Dave Asprey talks with Colleen Cutcliffe about how gut bacteria affect blood sugar and disease risk. The conversation covers the science of probiotics, why a personalized approach to microbiome health matters, and how changes to your gut can influence diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.
Bulletproof radio, A state of high performance. Tell me about the history of the probiotic industry. How did it get to be the way it is now?
The probiotic industry is very interesting. I think all of us kind of somehow intuitively or inherently know that these gut bugs are important for us. And that's sort of why I think probiotics and yogurts and things like that have been able to really thrive despite kind of the lack of clinical evidence or really going after a particular mechanism or target. I think we just all sort of know there's something important there, and we haven't really known exactly how to target it yet. So I think up until the time in which we could do DNA sequencing, it was about, well, what can we grow? What microbes can we grow at scale that we can commercialize and try to help deliver these beneficial microbes to people? It really hasn't been until the last decade that there's been science behind it that says, well, what are the functions you're looking for? And then how do you grow those microbes and how you deliver them to people? And then how do you measure what those microbes are doing and what impact they're having on health? That's what's really been happening in the microbiome emerging scientific space over the last decade. That wasn't happening before.
Even going back to when I first was putting together the bulletproof diet. I went really deep on probiotics because my gut had been screwed up by, oh, 15 years of taking antibiotics every month for chronic sinus infections and living in a house with toxic mold. Mold tends to maybe negatively affect your gut bacteria just a tiny bit. And I was kind of disturbed because I would read the research about some of the species that were in common probiotics, and some of them were histamine formers. Some of them were making stuff in the gut that you really didn't want. I'm like, why are we taking these ones? And there was actually a section in the book where I said, if you're not feeling good after a meal, maybe you should have more of these and less of these. So most of the stuff that you could find, especially at the low end on the market, probably was doing some good, but probably was doing some harm. And then a lot of it wasn't even going in because either it was dead or didn't have enough CFUs or didn't have prebiotics. But I feel like in the last 10 years, it's been just a sea change, and we still have all the old strains out there, some of which have some evidence. And then we have all these new kind of ninja species, like the ones you're working with. What do you think the future is going to look like? Are we going to wake up in the morning and have 72 different probiotic pills for each of the different states we want? How are we going to manage the growing number of things? And you have 10 different things, all the major diseases. Am I going to have all these different stacks of probiotics?
It's a great question, I would say, what you're experiencing with taking antibiotics and living in a house of mold and all those things. You probably know quite well that the microbiome is an ecosystem and kind of like a garden, right? And so as you're killing one type of plant, you're enabling another type of plant to kind of sprout up there. And the whole name of the game is keeping this garden thriving. And when we lose certain types of flora, we lose certain types of bacterial functions. That's when we start to experience different diseases. And I think actually where we're headed is rather than calling a disease by what the symptoms are, we are actually looking at the microbiome as an underlying infrastructure within our company, within our company, within our body. And so as you think about losing these functions and what that shows up for people, like, it could be the same loss of function results in showing up as a different disease for different people. So let me give you an example. If you're losing some of the functionality that's related to inflammation, you might feel like, wow, I'm getting all these skin rashes and inflammation is showing up for me in that way. And somebody else might feel a great deal of joint pain at the root cause is actually an inflammatory issue. But people are experiencing it in different ways. And I think where we're heading is understanding that the microbiome is foundational in a lot of things like the immune response, allergies, digestion, metabolism, and that once you start to make sure that you have the right flora and all the right plants in your garden, you're actually going to be tackling a lot of these different things. And so you. We won't have to have a specific thing for every disease, because I think we're going to transform the way we think about disease.
Wow. I agree with you. So much of it's happening in the gut or in the environment around us, and I'm hoping that as you figure out some of the other combinations, that you'll just make master ninja a whole platoon of ninja, even if it's a few pills. And they'll just say, look, we've taken, in my case, the big four killers I wrote in my anti aging book. I'm saying the first step to living a long time die. So let's play the odds. What is most likely to kill you? Number one, diabetes. Because it leads to the other three things that kill you. Cancer, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer's. And if you just don't die from one of those, you'll probably live a lot longer, and you'll probably like your life better along the way. So let's start there, and then let's look at all these advanced stem cells and all this other crazy stuff, including modulating the human gut bacteria.
Sam.
