Stress and Gut Health with Kiran Krishnan | How Humans Heal

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and today I'm excited to introduce you to Kieran. He is a research biologist and founder, co founder of Microbiome Labs. He specializes in understanding our gut and our gut biome. Thank you so much for joining me here today, Donny.

It's a pleasure to be here. It's been a while since I've seen your face and had a conversation with you directly. So it's an absolute pleasure to be able to do it.

And I have so much fun when you and I get to talk because you have all of this research in your mind and being able to translate that information from the research into how we can use it for us humans and our health and healing is, I think, key. And especially this area of understanding how to heal our gut. Because the thing is now we know so well that being human being exposed to stress affects our gut health in many ways. We can talk about that more in detail today. And yet we still haven't totally figured out what to do about that. And so this is why the research you do and the research you're going to talk about is so essential for our health. I think. So thanks again. What are your thoughts on that? Just this concept of connecting stress to our gut health.

Yeah. So I'm so glad we get to talk about that because to me, that is one of the most critical health topics to address. We've known for a long time that stress is not good for us. Right. But we haven't really understood molecularly how that is or why that is. There was a landmark publication in the Journal of Frontiers of immunology in 2015. That was a meta analysis. So they looked at a whole bunch of studies on this topic and what they concluded was mind boggling. They concluded that stress induced dysbiosis and leakiness in the gut, which means stress induced dysfunction in the gut. And then the leakiness and the gut that results was the number one driver of mortality, motility and mortality, sorry. And morbidity worldwide. Right. Wow.

That's like puts it right at the top of like what's causing chronic health issues is what's happening, this stress effect on our gut health.

Absolutely. And then here's the thing, it's a self perpetuating problem because when stress impacts your gut, it damages your gut, but then you need your gut to actually deal well with stress. And so now that your gut is damaged, stress actually impacts you even more, which makes it even harder to deal with stress. And the cycle goes on. Right. And Then what that study showed very clearly by evidence from tons of other studies, is how that process of stress induced gut damage leads to things like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer's, obesity, autoimmune disease. Virtually all of the chronic things that kill us can be tied back to that being a key source of many of these conditions. So your program and what you focus on couldn't be more important for human health. And I'm so glad we get to talk about it.

And I just love when I like when I wrote about it in my most recent book, the Master Stress Book, I just, I look at the research again and it is, it's so exciting to see, I mean, one to put it together. But the part that's exciting is that there's so much we can do to help ourselves recover from that effect of stress. We can, there's so much we can do to heal leaky gut and rebalance our gut bacteria. But I don't see, see that that information is widespread. Like I see that, you know, I mean, maybe a person might go to a practitioner who might recommend a general probiotic or people are aware of probiotics and maybe fermented foods. But what I'm, the perspective I'm usually coming from is I'm saying it's not going to help to just flood your gut with lactobacillus and bifidobacteria. That's not going to solve the issue, nor is it going to solve the issue to just overeat fermented foods. So I'd love your perspective on that because that's how I usually say it. But I would love from you to just say why is that it doesn't help to just flood our system, right?

It doesn't at all. So the analogy I use there all the time, it's like imagine you have a broken car in your driveway, right? And then you just take a bag of tools and you throw it at the car.

