A New Era of Innovative Technologies in Gut Health | Ep. 336

Probiotics are like flowers in a vase. They're beautiful, they smell good, they give you the psychology of prettiness. After a couple of days, they wilt and die. That's literally what happens to probiotics. They just transient.

Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden. And today I had the opportunity to go down the rabbit hole on the gut biome. I met with Oscar Cortiz and with his partner, Danny Arnold, and we go down into the most interesting conversation I've ever had on the gut microbiome. I think you're gonna be blown away by the insights that come forward in this podcast. It's a real winner. So I hope you enjoyed as much as I did chewing it.

He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30, and he's got the science to back it up. This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Hi, Oscar and Daniela. Welcome to the Gladden Longevity Podcast. We're excited to have you here to talk about things in the stool. You know, it's always a hot topic, no pun intended. So welcome to the podcast.

Well, thanks for having us, Jeff.

Yeah, thank you for having us.

So you guys both work for Designs for Health and you're both involved in clinical education. And you know, when I think about clinical education, I think about it from the standpoint of training clinicians. But in this podcast, we're really also training the audience as well, because the audience is very savvy and they're very curious and inquisitive and they take a lot of initiative on their own. And so as we're having this conversation, I'd like you to kind of be thinking it from the standpoint of educating the audience as much as talking to me. So that would be the invitation. So with that being said, do you want to talk a little bit? Maybe one of you wants to jump in and talk a little bit about your perspective on the gut biome, just in gen— for some broad strokes, and then we can dive into some specifics. There's a lot to go through.

Yeah, thanks, Jeff. I'd start with that, and I'm sure that Danielle would follow suit. So for me, the microbiome is a very misunderstood thing. I think we've always just looked at it as this bunch of bacteria living in our gut, and some of them are good and some of them are bad. But as we dig into the science and understand the metabolic influence and neurological influence that these microbes have, I personally think you need to look at it more as like an organ system, like an accessory organ system. I think you really need to look at the microbiome almost as a kidney or a heart. Or a lung because it has that level of influence in the body. Now, the critics might say, well, you know, you can live without this strain of bacteria. Yes, but how long before it starts affecting some metabolic category that then leads to a chronic disease that kills you? You know, so there's always a compensation. But if you have to, if I have to give you the little nugget, that's it. To me, it's an organ. It's an organ and we need to look at it that way.

I think it's a really nice way to look at it. You know, we learned about the gut microbiome a while ago, of course, and we started to realize that there were more of them than there are us. So either we're living with them or they're living with us. I'm not sure which, probably both. It's a— we're commensal with each other, and we make life better for them and they make life better for us when we take care of each other, right? So it's, it's kind of a neighborhood, it's kind of a system in that regard. But to actually think about it as, um, kind of an auxiliary organ system, I think is a really appropriate way to do it. Because when you think about what an organ actually does is it has many different functions, right? There are metabolic functions, anatomic functions, there's structural functions, there's, you know, all kinds of things going on— energy production, nerve signaling. Everything that an organ would do is being done by the, by the microbiome. I think the fascinating thing about your kidney is that, and your liver, is that you can't actually just change it, right? But with the gut microbiome, you— if you don't like it, you can, in many respects, you can kind of reprogram it, right, to be something different. So in one sense, it has an advantage over other organ systems in that it's— I'll call it reprogrammable to some extent. I don't know how you feel about that, but—

No, I think, I think that's a good point. I think what you, what you're touching on there is the only organ that has intellectual capacity and adaptability.

Right?

So it literally can adapt to— well, within reason. We can't really adapt to the modern lifestyle that we have and all the pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and stomach acid. We're not designed to truly adapt to that. However, I do feel that if we, if we really investigate it over the, the long term, we're probably going to discover that it's more intellectual than our own brain. You know, this gut-brain thing, I think we're probably going to get to a point where we realize that this thing has more say in our brain than we have in their brains.

Well, that's interesting because we have a brain and they don't, but we think we have a brain. We think we have a brain, but you're right. I mean, they have a collective brain. That's the beauty of these ecosystems is, you know, trees, for example, a forest has a collective brain. And now we're learning about all the signaling that goes on and how mother trees actually feed nutrients through their root system to their offspring preferentially versus other trees that are next to them, right? So there's lots of, you know, kind of personality, if you almost could think of it that way, personhood almost, to these, to these organisms, which is super cool, really. So what do you think? And, you know, one of the interesting things is that the gut biome has adapted not only to many individuals, but to many cultures and many geographic locations and atmospheric conditions and food conditions and soil conditions and nutrient conditions. And so, you You know, one of the things is that I think for people to understand is there is no normal gut microbiome. It doesn't exist. There are many, many well-adapted gut microbiomes and many misadapted or maladapted gut microbiomes, but there is no one, you know, one microbiome that we're going for per se. I don't know if you wanna comment on that or expand on that, but—

Danielle, I'll let you lead this one and then I'll jump in.

Yeah, no, I think that the more we're exposed to in different, these different locations, the more different our microbiome is from other people in other locations. I think some of the bacillus strains that we've even used to colonize have come from super remote locations where they haven't had any exposure to pesticides and they haven't had any exposure to any of our modern-day conveniences that we have. And they've actually, when we take them, they actually become a nice you know, upgrade to our microbiome.

