Dave Asprey compares sulforaphane and probiotics for gut health, explaining how sulforaphane affects microbiome diversity, tight junctions, and inflammation. He draws on scientific studies and personal experimentation to show what actually works.
What about things like zonulin? I just had an episode where we talked about that. Does zonulin go down on sulforaphane? We haven't measured that directly, so we don't know that answer. But it does. Tight and tight junctions. Okay. And in many cell types you can do any form of NRFTO induction bull tight and tight junctions. They're basically. There's whole review articles that talk about all the things that are able to tighten tight junctions. Every one of them that does it, does it through NRF2. I found a study out there that showed that if they use sulforaphane on old versus young mice, it gave the old mice, young mice bacteria levels. And listeners might remember. I've talked about this. You can predict someone's age by looking at the number of species of bacteria in the gut. I quadrupled my number of species by using prebiotics when I was riding Superhuman. And it's one of those many markers of aging you could measure, but you're showing that just sulforaphane without any other changes is giving you a bigger diversity or bigger volume of species. So all we know is that naturally David has done a lot of work in this area personally where you can change your diet and how fast your microbiome, it's about three days, right? Yeah, yeah, it's fast. And use me and my kids. Oh yeah. The best guinea pigs of all are family. My kids have been victims of testing for a long time. So I think that whole business of whether you're able to make butyrate by your microbiome is gonna then go backwards and affect your enterocytes and your neuroendocrine cells there. And so all of those, you know, there's multiple layers there and they're all talking to each other. But I think that the really great part about that is, is if you just tighten the tight junctions, some of the inflammation that's getting sensed by your gut associated lymphoid tissue is calmed down. And then the microbiome without the inflammation there changes pretty dramatically. And then you start getting these feedback and forth. The enterocytes start feeding, are making better mucus layer, better separation from the microbiome itself. The microbiome starts because of the change in, in its composition, it starts eating different food. So when you, you, you're, you're introducing the foods that you know will change your microbiome, your, your indigestible fibers and your phytostero. Phytoestrogen. I mean not what's the phytonutrients in general will be started to, acted on by the microbiome. And so that snowball effect starts, and it starts pretty fast and then on the opposite, in the opposite direction. If you think like, how does a old mouse get old microbiome? It's the opposite, right, that the tight junctions get loose, there's lps, there's just unhealth in general, and the microbiome shifts.