You're going to hit the car with the tools, you're going to flood it with tools, but nothing's going to happen. It's not going to get fixed because number one, you need an intelligent mechanic to use the right tool and fix the process in a particular fashion, right? If something's wrong with your carburetor, for example, if your car still has one, if you're old, then there's many different steps you do before you actually get to the carburetor and replace it. Then with the oil, if you need to change the oil, you have to remove the old Oil first before you put a new oil. There's a process there. So even with the gut, even though we have the tools, we have to be intelligent about how we utilize them, in what order and what kinds of things are very specific to repairing the types of damage that people are experiencing. So it is, it is a bit of a misnomer where it gets simplified, where it's like, oh, just drink this kefir. And oh, here's a probiotic. That's a gummy probiotic with 50 billion CFUs. And then you think, oh, I'm taking my probiotic, I'm drinking my kefir, I drink kombucha every day at lunch. Why isn't my gut healed? Right? But that's all like just throwing a bag of random tools at the car. So what I love about programs like this and then, you know, is that not everyone has access to a qualified practitioner. Right. Who can maybe walk them through how you actually heal your gut. But then when you have qualified practitioners like yourself making this information available to the masses, we can empower them in this conversation to know what to do specifically so we can absolutely address exactly what they do to fix it. It. And I will mention that one of the most exciting new developments in the world of probiotics that especially helps fix this issue of stress induced damage is this area of psychobiotics. And it's a cool term. I always thought it was awesome because psychobiotics basically mean probiotic bacteria that have an impact on the brain and it's a measured impact on the brain. So it's a super exciting area and we have that tool at hand.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is we, I mean, luckily we're more and more aware that we do have, that these bacteria living in our gut are important to our health. Right. We, if anyone listening, you know, like, okay, that's where we're really starting from, is saying, hey, these, you know, not all bacteria are bad. We actually need these bacteria and other microbes living in our gut and other areas of our body. Right. There's trillions of strains of bacteria and there's. How do they say there's more cells of other microbes than there are human cells in our, in our existence as an ecosystem here.

And even more than that, so, so there's, there's more microbial cells in your body than human cells. Right. And the numbers vary. It's anywhere from one and a half to two times more microbial cells. But the more staggering number, and the number that's actually more Meaningful is that we have 150 times more microbial DNA in our body than human DNA. Right. And use most of that DNA for function. So that's the part that really gets me. So one interesting thing about human DNA is that when they finished the Human Genome Project back in late 90s, they ended up sequencing the entire human genome and found that we have about 22,000 functional genes. It sounds like a lot, but the early estimations were that we would have about 150,000 genes because we're pretty complex.

So it was only 22,000. We're like, wait a minute, Thousand.

Right. And keep this in mind. An earthworm has about the same 22, 3000. Right.

It's a little humbling right there.

We're about as sophisticated as an earthworm is. But the thing that makes us different is that we house about two and a half million microbial genes in our system. That gives us all of this capability. Right. Microbes dictate the vast majority of functions that happen in your body. And if you don't have the right microbes, it alters your functionality. Right. And stress response is a beautiful example of that. And we could talk about specifically how our ancestors, who had healthy guts because they lived within the environment, they ate varied foods, they didn't have all these chemicals around them that destroyed their gut, how they responded to stress versus how we respond to stress difference. So we could do that if you wish.

Yeah, let's do. I mean, I think it's a. Just to kind of get that concept that, like, how you know, what an influence. Because again, these, these, these microbes, then what we call the microbiome is affecting our immune system, like how well we fend off infections. It's also, if it's out of balance, it can make us more susceptible to autoimmunity. We know these things well established in research. We know they also affect our nerv. Like you were saying before, psychobiotics is the effect that these microbes are having on our nervous system and our mood. So if we can, if we can get them rebalanced in the right way, we can influence and improve our mood if it, if it's needing help. And we know these, these, these, I say these guys are our microbiome. You know, these guys, they also influence our hormones and they influence, like in terms of cortisol, like you were mentioning, there's this whole gut brain axis, and they also are influencing.

Just our digestion and absorption and production of neurotransmitters in our gut. I mean, the List goes on and on. Right. Like so many ways that they're influencing us.