Mm-hmm. So you've kind of launched into the category of probiotics now, is what I hear you kind of pushing into. And when I first got into this field a long time ago, I was reading about probiotics and I thought, well, that's really cool. You can take probiotics. It's kind of like you're seeding the garden with certain bacteria. Then I realized that you're not necessarily seeding those bacteria, but you're actually signaling the garden that you do have through those bacteria to do certain things. And then I learned about prebiotics, which were, you know, kind of a loose analogy, kind of fertilizer for the garden, so to speak, you know, fibers and inulin and things like this. And then I learned about postbiotics, which are actually factors that are made by a healthy gut microbiome that when you take those factors in actually facilitates your own microbiome getting healthier as well. So there's now pre, pro, and postbiotics that are in included in certain, you know, probiotic supplements, and in others you cobble them together. Do you wanna talk a little bit about kind of the spectrum there, the pre, the pro, and the post elements and how you guys think about that?

Yeah. So the prebiotics are pretty much like the food for the probiotics, and the postbiotics are what the probiotics are making from that food. So it's kind of like a full circle. So a lot of times when you take those exogenous probiotics or something like that, like Lactobacillus or something that comes from outside of the body, a lot of times those don't stick around and engraft. But when we take them, we find many benefits from them because we get the metabolites and because we get the production of those postbiotics when they are present in the body. When we stop taking them, to your point, we stop getting the benefits from them. So that, that's kind of the connection of all three.

Yeah. So I'd like to add to your analogy because I like the flower analogy. That's literally what I do to train people in bacteria, because it's literally an ecosystem, right? So if you look at an ecosystem where there is affected soil, the first thing that you're going to see is a couple of weeds would come up, right? And, and that is not because weeds are bad. That is because the weeds are trying to recolonize and reassociate proper soil so that the other guys can move in and live their life. So we're very similar. So if we look at stool testing, for instance, Jeff, we would look at commensal or good bacteria, right? And then we also look at opportunistic bacteria, which are bacteria that are in our gut that have a purpose, but in excess, they could have a negative effect. So those are literally kind of like the weeds and the good flowers, if you want to call them that. But you don't want to just go in there and kill the weeds because the weeds are the reason or the signaling message that's maybe telling you, hey, something is wrong with the soil here. We're going to try and fix it by changing the pH and more minerals or whatever we can bring to the equation. But the objective is not for us to live here. We want to have fungi here. We want to have other things here. But now I'm going to throw something else into the equation. So in your garden, you have the flowers, you have the seeds, you have the fungi, you have the bacteria. But there is a group of bacteria in there that are called anaerobes. And anaerobes are the bacteria that live in a non-oxygenated environment. So with your garden analogy, I want you to pretend that those bacteria are the earthworms. Okay, so those are the worms that are at the bottom of the soil. They're digging the tunnels, and there's actually different levels of earthworms. The ones at the top aren't the same as the ones at the bottom. They live in different environments. They feed off the garbage that's coming from the top. They send it back down. And then these earthworms are clearly also digging trenches and holes for better water distribution and mineral distribution. So, there is a shift in the probiotic market now that is more going to the earthworm to help the base and the distal area of the garden to help the rest because there are certain strains called keystone bacteria. So, keystone, imagine an arch and there's a stone in the middle and that's your keystone. So, these keystone bacteria, they are literally the ones that engraft and then cross-feed with each other. So, these specific strains of bacteria that make short-chain fatty acids, they produce something that the other one is using, and the other one is making something that the other one is using. And that's when your other probiotics flourish their best. So, all the other probiotics are primarily transient, right? So, like Danielle says, they go through your body. When they're there, they do a great job. But there are ways now that you can bring anaerobic strains of bacteria with very, very high-end technology into the gut system that can literally plant. And like you said initially, Jeff, there are now bacteria and probiotics that can seed themselves. And then if you provide it with the right substrate, and that's what we're doing research on as well, what exactly is feeding this strain and what's feeding this strain, what's keeping this strain happy? And it's normally fibers and polyphenols and things like that. But there's a way now to bring these things in and engraft them. So what we're seeing in stool testing when we're looking at it from a functional perspective, we see that a lot of people are very low in these keystone commensal bacteria. And you can't replenish them with traditional probiotics because they were aerobic, right? So they would, they can live in an oxygen environment. These guys can't. So it took many years to to create the technology that you can actually produce these. But these have a much more metabolic effect on the body and a much more signaling effect on the system. I don't know, Danny, is there anything you want to add to that?

That's a really good analogy, a really good description. I think, you know, one of the things, just for the audience, aerobic means that it utilizes oxygen. Anaerobic, of course, means it doesn't utilize oxygen. Oxygen can actually kill it. So it's not just that it's anaerobic and can live without oxygen. Actually, it needs to live without oxygen, which is part of the issue when you think about trying to take something orally. I mean, there's going to be oxygen in your mouth, your stomach, small, you know, blah, blah, blah. So how do you actually get something to get into the colon where it's going to set up shop without it being damaged or destroyed? And I think that's probably part of the technology that you're talking about in terms of the delivery mechanism, right? How do you, how do you protect it until it can get where it needs to go so it can then implant itself and, you know, turn the corner in terms of these keystone activities that will create a healthy microbiome. That's kind of what we're talking about, right?

Correct. So, Danny, do you want to go on the technology stuff?

What's that technology?

It's called lyophilization, right?

Oh, lyophilize. Okay. Yeah, like freeze dry.

Freeze dry.

