, 200.

Got it. So how do you know which one to focus your research on?

Yeah, so we do a lot of screening. Right. So what we do, the way this particular strain was actually discovered is we started taking in cohorts of individuals looking at individual stress response. So you initiate a stressor to them, you look at their stress response, you look at cortisol levels. And then we are also doing something similar with sleep response. And so we were starting to group people into individuals that had really good stress response, good sleep efficiency compared to age matched cohort that did not have good stress response and good sleep efficiency. Then we dive into the microbiomes and we start comparing those microbiomes and looking for real clear differences between those two groups. And that's one of the ways in which we found this organism. We started seeing in individuals that had really good stress response, good cortisol cycling, good sleep cycles, actually had higher levels of this particular bifidal longum. And then as we and the people that didn't have the bifidal longam had much worse stress response. So then as we started digging into what is this longum, we discovered that this Bifidobacterium longum actually has this unique exopolysaccharide covering. So we said, okay, that's unique for bifidal longum in itself. Most of them don't have this covering. So let's take this strain, let's knock out the ability to produce the peptidoglycan the covering and then let's test it in animal models of anxiety, stress and inflammation. And sure enough, when we knock out the peptidoglycan, we come to find out that it doesn't do the same thing. Then compare it to the one that does have the peptidoglycan. It does reduce stress, it reduces anxiety, it reduces inflammation. So that's kind of the long screening process of identifying normal commensal organisms that are really important for and related to certain functions.

I want to talk about glycans for just a minute. And there's a bunch of polysaccharides and polysaccharides, basically sugars stuck together that cover a lot of our immune cells. And researchers like your predecessors probably used to call that junk sugar. And like, oh, you got to scrape that all off the cell to find out what's going on in there. And I've just learned throughout my entire life, anytime science calls something junk, that's shorthand for we don't know what it does. So we're going to ignore it and pretend it doesn't matter instead of maintaining curiosity. It's actually a really dangerous bias. So to me, Jun, look here, look here. And there's a company probably 10 plus years ago, who was making a product as just a powder you could put in your coffee that contained a bunch of these polysaccharides for immune function. And they got shut down by one of the regulatory authorities because they're saying that can't be. But it turns out there really is another compound people may know about is ahcc, which comes from mushrooms and has beta glucans, which are in the same family. Right. So what you found is a unique species of gut bacteria that makes these polysaccharides on the outside of it that most of them don't. And those polysaccharides have direct effect on gut quality.

Yep, that's exactly right. And in fact, this species, and what's so interesting about it is it's equally important in utero, when your brain was originally developing. Right. So now there's a lot of research showing that bacterial glycans are picked up by mom's immune cells. As you mentioned, immune cells have a lot of glycan receptors on them. So they pick up mom's glycans that her bacteria are producing, take it through the placenta into the baby's brain. And in the baby's brain, there are glycan receptors that bind these glycans, and then that is the stimulus for developing the brain itself. And we know that when mom's gut bacteria is compromised and they're less exposure to glycans through the gestation period, then the baby has the risk of underdeveloping the brain, and then you've got risk of things like spectrum disorders and so on. So for immune function and neurological development and all that, these glycans are critically important. And this particular peptidoglycan from the 1714 strain seems to be able to completely negate the inflammatory response that stress causes in the gut and the leakiness that stress causes in the gut.

That's kind of a huge claim, completely eliminates.

We saw huge reductions in them. So in both the animal models and the human models, because you need some inflammation, right? Inflammation is utilized as a way of creating perfusion during the flight or fight response. The body is trying to go, hey, I need to get blood to the brain, to the heart, to the muscles. No more blood in the digestive tract, or reduce the blood in the digestive tract. And then so that you're ready to fight or flee. And so you need some inflammation because that inflammation directs the blood to the right place. But you're supposed to be able to come down from it. What tends to happen in the modern day is we experience those stressors and we keep getting that inflammatory increase and that cortisol increase, but we don't have the method of coming down from it because our guts are messed up, right? So our gut is a checkpoint for going, okay, here's your flight or flight response. You're now safe. You can come down from it. The modern day, it goes, here's your flight or fight response. Oh, and we're going to keep triggering the HPA axis over and over again from a single stressor, right? So the entire day after that single stressor, that one person that cut you off in traffic on the way to work, you're now experiencing continuous cortisol cycling and upregulation and the resulting inflammation, we can't come down from it. So.