Yeah. I mean, at any given time, if you look. If you pull out a sample of your blood and you look at all the molecules floating around in your blood that are required for human function, and more than 50% of those molecules are actually synthesized by bacteria in your gut and not made by you. Meaning you can't make those, and you can't extract them from food. In order for us to function, we have to have the microbes on our side. If we don't have the right microbes at the right levels working for us, we end up eventually with disease. Most chronic illnesses come about because of an imbalance of certain types of microbes within the system. I'll give you one really good example of a critical nutrient that we need to function as humans that we cannot make ourselves and we cannot get from food. This nutrient is called urolithin A. Urolithin A is a compound that's critically important for fixing the mitochondria in your cells. So those are the little powerhouses and engines in the cell and then removing damaged mitochondria and replacing it with new mitochondria and improving damaged mitochondria within the cell itself. Now, this is critically important to human is at our cellular level. This is what allows our cells to function over time. What happens is our cells, the mitochondria, the little engines in the cell, like any other engine, they wear down, right? And they get damaged and they get choked up, and then they start to die. And if they die and they're not repaired, then the cell that the mitochondria is within will die. And then the tissue that those cells make up will die. And then you start losing capabilities, whether it's your skin and you start looking saggier and old. You go to heart failure or lungs, you develop lung disease, whatever it may be. Those cells are dying and killing the organs with it. So longevity and health is based on the health of our cells and our mitochondria. And we've outsourced this critically important nutrient to the bacteria in our gut. We don't make it right, so we don't make the critically important compound that's responsible for keeping our cells functioning. So that's how important these bacteria are, and that's how intimate our relationship is with them. And when you talk about the gut brain axis that you mentioned, it's one of the most fascinating parts of physiology because we always mention gut brain access. Sometimes people call the gut the second Brain and so on. And the gut and the brain are intimately attached through a neurological system called the vagus nerve that connects the brain to the gut, and then the gut is covered in a neurological system called the enteric nervous system. Right. So the enteric nervous system connects to the vagus nerve, which then goes up to the brain and connects it to the brain and central nervous system. The thing is, the enteric nervous system has the second highest density of neurons and endings, more so than our spinal cord. So it's a very complex neurological organ that is in complete control by microbes. And in fact, the gut and the brain are actually two parts of the same system. They're not two separate systems that have all connected. They're all connected. They're the same system. From an embryo stage, embryonically, they develop from the same exact tissue at the same exact time. Right.

Isn't that amazing? It just gives me goosebumps to think about it.

Yeah. And they communicate constantly. It's a bi directional highway. So the gut communicates with the brain, the brain communicates with the gut and vice versa. Right. And stress response is one of those critical examples of when the gut and the brain aren't working together. It totally kills you literally. Right. Over time, takes a while because it develops into chronic illness, but it will absolutely kill you. Right. So that's the part that's really exciting to start to learn about and then also learn about the solutions that we have at hand. So let's talk about what happens when you encounter stress. Right.

Yes. I want you to come back to that. Definitely. Go for it.

Yeah. So if I'm one of our ancient humans, we're living, let's say even three, 400 years ago. Right. Hunter gatherer, forager type, living within the land, relatively healthy, eating off the land. So you're eating dirt, you're drinking waters from rivers and streams, you're eating wild game, you're foraging for food, gathering food and all that. You've got a very robust and healthy microbiome. And we see that in the current indigenous hunter gatherer type tribes that still exist in places like Papua New guinea and places like the Hadza tribe in Tanzania and in the rainforests of South America. So they still exist and they're a great model for what we were like not that long ago. So what happens is we use stress as a survival mechanism. Right. And stress is a normal thing in your body. It's really there to alert you to.

Danger because we need it, it's essential.

It is, yeah. Without stress, we wouldn't exist as a species. In fact, there are studies on mice where they cut the vagus nerve because the stress response goes from the brain to the gut, right? And we know that because when people are really sc. One of the things that happens is your bowels get loose and all kinds of things happen in your gut. You, in fact, feel it in your gut first, right?

Stomach ulcers, we know, are linked to stress, right?