Yeah, exactly. And that way, and then some of, some of the bacteria that we have found, they actually form spores as well too. So that means that it's resistant to oxygen. In some cases, it's resistant to the production, it's resistant to traveling, and then going through the stomach acid and can make it all the way down. So some of it at a certain percentage can do that. But the other way is just the new technology that they've been able to freeze dry it and make sure that it can make it down to the—

Yeah, so there's several steps involved with that, you know, and I'm not going to go into the depth of that for the listeners, but just imagine that in real layman's terms, right? Everybody has heard of things called fecal transplants, right? There's been dramatic success with people transplanting a healthy fecal donor into a sick person, and they can actually cure C. diff, right? So this is a mechanism similar without the poop.

So let's put that— as you're telling me this, I'm thinking this is like a fecal transplant without having to do a fecal transplant, right? Correct.

So you don't have any of the negative side effect, potentially some of the genetic DNA expressions, things that sometimes come with these fecal transplants, but they have, in layman's terms, taken the bacteria out of the poop, freeze-dried it in such temperatures that it cannot be toxic, but you're getting the benefit of that bacteria. And then they encapsulate it in a way, after several steps— I think it's 6 or 7 steps— that they can put it in a capsule and can go all the way down your gut. Acid doesn't touch it, nothing touches it. Once it gets down there in that pH that it likes, it can kind of engraft itself or plant its own seed. Now, if you provide it with the right nutrients and fertilizer, now it's going to really grow. So one other thing I wanted to mention, Jeff, just for your listeners so they understand, because you were talking about anaerobic and aerobic, let me just make it clear to the listeners that most bad bacteria or pathogens love to be in an aerobic environment. So if you bring an anaerobic environment, you actually crowd out the opportunistic and the pathogens. And that's the most exciting part for me about this. Where the technology and the science is going. Maybe we are now getting to a point where we've learned that some of these keystones can actually be so powerful in combination that they can crowd out pathogens instead of us jumping down the line of killing everything in sight. That might be the most exciting thing for me, fairly early stage in science right now, but that, that I can tell you that I feel is going to move the needle.

Well, that's interesting. So let's say someone does a stool test and they get back that they have a number of pathogenic bacteria and their ratios are off or this or that, and they don't have enough Bifidobacterium and they're low in Lactobacillus, or, you know, it could be a combination, not enough Akkermansia or whatever else. I think what you're saying is that's looking at the flower bed, but what you're talking about is, okay, if we're gonna deal with the flower bed, yeah, we can give you Akkermansia, we can give you Lactobacillus, whatever else. But how about if we actually, actually rejuvenate the soil and put in the prebiotics, which you're talking about, along with the, the anaerobic microbiome, keystone microbes.

Yeah.

That can actually set the stage for the right flowers to grow in the first place. That's kind of what you're talking about. Is that right?

Yeah. You know, Danielle and I always use this analogy. We say that probiotics are like flowers in a vase.

Mm-hmm. Right?

They're beautiful. They smell good. They give you the psychology of, of, of pretty.

I don't know if they smell good. Maybe, maybe it depends on your sense of smell.

Yeah, I guess. And then you have your flower garden. That you create on your own. So the problem is that the flowers in the vase, after a couple of days, they wilt and die. That's literally what happens to probiotics. They're just transient, right? So they don't have that engrafting or growing ability. So your analogies are right up the alley of the way we even educate practitioners because this is a completely novel thing, right? You're completely shifting the paradigm and saying, hey, probiotics as a standard rule work, but they're not permanent. And that's very hard sometimes for people to take that next step, right? It's almost like, hey, limes prevent scurvy. Takes 200 years before we start eating lemons on ships. You know what I mean? I hope it doesn't take that long. But that's kind of the level of shifting of paradigm that you're talking about.

Yeah, well, it's, it's really cool. Because when you think about it, it is a very agricultural analogy, right? I mean, when you think about soil, even when you think about weeds, the thing about weeds is that they are the hardiest plants. So, you know, when there's a volcanic island and it's rock, the first thing that can actually get a foothold there is gonna be a weed, right? It's that strong. It's that hardy. So, you know, God bless weeds. They actually set the stage for everything else to happen, right? They start breaking down the rock, creating soil, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, weeds can be good in their own way, but I love the idea of the soil. So I would, I read a, a book by a, a farmer who was got into regenerative farming. And the title of his book is Dirt to Soil, I think is the name of the book. And, you know, he was basically going broke trying to run a farm, you know, plowing the field for one thing, then fertilizing the field, then weeding the field, then doing all this and getting a certain crop. And he started being exposed to the ideas about that when you plow the field over and over again, you're actually destroying the soil and, and you're not helping it. And so then you plant, then you, then you gotta replenish it with the fertilizer, then you gotta weed it. And so he got into this whole thing of rather than growing plants, he decided to kind of grow soil and he used plants to help him create the soil.

Amazing.

Yeah. And so my son has actually done this in his front yard in Denver, Colorado. And what they have all these different plants that complement each other. One's putting in the nitrogen, one's taking out this, one's adding that. And basically what happens is one of them is killing off the weeds, right? One of them is keeping the insects at bay and this, all this complementary. And so in there, if you take a trowel and you dig into the soil in their front yard, you pull up all these, this dark, rich soil that has, you know, worms in it and different microorganisms and all these things that are feeding the plants. What you've done is you've recreated the rainforest in your front yard, right? And, but the idea is not to focus on the plants, but to focus on the soil. So the fact that you're talking about, you know, how we get into the soil of the gut biome is, it's a revolutionary thought because all of us have been focused on the flower bed, so to speak, or the, or the crops, right? So I think I love the analogy. It really resonates. We're really going into farming here. We're farming our, our guts.