Well, this reminds me of conversations that I've had for years trying to define what adaptogenic herbs do. And it's exactly what you talked about. When people are taking adaptogenic herbs, then it means that you can more quickly turn on your stress response. But as soon as you're done with it, you can turn it off all the way. And this is why I've been recommending them for a very long time and taking them. They were pioneered by mostly China and Russia. Pioneered, as in thousands of years ago. They would use them before a fight, in a war, before a battle, because, like, oh, our soldiers are actually much better able to return to baseline and then they can fight again. And if you have multiple skirmishes, it actually makes a huge difference because you're not tweaked after, after the fight. So when the rest of us take those. That's one way to do it. And it sounds like this new strain, for some reason, probably those polysaccharides on it, it actually has an adaptogenic effect because it allows you to return to baseline faster than you otherwise would.

That's exactly right. So what we did in some of our studies, what we do is we take individuals, these are healthy, normal individuals to begin with, and then we dose them up on the strain for 30 days versus a placebo, and then we induce stress in them experimentally. And as we induce stress in them, we're measuring the cortisol response and then their ability to recover from that cortisol response. And what we tend to find is that the cortisol peaks are lower in these individuals, so the perception of that stress is significantly lower. And I'll talk about why the perception of the stress changes as well. But then also the inflammatory cascading that occurs in response to the stress comes down much more dramatically in these individuals once they have enough of this organism in them. So it's absolutely correct where you can actually cycle up but then come down and actually recover from it. That's the fundamental difference between humans today and our ancestors that use the flight or fight response to survive. Right. It's such an important survival mechanism. The stress response is so critical for survival of our species. But they were able to flee away from the danger and then come down from it, versus a modern human perceives danger, most of it is not life threatening, but they perceive danger and then they can't come down from it. So that's a critical difference.

Okay, I love that. Now I'm already asking myself, so I take Just Thrive probiotics. Is this species in the ones that are the, the standard thing or is this a new one?

So there's a, there's a new product called Just Calm. It's under a sub brand of Just Thrive Health called Jute. And, and one of the reasons why. Called Jute J O O T so.

Jude JOO T and so if I go to Just Thrive, can I find it?

Totally, yeah. 100%. It's called just Calm. That's the idea behind it. And really it pairs amazingly well with the spores with the standard spore formula. And the reason for that is, you know, the spores, as we've talked about, dramatically reduces lps, right? Lipopolysaccharides circulating in the body by slowing down the leakiness of the gut. LPS is one of those key triggers of inflammation in the brain and the central nervous system. That drives anxiety, drives mood.

Let's talk about what LPS is because we're getting pretty nerdy here. But I know that listeners can handle this. So we talked about polysaccharides, sugars stuck together. Lipopolysaccharides are a fat stuck to sugars. And this is the bad stuff that happens in your gut. Even if your gut isn't leaky, some of it makes it through your liver, ideally DD detoxes some of it, but the rest of it goes through, crosses the blood brain barrier because of the lipo part of it and wreaks havoc in your brain. So a huge number of my anti aging and like the whole bulletproof diet thing is around managing LPS production and even things like activated charcoal binding to lipopolysaccharide, which we're going to call lps. So basically this is onboard highly, highly bad for the brain. Toxin made in the gut. And that polysaccharide thing I think is key because it's immune activating. And the polysaccharide that's in the new just calm formula you talked about, that's a good one, that's not stuck to a fat. So it works in the gut to protect the gut and stop the bad stuff, the LPS from crossing the barrier, which is really cool.

Yeah, absolutely. And it stops all the inflammatory cascading that the bad stuff the LPS causes not only in the brain, but the rest of the body as well. Right. And we know we mentioned Alzheimer's and Parkinson's earlier. There's good amount of research now showing that some of the initial insult to the central nervous system that leads to those kind of conditions is the overt presence of LPS in circulation. Right. So LPS is this because it's made in the gut, like you mentioned, it can continuously leak in. So it's continuous exposure to a pretty powerful toxin. And it's an endotoxin, meaning it's made within. So it's hard for us to get away from it. Right. All we can do is really try to reduce the amount of it being made and dramatically reduce the amount translocating into circulation. So the two products we know that the just thrive we've published on this, the original probiotic stops or slows down that lps by about 60% in a 30 day period, which is magic.