Stress. And we always say, you know, like, oh, I got a bad gut feeling about that, right? Because the gut has that other brain, the enteric nervous system, that's communicating with your brain up here. So. So, so the way it works is that stress response induces something called the flight or fight response, right? The reason for that is we're supposed to be in tune with potential dangers around us. If we sense there's a danger somewhere, we're supposed to get our body ready to fight that danger or flee from it, right? If we didn't do that, we would probably get killed by that danger. And this has happened. And I was talking about studies in mice. So they do studies in mice where they modulate the stress response with. The mice don't feel any stress, right? They don't have the flight or fight response. They don't have the HPA activation. That's the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis activation, which is the axis in which stress turns into flight or fight response. They can knock that out. They put that mouse in, like a cage with a snake, and then the mouse just goes up to the snake and climbs up on it and pats at its head and then gets eaten, right? And so you see it very clearly in studies that if you don't have stress response, it will kill you. Because it does, you have no fear. You have no rationale behind things. So early humans walking down, you know, hiking through the grasslands will hear a rustling in the grass, and that heightens your senses. That starts creating a stress response. The first thing that perceives that stress is your hypothalamus, right? So it takes in auditory, visual, and other cues. It goes right to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus goes, this sounds suspicious. It starts releasing a hormone that eventually activates your adrenal glands. Then your adrenal glands start releasing cortisol, which is your stress hormone, to get your body ready for the flight or fight. Now, on one end, it's releasing cortisol. On the other end, it's actually activating your sympathetic nervous system. And what the goal of your sympathetic nervous system is, is to increase your respiratory rate, increase blood perfusion to your heart and your brain so you can think and be clear, and you can pump a lot of blood through your, through your heart, and then increase blood perfusion to your muscles as well. So let's take that for a moment. So blood has to go to your brain, your heart and your muscles, and it diverts blood away from other areas like your digestive tract and so on. Right? So now you're in the sympathetic activation, which is the fight or flight activation, that is counteracting the parasympathetic, which is rest and digest and repair. Right? So we're not repairing anything. We're not digesting, we're not resting. We are in the fight or flight response. Now, in order for the sympathetic nervous system to get blood to the heart and the brain and to the muscles, it uses the immune system. So it actually releases chemicals called catecholamines and irritates the system in the brain, in the heart and the muscles to recruit immune cells to that area, which will increase inflammatory responses. Inflammation equals perfusion, right? So that's how the sympathetic nervous system gets blood to the brain, the heart and the muscles. Which means that when you start the flight or fight response and your body's starting to get ready, your brain, your heart, your muscles are inflamed, right? It's the same kind of inflammation that causes disease and damage and all that, but it's needed at that moment to get blood to that area very quickly. Right? And again, at this point, it's survival mechanism. So your body's not thinking, oh, the long term implications of this, it's going, we need to not get eaten right now. Right? So that's happening in the sympathetic nervous system. Now, cortisol, as it goes up, one of the things that happens to it is it gets dumped into the gut. And it gets dumped into the gut for a couple of reasons. Number one, it gets metabolized by certain microbes in the gut. So part of the cortisol does, and the byproducts of that metabolization go to the kidneys and increase sodium, potassium and calcium channels in the kidneys to bring more fluid into your circulation to increase your blood pressure. Right? Blood pressure gets you more blood to your heart, your brain, and so on. Now, again, having blood pressure chronically is not a good thing. But in that moment, your body doesn't care. It's like you need to fight or flee. The other thing that happens to cortisol is it starts binding Things called glucocorticoid receptors. So basically receptors that bind cortisol. And when you bind enough cortisol in those receptors, you actually start to get a negative feedback signal to turn this whole machine down right now.

And I'm so glad you're reviewing this, Kiran, because it's. And I talk about this in my book too, like understanding this is what our healthy stress response to protect us looks like. But in our modern day lives. You're going to tell this part of the story next, I'm guessing, is we're not getting to turn it off.

We can't turn it off. That's the big problem, right? So a healthy ancestor is going to experience the stress, going to get ready to fight or flee and maybe fight or flee. And then when, when they're away from the danger, all of this gets turned off. They go back to rest and digest. Their brain's no longer inflamed, their hearts no longer inflamed, their muscles aren't inflamed. And in fact, when they go to sleep at night, a system turns on called bdnf, which is brain derived neurotropic factor, which actually starts repairing all of that inflammatory damage that occurred in the brain and the heart and other areas as well. Right? So they can experience stress, they can use it to save their lives, but then they come down from it and they repair it. And then they go on, next day, they start completely new and fresh again. Now what's happening in the, in the modern world is that process where cortisol gets dumped into the gut. There's one thing that goes wrong because we tend to be missing certain microbial components. One of the key things that occurs because we're missing certain microbial components in our gut is cortisol makes your gut super leaky in a very short amount of time, right? It creates amazing transient leakiness in the gut. Leaky gut drives a different type of inflammatory response, which increases a particular type of cytokine, which is a chemical messenger in inflammation called interleukin 6 or IL6. When IL6 goes up, what tends to happen is IL6 can go back to the brain and reactivate the hypothalamus again, turning on a new cycle of stress response.