So yeah, we're talking about ecosystems too. So yeah.

And let the guts do what they do. You know, you were saying earlier that guts are microbiomes are different. Yeah, if you look at a Kalahari Bushman to a Northern Territory Canadian native, yeah, to a Central African individual, the microbiomes are going to be completely different. But one thing that is consistently the same within are anaerobic keystone strains. So you may, you might find more Akkermansia in population A than B, but you're always going to find Akkermansia, you're always going to find Roseburia, you're always going to find Enterostepes. Those are not bacteria that are not going to be there. That's, that's why they are called keystones. What we don't know at this point is how many more does Alaska have than the other one. And obviously then your microbiome gets adapted to the substrates that you provided. If you're eating a high fish, fatty fish diet, clearly you're not going to have the same level of carbohydrate-feeding bacteria, but it doesn't mean that they can't be reignited when that person moves to Africa in 6 months to a year. The adaptability of the microbiome is amazing. And I think that's the thing that we've lost as a world. We can get on a plane— Danny and I and Jeff can get on a plane from America and fly to Alaska in 24 hours. Okay, we can be there. Our guts are not going to be adapted to that at all.

That's right.

But if we live there 6 months, our gut will progressively adapt. But when we were nomads, you know, we moved from one place, it took us 3 years to get to another one. So there was a very gradual time of adaptation. So we're also in the first generation, the last 100 years since aeroplanes have been designed, that we are messing with our microbiomes quite extensively by international travel. So this whole travel, the traveller's diarrhoea thing, sometimes I think is an ill-adapted microbiome to that specific area. It's not necessarily the water or something that's off, you know.

No, that's right. I think one of the things that you brought out is that, you know, the microbiome, at least the flower bed, is different wherever you go around the world. I think it's really interesting to hear that the keystone bacteria are the keystone bacteria wherever you go. That's almost kind of reassuring. It kind of simplifies the equation and dealing with the gut. The other thing though that we hear about is that, you know, different tribes or whatever that are in the bush, let's say, I don't know where, New Guinea or wherever else, that they have the most robust diversity of microbes in their gut of anybody because they're eating all these different plants and there's different soil, you know, and microbes coming outta the soil on the roots and all this kind of stuff, right? Not everybody's washing everything completely. And the point is that there's, there's value in kind of just sheer diversity. And do you have any take on that as to how we, you know, in in a first world country maximize our diversity?

That's where I think that the gut microbiome responds the best, is to diversity. You want as many colors as possible. You want as many different fibers as possible— resistant starches, non-resistant starches, polyphenols. The more colors, the better. The more diverse your microbiome would be, which is why people in, you know, that are still living kind of like a nomadic, eating from, you know, without washing their vegetables and things like that, or not even vegetables, probably just like plant matter, um, and eating those. That's why they have such a diverse microbiome is because of their diet.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I'll add to that because I've actually been looking at this particular— I think you'd really enjoy this article if you wanted to read it. It's called Evolution of Bacteria in Human Gut in Response to Changing Environments. So it basically looks from the ancestral Paleolithic era from what they could gather And what they found is that the Paleolithic ancestral diet contained about 100 to 150 grams of fiber per day. Our modern diet in the US is about 17 to 20 grams. So that's about a 75 to 92% reduction in fiber. Secondly, a lot of these countries and areas that you're talking about with these diverse microbiomes, those people are still exposed to things called protists. And Helminths, right? So they still have a worm or something in the body. Now, for a lot of people, that might sound very disgusting, but think of it from a logical standpoint. If I have a couple of cohesive worms in my gut, my immune system is not going to attack a gluten protein. It's going to attack the excess worm, right? So my immune system actually has things to do that it was supposed to do. So with this whole sterile world, right, that we've removed all the worms and all the bacteria and all these kinds of things, we've created this niche space in the gut. That's literally what we can call it, a niche space. Now that niche space that now you've got rid of these helmets and these protists, and humans can live with those things in their gut, by the way. As a matter of fact, there's been things called helmet therapy where they literally give a person a worm in their gut to kind of fix a, it's a very alternative way of practicing gut medicine, but that's been done in the past. So this niche space can go one of two ways. You can populate it with not great guys like fungi and opportunistic and pathogenic bacteria, or you can do what Danny is saying. You know, you can start eating more fiber. You can start eating more colors and polyphenols and resistant starches and inulin-based fibers. That would feed these other guys into this niche space. I'm not saying we need to bring protists and helminths back. I'm just saying that you have this gap, and if you, if you don't fill this gap with good things, it's going to fill with bad things. And that's when we have all this IBS and chronic conditions in the gut that we're looking at today.

And that's why they call the bad guys the opportunistic bacteria, because given the opportunity, when you have that vacancy, they're going to move in.

They're gonna move in. Yeah, exactly. Now I think it is interesting in all the processed food, we, we don't get enough fiber, right? So I use a fiber product every day, couple scoops of it and things like that. And then I, when I go to the grocery store, I try to buy different things and I try to buy fresh plants and pomegranates and you know, whatever it is, whatever, whatever looks good, right? Any color, any whatever. And that's all helpful. I thought you were gonna talk about how you were gonna lyophilize worms so we could actually take those.