Like that is a huge change.

Huge change. Right. And you feel that. Right because. Because we know that LPS creates all kinds of problems throughout the body. And then here comes this other psychobiotic that not only helps reduce further the impact that LPS has. But more importantly, it actually stops what cortisol ends up doing in the gut. Right? And cortisol, when it cycles through the body in a stress response and dumps into the gut, and it's supposed to dump in the gut because there's a couple of things that happens to it in the gut that are important for the flight or fight response. In particular, cortisol gets metabolized by certain bacteria into byproducts that are sent to the kidneys, and those byproducts change the mineral transportation in the kidneys. So you actually end up with more sodium in your. In your circulation to increase. Increase blood pressure. Right. And in the fight or fight response, you want more blood pressure, you want more perfusion. But the other thing that cortisol does in the gut is it makes the gut leaky. And when the gut becomes leaky, you've got more LPs flowing through, you've got more inflammation, and you've got this critical compound that you and I talked about before, and I know you talk a lot about, is Interleukin 6. Right. So IL6. IL6, right. Yeah, IL6. So IL6 scales up when cortisol levels go up and start dumping into the gut. The problem with IL6 in the stress response is IL6 has the ability to go into circulation and then retrigger the HPA axis, turning it back on, causing it to release even more cortisol. So a single external stressor that causes that cortisol release and that stress response can then become retriggering over the next several hours, if not days, if the gut continues to stay leaky. And the other thing that IL6 does that's especially egregious when it comes to stress response is it reduces the expression of things called glucocorticoid receptors that are found all over the body, including the gut. These glucocorticoid receptors are supposed to bind cortisol as it increases in circulation and then start sending negative feedback signals to tone down the sympathetic nervous system. Right? So that's the control mechanism for the stress response. The body goes, okay, you're stressed, you need to fight or flee cortisol shooting up to help you do that. But as cortisol gets to a certain level, it starts providing a negative feedback from itself by binding these receptors. But IL6, when it's up, it lowers the expression of those receptors, so there's fewer of them to actually provide the negative feedback.

It's really interesting. IL6 is one of those inflammatory signaling molecules that goes up when you have an infection. In fact, I got censored for a piece that I wrote about IL6 and how it goes up after a very popular viral infection and all of the many things you can do to lower your IL6 levels. Because I've dealt with chronic inflammation for most of my life. Partly 15 years of antibiotics will do that to your gut bacteria, but mold, exposure, lots of other things. So I know IL6 well because it's been stalking me for years. And this is fascinating that a probiotic can do this. I'm a little bit worried, though, because cortisol is not a bad thing.

Right.

In fact, many people don't know it, but they have low cortisol, whether it's because of adrenal dysfunction, genetic things or other reasons. And I'd rather have high cortisol than low cortisol because you can do stuff about high cortisol, but low cortisol you actually supplement with cortisol. And a lot of people with autoimmune conditions, that's exactly what's wrong, is they need more cortisol, not less. And I take cortisol as a bioidentical form. Is that. Is this going to eat my cortisol? Is it going to make me not have enough? Or is it going to work systemically? But it just takes it out of the gut where it's not helping?

Yeah. So this is. That's a really important distinction. I'm glad you brought that up because this has no impact on your body's ability to make correct cortisol at all. Right. Which is, of course, coming out of the adrenals. So you'll make all the cortisol you make. What it's doing is negating the negative effect that cortisol has on your gut microbiome. And cortisol in an unhealthy gut creates that intestinal permeability. In a healthy gut, it's perfectly fine. Right. It's exactly what we need. It does what it's supposed to do for the flight or fight response, to get you ready, awaken in the morning, and so on. So it's not going to impact your core cortisol's the ability to make cortisol. What it's doing is counteracting the negative effect of cortisol in an unhealthy gut.