And it just snowballs, right?

Snowballs. And then that causes more cortisol to be released, more cortisol to be dumped in the gut, causing more leaky gut, more IL6, it goes back and turns on the same thing again, right?

Round and round.

Yeah, round and round. It keeps going. So Nowadays what happens is a single stressor in the morning. It could be something small, what used to affect us in a particular biological way that could kill us. We have the same biological response to a bad tweet or an email that was annoying, or being late in the morning, or somebody cutting you off in traffic, right? And you have to swerve and honk a little bit. So all these things that aren't at all life threatening in any way, shape or form elicit the same degree of life threatening like response in the body that we had back in the day, right? So now what's happening is when, when cortisol goes up, it creates a leakiness in the gut. The IL6 goes up, it returns on the HPA axis. That means a single stressor is keeping you in the stress cycle throughout the day, which means you're continuously in that sympathetic state. So you're not resting, you're not digesting, you can't break down food, assimilate the nutrients properly, you can't repair any damaged parts of the body. You're not functioning properly because your brain is inflamed, your heart is inflamed, your muscles are inflamed, your gut is shut down. And here's the other thing that happens during that period, right? There are microbes in your gut and both bacteria and viruses that are called opportunistic organisms, right? They're not strong enough to be pathogens all the time, but they're opportunistic because under certain conditions they use that as the opportunity to become virulent and start producing. Many of these organisms have developed the capability of looking at stress hormone levels in the host and using that as a signal to increase their virulence factors and start replicating. So every time you have this bout of stress, those organisms go, holy cow, this is the best time for us.

And they start replicating, they start having a party. I know, I was like, they're just like. And this is why so much of the time I say like these, these microbes, they, they love it when we're stressed because that's when they get to thrive. I, I'd be curious, I see this with viruses too in the body. You know, when we're, when we're in this stress state, it seems like they just pick up on it. But you're explaining they're picking up on the chemical signals in our immune system and our hormones is no wonder they can tell when we're stressed probably better than we can tell when we're stressed. And they just go for it.

Yeah. They read the chemistry, right? And perfect examples of that, right? So, for example, when people are stressed out, pops acne, right? If you're someone on the acne, if you've ever had herpes, right? People that get lesions, really stressed out, boom. You get the cold sore, right? Or people with cytomegalovirus or Epstein Barr virus that gives all kinds of neurological dysfunctions. When you're really stressed, you start to feel those dysfunctions more. And of course, you gain weight when you're stressed, because the opportunistic microbes in your gut mess up your metabolism and they release neurotransmitters to make you want to eat more sweet things and so on, because that's how they feed themselves. This is their party, right? They're going, I want you, host, to bring cupcakes to the party.

They do.

They will literally send messages to your brain to make you want to eat cupcakes, right?

Because it's amazing, isn't it? Like. Like, I really. You have to, like, when you get a craving for something, stop for a minute and think, is this my back? The bacteria in my gut that are causing me to want to eat this thing to feed them? Because we know it's really not feeding us.

Yeah. It's not nutritious in any way for us. Right. It's not good for our system. But they are very powerful at being able to do that, because the moment they sense the stress hormones, they go, this is our opportunity. And then they will throw everything at it. And in fact, one of the things that some of these microbes can do is throw out more neurotransmitters that actually increase your stress even more.

Right.

You want to keep the host in that state. Right.

They literally are controlling the whole scene. And, like, so it helps to. I love that we're sharing this, because I really believe that the more we understand it, the more we can become aware and conscious about the choices we're making so that we can get control back of our body and our health.