Well, that therapy is actually out there. If you go look at Helmut therapy. That's actually been incorporated in several countries as a treatment for certain IBS conditions. And just as a point of interest, right, people with helmets do not have skin disorders. Like, that's a known fact in Africa. So they don't have these typical skin issues that other people have, you know, like these autoimmune-related things. Autoimmune diseases in those countries are very far and few between. Now, it's really hard to find them nowadays because you know, processed food and that kind of stuff has kind of spread its wings pretty badly. But I always find that interesting, you know.

So what you're saying is my alive flies worms have a chance, right?

I think that's a great— it's a great idea as a patent that you might want to, you know, put out there, intellectual property on that soon.

Yeah, exactly.

I think we need to get away from the whole notion that, oh, you know, nasty and gut bacteria and stool movement as a population. Because that's, you know, we're both practitioners, we're both docs working in this industry, and I can tell you that that's— when I start talking about poop in front of my patients, that's, whoa, yeah, I don't want to— it's like, that's the most important thing you can tell me, okay? Because I need to know how often you go, why you go, what's the shape of it, does it float, does it sink, you know, all those things tell us a little bit about the microbiome. But nothing can tell us as much about the microbiome as like a functional stool test, like that we can see what the categorization of those keystones versus the opportunists versus the pathogens are.

So, you know, when you're, when you're trying to rebuild someone's gut biome, the world that you're coming from, it would seem to me that you would've put together a system, right? Somebody gets a stool test and they've got, things are not right. Like I've never seen a perfect stool test, right? So, and part of the reason for that is that, you know, the stool test is basically looking at it through a lens of this is kind of ideal, but we know that there's a wide spectrum there. Right. So that's part of the problem. But then nonetheless, everybody's got something going on. And so is there kind of a systematic approach that you take to rebuilding the gut biome? Does it start with the keystone bacteria? Does it start with using anything to kind of try to weed the garden first before you put in stuff? Or what's, what's the actual system? Walk us through, because I know Designs for Health, you would've developed a system around this, I suspect. It's not just throw some stuff in there and see what happens. So can you walk us through that a little bit?

Yeah. So we use a lot of GI testing. Like we have the GI Spotlight at Designs for Health and that's algorithm powered. So if you're brand new to it, you don't have to know what this, this bacteria does or what that bacteria does. It gives you recommendations at the end. But for me, testing really allows us to like identify the inefficiencies in the system. You know, whether it's digestion or absorption or inflammation or what's upstream of what is what you can see on GI Spotlight, and then you can address, you know, with something like a 4R or a 5R protocol. I typically like to remove bad bacteria and replace digestive capacity. Those are 2 Rs within that framework. Uh, at the same time, I find if you don't replace digestive capacity, you're often feeding the bad guys food scraps.

Absolutely.

I always say it's like feeding stray cats and you're like, I don't know why these cats won't go away. It's like, stop feeding them. You know? So I like to digest my food. Or make sure that their digestion is optimal so that we stop feeding the bad guys as we're removing the bad guys. And then I like to come in and reinoculate with some probiotics, some Precision Probiotics if we can, especially if anaerobes are low, then we'll probably use an anaerobic strain. And then, you know, talk about lifestyle and making sure that we have the diversity in our diet and things like that.

To add to that as well, Jeff, you know, if you wanna go down specifically the road, the road of Designs for Health, so we, we have these algorithms that spit out protocol recommendations. And then we have, we have a gut dysbiosis protocol, we have a fungal protocol, you know, and they all have a mix and match of different kind of nutraceuticals in, right? So the one, the gut dysbiosis protocol, maybe we want to get rid of some opportunistic overgrowth of bacteria. So we give an antimicrobial, but we also give a binder at the same time. So those endotoxins don't end up in the bloodstream, you know, so there's, there's a mix and match of various things. That are put in components. So we don't have a standard protocol for a gut, obviously, but, you know, this component triggers this protocol in this area of the test, triggers this protocol. So it's very possible that you can have two protocols, right? Because you have two categories that are, you know, problematic. And then that's up to the clinician to decide what's first. You know, we don't get involved necessarily with those decisions. But as if I'm the doc working with a patient and I look at your symptoms, I'm going to know which protocol I need to go for first, you know, as a primary versus the secondary.

Well, for the listeners, what I'm getting at is that, you know, there is a, a system. And although the components of the protocol might change, the logic of the protocol remains the same, right? In other words, understand what needs to be removed, get digestion to work properly, you know, reseed with the things that need to be reseeded, and then support it with the fiber and the other things on the back end, and maybe some postbiotics or whatever else. But just if you're listening to this, just think about that because it's not enough to, my gut's not working well, I think I'll take a probiotic, right? You really want to do the testing. And there are a number of good tests out there where you do the testing so you can actually see. And then a lot of the tests will show whether or not you're digesting your meat fiber appropriately or your vegetable fiber appropriately or your fats appropriately or things like that. Because if you're not, you know, that's, that's job one is to actually fix that. And that's pretty pretty fixable with, you know, some enzymes and some lipase and, right, and some emulsifiers for fats and things like that. So next thing you know, you can get past that hurdle and you can work your way through this. 'Cause I know a lot of people struggle with their gut, and as they're listening to this, I'm sure they're asking themselves, well, what about me? Right? How do I, how do I take care of this? And so what they've just outlined and what we're talking about here is kind of a, a systematic approach to it. You know, do the gut test, then work your way through, you know, Removing things that are obvious pathogens, fixing the digestion, and then go into what's new for me is really focusing on these keystone anaerobes as a way to kind of fix the soil and allow that to actually get the gut biome to come back into whatever you want to call harmony.