Got it. It's going to be game changing because people who have cortisol issues, whether it's high or low, their guts aren't going to be working. Right. And it sounds like this is going to modulate it. Whichever one you have, it's going to happen. Because low Cortisol equals higher IL6 as well, because cortisol is responsible for. For dampening that inflammatory signal. Now, if you're listening to this going, Dave, I wanted to be into biohacking and living forever, here's the thing. If your IL6, which is a primary inflammatory signaling molecule in the body, if it's high, your brain will be inflamed. You're more likely to get Alzheimer's. You're more likely to get every bad thing that happens, including probably cancer. So having a gut bacteria on board that breaks this cycle, the one you described of, of lipopolysaccharides crossing the gut, creating inflammation which creates cortisol and then which creates more inflammation, breaking that cycle means that your cortisol is probably going to be just better regulated regardless of whether you're high or low.

That's exactly right. Because remember, a key part of cortisol regulation is the presence of those glucocorticoid receptors, right? Because those are the guys that bind up cortisol, cortisol, and go, okay, we've got enough. Let's now shut down the negative effects that cortisol can have on your sympathetic nervous system. And then that also gets your body and your adrenals reset to be able to produce cortisol again. Because most people end up going into this adrenal fatigue area with continuous and overproduction of cortisol over time, right? Then their adrenals that aren't designed to be producing it constantly, every minute of every day, it's supposed to cycle appropriately. Those adrenals go into a fatigue and can't function anymore. So now we're giving the body a chance to allow cortisol to function the way it's supposed to without all the negative effects that increases IL6 and screws up the whole loop, the whole feedback system.

All right, so I'm really interested in this stuff. And full disclosure, I haven't tried the new just Comm product. So I'm actually now sending a text message to my team going, guys, how come I don't have any of this stuff? So it's probably on its way. Living in Canada right now. It has to go through the Berlin Wall. So I'll tell you guys how it's working for me. But the science behind this is it just. It's pretty clear to, to be honest. And, and the results are, are not what I would expect. I looked at the studies before deciding to do this interview. And one of the studies that just came out last year, improvements in sleep during exam stress from the specific strain that's in just calm, the Bifidobacterium longum 17, 14. So tell me about that study. What happened with exam stress?

Yeah, so what we're finding out, obviously, is that during exam stress or any periods of stress, the gut tends to become leaky and it actually drives dysbiosis. Right. So there are certain organisms that thrive under that condition of leakiness, inflammation, and so on, and in fact, increase their virulence factors. So during those periods of stress, you can get an increase in opportunistic organism growth, which means that we start negating the microbes that produce serotonin and dopamine in particular, another precursor, which is tryptophan. So tryptophan can be metabolized in two different pathways in the body. You take tryptophan if you're healthy, your gut is. Is healthy, your immune system is healthy, it's going to get metabolized to serotonin and then dopamine, both of which that are important for resting, relaxing, sleeping, feeling happy, and so on. Now, if you have this continuous HPA activation due to stress and the inflammation that goes along with it, there's a shift to metabolizing tryptophan to something called kynurenin and quinolinic acid, which are actually neurotoxic. And those neurotoxic compounds prevent the release of things like melatonin and so on to be able to sleep and rest. So we know that it's all tied, right? So we know exam stress is going to impact your ability to fall asleep. So the time to sleep and then the quality of sleep as well. Which means, of course, your brain's not absorbing that information. You know, it's inflamed. It's not really helping you when you're studying. So what we did is we said, okay, that's a great challenge scenario to see that if we can take people who are under certain amount of stress already and then see if we can improve their sleep patterns, then we're really breaking up that negative cycle of inflammation, leaky gut, lps, increase serotonin, melatonin production, compromise, and so on. So, yeah, and we saw very significant improvements in duration of sleep. So how long it took them to fall asleep and then the quality of sleep throughout the period that they're sleeping, that's profound.

And you also brought up something that may be the explanation for tryptophan restrictions. Tryptophan is an amino acid, and longtime listeners have heard me talk about. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. You string different ones together to make peptides. And pretty much every protein in the body is made of one of a relatively small number of aminos. Studies show that restricting tryptophan in the diet equals longevity. So eating a lot of tryptophan is bad for you. And then people say, but, but serotonin. And what you're saying is, here's the microbial pathway that's going to force the tryptophan to go down the it's good for you path versus the it's bad for you and increases all cause mortality path.

That's exactly right. Yeah. Okay.

I have to just underline that because I've written about tryptophan and methionine restriction and because of biohacking, because of all of the things we're learning about microbiology, all of a sudden saying, oh, here's a little tiny thing we can do to hack our system so that when we eat tryptophan, which comes from animal meats and things like that, there's probably some vegetarian sources too, but not that many. And when that happens now, it may not be causing aging. Do you know anything about this bacteria and MTOR by any chance?