Absolutely. And we absolutely can. That's the good news about it. Right? So, you know, and I mentioned earlier. So then. So where the whole system falls apart is when cortisol enters the gut and it makes your gut leaky because you're missing certain components in the gut, right? And that's where the whole thing falls apart. Because if cortisol doesn't make your gut leaky because you have the right kind of bacteria and Right. Kind of bacterial byproducts, then you. You can go through the Cycle of binding all of those glucocorticoid receptors and turning the system off that missing component. Well, we've been working on this for, you know, eight, nine years. We've been working with a research institute called the apc, which is in Cork, Ireland. They're the biggest microbiome research institute in the world. Right. And they're super well known, published tens of thousands of papers. We've been working with them on this. And what we were doing is we're screening people in Ireland who had really good stress response and mood control and also slept really well, and then matching them to age match. Individuals that didn't have good stress response, did not sleep well, would tend to be anxious. And we're looking at their microbiomes to see what is the difference between individuals. What you start to find is that people that have really balanced moods and are stable and have good sleep and all that tend to have a particular type of bacteria in the gut. And the one that we found is called Bifidolongum 1714. And the reason it's unique is on its outer surface, it has these carbohydrates. We call it an exopolysaccharide. And in fact, components of that within the cell membrane are also called peptidoglycans. So they have these unique carbohydrates that they make that 99.9% of other bacteria don't. And it's this carbohydrate that actually prevents cortisol from making your gut leaky.

Wow. Really cuts the process off.

Yeah. Which is amazing.

That is amazing.

When we discovered this bacteria being very present in people who had good stress response and absent in people without stress response, first thing we did is say is test whether it's those unique carbohydrates that it produces on its outer coating. Right. So we took a version of the strain and we knocked out its ability to produce the carbohydrates. And we did some studies with it in a stress model for animals, and we found that it didn't work. It didn't do anything. So then when we. When we gave those animals the version with the carbohydrates on it, then absolutely, we saw all the stress benefits. Right. So. And what's really interesting about it, then, when you dig into the literature and you go, why is it that these unique carbohydrates have this effect? In fact, it turns out that these unique carbohydrates are a critical component to early brain development in utero. So the baby's brain development, right? So the development of the size of the brain, the synapses, the neurological synapses, all the neurological connections, the blood, brain barrier that protects the brain, the myelin sheets, which are like insulin, around all the nerves. Those are all arguably some of the most important developments you want to see in your human baby in utero. And all of those are stimulated by mom's gut bacteria producing these peptidoglycans.

Right.

And so from day one when you were in, in utero, the, the function of your brain is dictated in large part by having adequate exposure to these peptidoglycan. And if mom doesn't have enough of that, her gut is not healthy enough, she's not producing enough peptidoglycan, then you start to see significant neurological development issues in the baby. So babies are born with, you know, neurodevelopment disorders, attention deficit disorders, spectrum disorders like autism and so on. Right? So this compound has been important since you were developing your brain. And as it turns out, in adults, it also mitigates the stress induced inflammatory response that keeps triggering the HPA axis. And so it works in two ways. One is it prevents cortisol from making the gut leaky and then inducing that inflammatory response, which re triggers the brain. The second way it works, which is really fascinating, is it can bind to receptors on the lining of the gut. And remember, the gut and the brain are very closely connected. It binds to receptors in the lining of the gut, which sends a neurotransmitter up your vagus nerve to your brain, which actually changes your brainwave function.

Wow.

These microbes can change your brainwave function. So everyone knows that meditation can be good for you if you do it correctly, right?

Yes.

Now, the reason meditation is beneficial, this is the main reason, is it puts your brain into something called a theta wave band. Theta wave band is that flow state. You're very cognitively aware. Artists call it the flow state where they can basically, you know, their body's just doing the work that they do. Right. Automatically, without thinking about it, your coping centers, your brain are turned on, meaning all kinds of negative emotions and all that come in. You can rationalize it very easily, it doesn't bother you the same, and you're in a much more relaxed state. When you can go to that state. When you experience a stressor, it actually dramatically reduces the perception of that stress. When you be in that state and you experience a stressor, it heightens you up immediately. Right. So that's the big difference between some people that can be relaxed about something and then other People that are all frantic and worked up and all that. About the same exact thing. Right.