You brought up something really nice about your son and that book that you were talking about where you fixed the soil. So I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you an N of 1, right? So Danielle and I recently published an N of 1 case study. Peer-reviewed on using an anaerobe, right? Like one of these, these keystones. And we initially gave this patient this because they show very good outcomes in food sensitivities like dairy and gluten sensitivity. And you take this and somehow the person can tolerate these things without bloating and gas. And that turned out to be the case. But we ran a pre and post stool test, right? So what we ran in the beginning, we completely eradicated the problem. On the backside from the symptom standpoint. But what was mind-blowing was the things that we had to go and figure mechanistically out afterwards. So this person was extremely low in akromancia. We didn't give her akromancia. We gave her an anaerobe that produces butyrate, a high butyrate-producing anaerobe. And somehow there was a feedback cycle that then normalized akromancia. It's like, okay, wow, that's interesting.

I like this a lot.

And then the second thing that we saw, this person had massive overgrowth of an opportunistic bacteria. In fact, is it Pseudomonas?

Was it Pseudomonas?

I think it was Pseudomonas.

Yeah. High. I mean, like exponent of E9 when it's supposed to be E1, right? So for the listeners, 1 zero versus 9 zeros. That's the overgrowth level.

Yeah.

It completely crowded it out in 12 weeks to normalize it. Now, I have never seen that, Jeff, other than antimicrobials. So I have never seen a probiotic crowd out an opportunistic— now, opportunistic bacteria is what you said, it's a weed. So it's resilient, it's tough, it's got its roots deep down there. You're not just going to pull it out. And I guess with your analogy, the soil improved. So the weed is like, okay, I don't need to be here anymore. I need to go find a different place where my services are used. And it completely normalized. That to me was the eye-opening moment as a scientist and as a doc in my area to say, man, I think we're onto something.

I think you are.

Because anaerobically we can fix the soil. And I think that's a phenomenal analogy and I'm going to steal it.

Okay. Yeah, you can quote me on it. So yeah, but I think it's right. I think fixing the soil as opposed to trying to grow the crop is actually where it's at. So with these anaerobic strains, do you have a whole cadre of them or are they in combinations or how does that appear?

Well, we started with one specific one was a heavy butyrate producer and then the other one we're launching probably in about a month. That one contains 5 strains. So we're getting now to the point where we're getting them more in combination. Through very research-oriented combination reasons, right? So we didn't just throw 5 anaerobes together because we thought it was a good idea. We looked at, you know, obviously utilized AI scientific research or whatever, but there was this very specific thing called RoboGut, which is a mechanical gut that you can create where you can create the environment of the gut for the human, and then you can kind of follow them around. And when we looked at the research in the RoboGut, it was indicating that these 5 strains combined have 85% expression on the metabolic pathways in the body. So that's significant, right? So now you're talking about GLP-1 production, and you're talking about, you know, blood sugar regulation and immunological association. So that's why this combination is now put together.

Yeah, this is, uh, this is exciting stuff. This is maybe the most exciting thing I've heard about the gut in a long time. Because no, really, because, uh, I mean, we knew about digestion, right? We knew about pathogens. We knew about, you know, quote unquote, good commensals. We've known there were anaerobes down there, but it was a little bit of a black box, no pun intended, because, you know, you didn't really, what are you gonna do about it? Right. Uh, except give, you know, some fiber. And now if you're able to actually kind of resurrect, reconstruct, rescue the soil in which the gut microbiome is actually growing. Oh my gosh, that seems like, that seems like the Holy Grail. I mean, it's— I don't know if it's a Holy Grail, but it seems like, you know, a big part of the answer.

So yeah, we think so. But I think, you know, we're not arrogant enough to believe that we have the full answer. But I know that we have found the opening to the black box.

But it's a direction, it's a vector to go down, right? I know you don't have everything in hand. I, I appreciate that. But nonetheless, yeah, it's great.

Yeah, so, you know, furthermore, as a company, what we also do is we— you always have the hypotheses, you know, because you're, you're an intellectual man, you read a lot, and, you know, Danny and I do the same thing, and we're like, okay, well, if we put this with this anaerobe, it's going to make it feed great, because that's what we've read in textbooks all these years. So we literally gave some of these substrates to a microbiologist, right? So like some of our products that we perceive feeding these guys, And it turned out to be the opposite. So we have products that are feeding them, and they're feeding them like they are addicted to it, but it's kind of the opposite of what we thought. But that's for this specific strain. So we're going down the path now as we're not only utilizing these strains through the scientific research with RoboGut and the microbial ecosystem transfer, all that technology is built into it, but we're also seeing what is the fertilizer that you need to sell with the seed right, so it can go in and grow in the right area because certain bacteria grow in 6.5 pH, other ones in 5.5 pH. So, you know, the nutrients that go with that, like I'll give you an example, like butyrate-producing bacteria needs to be in a pH of about 5.5. Acetate and propionate bacteria hangs around 6.0. So they live in slightly different arenas, even though they work very well together. So I'm thinking that the foods that go with them are more associated to that acidity or alkalinity. And that's why they do better. It's not just sugars and straightforward things as we're thinking. I really think it's a whole soil-based ecosystem and intellect in its own.

And are you able to predict which fibers or which foods will generate the pHs?