I don't. We have not studied mtor. We do want to look next at epigenetic changes. My guess is that it could have an impact on it, but that's a super exciting area to look at as well.

Okay. And for listeners, MTOR is something that is a really big thing in the anti aging field right now. You need MTOR to grow tissues and stay young and build muscles. But if you have mtor, that's elevated all the time, it makes you age quickly and increases your cancer risk. So we have this weird thing, you want it, you don't want it. And part of the reason I recommend cycling in and out of ketosis and things like that is because cycling back and forth seems to make a lot of sense. So going some time without protein, called intermittent fasting, it's to lower mtor. Right. And then MTOR can go back up when you exercise or when you eat some protein or very particularly carbs. But we don't know if this is going to affect that. But we do know that it's going to have a beneficial effect on specifically tryptophan. So maybe you won't get that aging effect from eating it. That is something that I don't think you've Talked about much in research there. But from an aging perspective, if you do eat meat, which is correlated with living longer, to be really clear. So I think you should eat meat. This is probably going to make it even better. So I'm pretty excited, not from a psychobiotic perspective, but just from an aging perspective about the new the just calm The Phyto Longum 1714.

Yeah, absolutely.

No.

And you know, when you think about all of the neuro inflammation that comes about from stress and having a dysbiotic gut that can't help you deal with stress adequately, that has a huge anti aging effect as well. Right. The neurodegenerative conditions when the mitochondria and the neurons start to die off and we start to see reduced ATP production over time, that is a hallmark of aging. So as we can improve the inflammatory supply cascading, we can reduce the inflammatory response that stress has, we can improve what tryptophan does. Instead of going towards the neurotoxic side, becoming more neuroprotective, turning into serotonin and melatonin. Those are all going to be things that really improve not only your existing mood, your sleep, but it has long term implications for your overall health.

Wow, that's. That's a pretty serious stack of things for just a single species.

Yeah.

Second study that came up was modulating brain activity during social stress. So these are things like exam stress is a really common thing, even if it's not because you're taking an exam, but it can be, I have a big presentation at work or whatever, but brief stressful periods where you have to perform well cognitively. So talk to me about social stress. What did you find it does there?

Yeah, what we're looking at is a couple of different things. So we were looking specifically at brainwave activity. We wanted to see what areas of the brain were being triggered when you were on the probiotic or not on the probiotic when you induce social stress in individuals. And the way we did that is actually a really cool thing. It's a professor in Germany that specializes in this in psychiatric medicine. And there's a machine system that you put people in and they play a virtual game. And it's a ball throwing game. And what's super interesting about it is it's a virtual game, but the other virtual components are AI components and they avoid throwing the ball to you. Right. And just that little bit like kickball.

In third grade or something.

So you get really stressed. Yeah, we all, I guess every adult has had that experience where they tap into it because man, do their, did their anxiety go way up in that, in playing that virtual game. It's like being pick last gym class. Right. So, Right. That same old memory. So you can really induce an amazing amount of social stress in these individuals. And what we found was that when people took the probiotic for 30 days before doing this experiment, what we found was a dramatic increase in theta wave function. That's the flow state. So we're changing that brain wave function and a lighting up of the coping centers of the brain. The coping centers of the brain is a rational thinking that helps you talk yourself out of being bothered by the situation too much. Right. It negates the negative emotions that come along with that stressor. And it's those negative emotions that keep eating away at you and you keep thinking about it and thinking about it and then it has this prolonged effect. So we saw real and true brainwave changes from taking this strain, which is really fascinating.

Okay. I, I, I'm, I'm intrigued because social stress for most people, it's, it's not just, you know, they're, they're not, you know, they're not passing the ball to me, but they go into a crowded place, they don't know anyone. It's a really, a much more common thing than people realize. And there are people say, I know I have social anxiety, but that's probably 10% of the people who actually have social anxiety.

Right.

So all of a sudden now it, it, for some reason, I don't know if you can describe the mechanism, but it makes it easier for you to think about it instead of just feel about it and be tweaked.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because think about social stress, right? And this is like you mentioned, different than the people with severe social anxiety that really can't do with it, panic and all that social stress is really a mix of.