They're actually in a different brain wave state.

Exactly. Their brain are functioning on a different frequency. And brainwave biology is very, very well known and studied for decades. And it's just fascinating to know that there's a microbe that can change your brain waves. Right.

That is, that is. Now when I started to hear you talking about this, I'm like, okay, so how do we, first of all, how do we know if we have enough of these guys and if not, how do we get more of them?

Yeah, that's the most important part. Right. So how do we have enough? I would say that if you experience stress anxiety on most days or throughout every day and you have issues sleeping, you likely don't have enough of these microbes. Right. Because what should happen when you encounter a stressor big or small, you should be able to experience the stress acutely very shortly, but then be completely done with it in a short period of time. And you will especially not have ongoing negative emotions rolling in your head about that stressor. Because when you don't turn on the coping mechanisms of your brain, that's what happens. Stress creates this ongoing negative emotion cascade. And that's probably, that's one of the reasons why people go from just experiencing stress throughout the day to having this basal level of anxiety throughout the day. Right. You're in this continuous heightened state and then what happens is you start melting into depression. Because depression is defined as the absence of hope, Right. And anxiety creates a doom and gloom picture in your mind of everything. You start to lose hope. When you have enough of that happening throughout the days, you actually go into full on clinical depression. Right. So if you have anywhere on those spectrum, any of those things, you absolutely don't have enough of this type of species in your gut.

Something a lot of people don't know is that too much stress can actually create an abundance of health problems like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, anxiety, migraines, insomnia, even fertility issues. This is because high stress puts your adrenal glands on overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline, which controls your digestion, hormones, immune system, energy, focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free seven day stress reset program. It's designed to help support weight loss, digestive healing and hormone balancing. It includes support for integrating self care. Daily tips come to you by email and video. Gluten free Dairy free meal plans as well as grocery shopping lists, journal pages and more. This free program will help you beat stress and put you on the path to wholeness in your body. Get your plan now for free@drdani.com now.

The beauty, the beauty of all of this is you can easily take this as a probiotic and then completely change how your body responds to stress. So we've now published seven clinical trials on this particular, particular strain and this particular product that has shown that it dramatically reduced the perception of stress. It reduced the amount of cortisol that's released during the stress response. It reduces all the types of inflammation that stress tends to increase. It activates the coping center of the brain and changes your brain wave function. And it improves sleep indices at nighttime too. Because when you're in this heightened state of sympathetic nervous activation stress, it becomes really hard to sleep for most people. Right. Hence disorders occur. Now why is that? An added problem is because when you experience stress throughout the day and all the inflammation that happens in the brain and so on, when you go to sleep, that's when you're supposed to repair all of that. Right. And what happens if you're not sleeping adequately each night?

You don't getting the repair.

Exactly. So you keep experiencing this. Over time, the damage starts accumulating and then guess what happens? It leads to the formation of Alzheimer's and dementia.

Yeah.

Now we know since 2017 that the biggest driver of things like Alzheimer's and dementia is the same inflammatory stress response that's due to leakiness in the gut. Right. So what we experience now is anxiety is as some degree of depression as mood disorders are actually pre Alzheimer's, pre dementia, because it's the same pathways that lead to that. Right. So brain health is very compromised in the modern world. We know this from cognitive function. People get brain fog and memory recall issues and all that. You start to feel that even in your late 30s, early 40s, early 50s and so on, you start to experience kind of a slowing down of the brain a little bit. And then you add on to that all of this hyper stimuli from all of these places, your phones, your iPads, you know, the TVs and all that. It kind of throws even adults into this ADD ADHD kind of mindset. And it is also mediated by stress. Right. So it's super exciting that a probiotic can certainly help this, that's a psychobiotic with that, with that peptidoglycan strain for us. The product is called Zenbiome and Zen Biome is absolutely critical in modulating that, that stress response. Right.