This is what we're working towards in the next couple of years. So yes, I think we're going to be able to the point where we can tell you Achromancia uses this as the main feeder, and this will help it to do this. At this point, for the listeners, it's really simple. Eat a diverse diet, eat as many colors as you can, eat as much fiber as you can within reason, because I know that could be a negative effect in some people with compromised guts. That's always the starting point of the answer. But in my opinion, clinically, there are very few people that come to my office that I do not put on an anaerobe now, because the anaerobes are affected by modern diets, processed food, environmental stuff, medications, antibiotics. And if people think that they don't take antibiotics, even though you haven't been on antibiotics, it's in your water, right? I mean, it's like literally everywhere. Glyphosate by itself, which is an herbicide, is an antibiotic, right? It's literally something that would kill the microbes. So I just think for us, as a general rule, it might not be a bad idea to just be on an anaerobe at some point because it's just systemically going to get you better soil quality.

Yeah. And is it the kind of thing, since it is implanting itself, is this the kind of thing you take for a course? Like you take it for 6 weeks and you stop, or you take it indefinitely, or how are you thinking about that?

See, that's a great question, Jeff, and we don't really know that yet. But one thing we do know is that you're probably not going to have to take it permanent. Right? Like any other probiotic, because the only reason that you would need to go again is if you've changed modalities, right? So if you've gone on a heavy-duty antibiotic or, you know, you've moved area, if you had a crappy diet for a month, then I would probably take it short-term for a while with a feeding agent. But theoretically, if you get it in there and you engraft it and then you feed it with the substrate and you're not deliberately messing with it, I don't think it's a permanent thing. I personally would use it intermittently, probably in the future, because my life is never going to be perfect. I'm never going to have a perfect diet.

I'm never going to travel. You're going to— yeah, exactly.

So I think it's more of an intermittent thing. But in answer to the question, if I can put you in a box in a perfect environment and I can engraft this thing, let's say it takes 12 weeks. Theoretically, you shouldn't need to do that if you stay on, on the same diet. It's just not a feasible thing as a human. Right.

Awesome. Well, I'm excited. I'm excited for this. I'm excited to try it out for myself. I'm excited to try it out for clients and see what comes of all of it. So yeah, very cool stuff. What else? What else you have up your sleeve? Anything else?

We have a lot of things up our sleeve, but yeah, I mean, this is what Danielle and I are really driven by. Dani is literally the key component to training all the professionals and the docs in the stool testing and how to interpret them. So she has a real amazing knowledge on, you know, these microbes and the interaction with them. And, and we are going to evolve and change the protocols as they go on. Clearly, as a company, we will bring out several of these microbes, but we're not going down the path of creating this theoretically. We, we're, we're looking at the science, we're figuring out what feeds them, and then bringing it to the market. And we as a company are very much into publishing and working with the practitioners in the real field. You know, it's one thing to do a randomized controlled trial with 10,000 people. It's quite a different thing to have 20 doctors doing an intervention and then publishing a case series trial on the outcomes. I think that's more powerful to me as a doc than, you know, looking at an isolated controlled environment RCT sometimes with— because we're in an anecdotal industry, right? We, we need to experiment, but none of the things that we're really working with here are toxic chemicals, you know, so it's a worthwhile experiment.

That's a good question. Maybe somebody listening might be thinking, is there any way I could hurt myself by taking these things? Any response to that question? Look, I've—

and Danny, I want you to jump in on this one because I know you've done a lot of work here as well. I have dug deep. I think when the body has what it needs, it regulates. Right. So I don't think that you can take too much of an anaerobe because at some point the anaerobe will just stop at maximum capacity. Right. It's not like a glass that spills over. Maybe what you will have is, hey, you know, I didn't have loose stools for 6 months on this. Now I'm starting to have loose stools. That's generally an indication that maybe you've reached the upper threshold of something. So I would always just look at that. But look, this is not the first time people have been playing around with anaerobes. There's been a lot of research going on for years now. And the side effects are literally minimal, if any.

Yeah.

From a standpoint of taking it.

Yeah. They're mostly just symptomatic. Like if you get bloating or something like that, that just shows there's an adjustment in the microbiome when you're taking some of these things. Mm-hmm. You might get bloating on the onset, but that's just because you're crowding out a lot of the bad bacteria, even making space for this, this anaerobe. So a lot of times you have to let that kind of play out, maybe 3 days or so. Some people are not willing to do that. I sometimes will take it low and slow where it's like, okay, if you're getting those symptoms, let's back off, take it every 3rd day or something like that so that your body can take time to adjust.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, it's very exciting. Really exciting. I'm going to order some in. So how many of these anaerobes are available currently?

Well, we have one right now. That is the one strain one.

And then you have the 5 strain coming out.

The 5 strain, yeah, is coming out. You know, very soon. And I wish I could give you those strains yet, but until it's officially launched, I'm not. But I'd be happy to come back when it's officially launched and, you know, explain every one of those strains and what they do specifically to your audience. And yeah, I mean, I would love to hear your input on using it, you know, on yourself, because that's the beauty about our industry is like we're always doing all this stuff on ourselves. So as a practitioner, I can tell you all your listeners, I take it. I mean, I wanted to see what it feels like and what it does to my system. And that's the beauty about my profession compared to maybe a pharmaceutical researcher. I'm not going to take every drug on the planet, but I'm willing to take most of the probiotics on the planet to see what they do to my system. And yeah, I mean, it's certainly indicating benefits, even though clinically for myself, I wouldn't say that I had a completely messed up gut, but there are changes that are positive that I didn't have prior. So I think there's always potential for optimization, um, you know, when you're using things like this.

Have you seen that using the anaerobes decreases leaky gut or elevated zonulin and things like that?

Yeah, definitely. The Anarostipes is actually— I say it's like the Swiss Army knife of the gut. It kind of does a lot of things, but the top 3 things that it does is it lowers zonulin signaling, so it seals up the tight junctions. It works on your immune system, so it supports secretory IgA within your mucosal immunity. And then it also supports the mucosal barrier. So your mucosal barrier is kind of like a physical barrier between your tight junctions, the contents of your gut, and your bloodstream. So that kind of slows everything down so the immune system can work in that area. And then the tight junctions kind of regulate what can come through and what can't come through. So it works on all three of that— those layers.

Beautiful. No, that sounds awesome. Okay, good. Annie, have you taken this as well?

Oh yeah. Yeah. My son, so actually another thing in the research, there's many things in the research that were super exciting to learn about, but one of 'em was the response to the immune system early on. The earlier you got it into your system, the more Tregs you would have in the study. It was, um, type 1 diabetic mice. They didn't go on to, I think it was 60% of them didn't go on to have type 1 diabetes the earlier they got it on. Got it in their system. So my husband's dad, so my father-in-law and his brother both have type 1 diabetes. So my son is 19 months old, so I try to get that into him as, as soon as possible after I read that research. So I took it for like breast milk, and then I also gave it to my son as well too.

Okay. Yeah, you talking about keke?

Yeah, enterostibius keke.

Yeah.

So this research originated, Jeff, ironically, with children with milk allergies. Babies or young kids with milk allergies. So what they found is—

not lactose intolerance, but—

yeah, yeah, like a milk allergy. It might be the protein, it might be the sugar, not 100% sure. But basically, they looked at babies without milk allergy and babies with milk allergy, and they found this strain of bacteria to be substantially higher in babies without milk allergies. So they took this obviously to animal studies where they implanted the strain into a mouse with milk allergies and reversed it. They even had research in the animal models— make clear, the animal models— where there was reversal on anaphylactic food sensitivities. So, you know, there's, there's great potential in the animal studies, which doesn't always translate to humans, but certainly we've seen it, the strain, from a food sensitivity— let's call it food sensitivity, food intolerance level. It definitely positively affects that.

Yeah, because you think about all the different things there, like peanut allergies. You think about all the people that suffer with autoimmune disorders, whether or not this could be an adjunct to other things that we do from a functional space. Seems like it would be a winner to do that, right? And then you think about some of the things like with autism and things where we know the gut biome is heavily disturbed, or some things like that, or even in the aging longevity space where the gut biome gets disturbed, that this could have benefit in, you know, lots of different populations potentially.

So, yeah, I think the gut is the central lever for longevity, performance, cellular health, and immunity. So I think that the more you work on the gut and optimize the gut, the, cuz a lot of times the molecular mimicry that we're coming, that we get from leaky gut, you know, like where proteins that are undigested escape into the bloodstream and on the other side of the bloodstream we get that molecular mimicry where we create an immune response to that protein and it looks like our thyroid, it looks like our myelin sheath, it looks like our acetylcholine receptors. So the more you optimize the gut, the more impact you will have on longevity and immunity.

I mean, we already treat the gut as a primary form of treating Hashimoto's, but it seems like this could be even Hashimoto's thyroiditis if you're listening to this antibody that attacks the thyroid. But it seems like this could be a, you know, I don't know, a golden arrow to fire at something like this along with the other things. Yeah.

There was an interesting study just published just as a final thought here talking about anti-aging and, you know, longevity, where I can't remember, it was one of these anaerobic strains that they used. And basically, they— the donor was a young mouse and donating to an older mouse. And when they were doing this, the stem cells rejuvenated, like, so there's definitely potential if the donor is young, it seems to have a positive outcome on the older recipient. When the older donor provides their stool to the younger recipient has no effect on them whatsoever. So there's something about the young microbiome, right, that is specific.

So, and do you think that the younger microbiome has more of these anaerobes in it? Is that what you're trying to say?

Or something? Our— in our products, we're focusing on the donors coming from young people. So that is literally where this whole discussion originally originated from. So the donor is like 25-year-olds.

Yeah, it's kind of a take on young plasma, which is complicated to use these days because nobody wants to get plasma from somebody that got a COVID vaccine. So, uh, yeah.

And I think as we, as the microbiome ages too, we lose diversity. Um, you know, we have an increase in inflammatory species. We have reduced short-chain fatty acid production, like the butyrate, which signals inflammaging. Signals, you know, our immune system to, to regulate or be dysregulatory. And then also in an aged microbiome, you also have increased gut permeability as well too.

Yep, exactly. Beautiful, guys. Great work. Congratulations on what you're doing. Yeah, we'll keep you updated, Jeff.

And, uh, you know, once we launch, if you wanted me at some point and Danny to come back, we could dive into the individual categories and strains and why they were picked and why they work and why they don't work, is, is kind of where it's going.

Yeah. I'll, I'll give you my, my cell and you can text me when that 5 strain is coming online. We'll have you back on and we can chat that through. I'm sure the audience will be interested.

Sounds great.

Awesome. Awesome.

Danny, pleasure to meet you. Thank you.

Yeah. Nice to meet you too.

Great to see you too.

Thanks, Jeff.

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