And then so, I mean, it's so amazing. And at the same time, it's like, so, you know, it's so powerful, like to see, wow, here's something we can do to help. And at the same time, what I always like to emphasize is these bacteria need a healthy place to live. And I, to me, it's because people will say, well, do I have leaky gut? Do I not have leaky gut? What I would say is, we all have some degree of leaky gut. It's more about, is it mild, moderate or severe. And if we don't pay attention to healing the leaky gut, even if we put in these good guys, they're going to have a hard time surviving. Right. We need to really help their ecosystem out.

Yeah, you have to fix the terrain as well. Right. And not only do you have to fix the terrain that these microbes are going into, you have to maintain the terrain. Right. So you have to have certain healthy habits in order to really maximize the benefits out of certain types of probiotic strains. So some of those key healthy habits are, of course, cleaning up your diet. Right. And people hear that all the time. But it's really important how, how influential that is on your microbiome. So even things like trying to move towards organic or cleaner food so you're not getting as much exposure to pesticides and herbicides, which of course all act as antibiotics in your gut and kill off good bacteria, trying to diversify your diet to a certain degree. Right. Because our ancestors evolved eating 600 different types of foods annually, maybe like 15 to 20. And our microbiome is designed based on that real diversity in diet. So there are lots of microbes in your gut who are waiting for food and aren't getting the right types of food because we're eating the same, you know, half a dozen things every single day. Right.

Well, the funny thing I see, I don't know if you hear this too, but like, sometimes we think, okay, I'm gonna eat more different foods. But then we end up eating. We try to eat them all in one day, and it's like, no, we can't. Our digestion can't handle that much all at once. It's more. I think it's a really difficult concept as humans, how do we kind of increase our variety and diversity over time, you know, so that we, so that we create this effect in our digestion, but it doesn't mean, you know, eat four different seeds and four different greens and all in one serving. One meal, right? It's like how to do it in a smart way that feeds. Because these bacteria, they don't need a lot of food, they just need a little bit of food.

They do. They need a little bit and a little bit of variety, right? So. And I think you're absolutely right in pointing that out, because what people then tend to do is they make it very difficult on themselves, right? They're trying to figure out like, all new cooking and all new types of ways of preparing things, and then they get overwhelmed by it, and then it's easier just not to do it. Right? And so my advice to people always has been this, you know, look in your local neighborhoods and all that, you'll have ethnic grocery stores, for example, an Asian market or a Middle Eastern market or something, and you'll find different types of produce, different types of fruits, different types of food based in those places, right. Than your, your general grocery store. If you, if you can focus on adding one thing each week to your diet and it's, you know, a couple meals of the week, it doesn't have to be every meal of every.

Nothing new, just to switch it up, nothing new.

And then you maintain that that new thing that you had added in, and then next week try to add one more thing. And again, that one more thing could be, oh, my God, I just found these new nuts that I've never had before at this store. I'm just going to eat these new nuts, right? Or you might find a new fru. A star fruit, which you may not have ever had, or durian or something like that that you'll find that you've never had before. Just add that in into one meal of that week, right? And then maintain that, that that new food product to some degree in your diet. Again, it doesn't have to be every day or every week, but keep adding, you know, every week or every other week a new ingredient or new product into your food, into your diet and maintain some of those as you go along. By the end of the year, you would have added 15, 20 new things to your system, and your gut bacteria will be perfectly healthy, right. And perfectly happy with that. So that's a really important thing that you can do. The other thing that's really simple is just getting outdoors more in natural environments, right? And I don't mean walking down the sidewalk in your neighborhood. That's better than nothing, right? Absolutely. Go for walks, move the system, get some movement, and cardiovascular system will benefit from that. But if you can go on a hike, if you live Anywhere near areas near me. There's lots of forest preserves to go on, hikes on. If you live on the coast, go to the beach. You know, places that are natural, undisturbed environments and, and have a snack while you're there. Don't sanitize your hands before you have a snack. And I always encourage people like, if you want to maximize the time you're spending outside, you know, prescribe it to yourself, right? Say I'm going to do 30 minutes outside in this environment three times a week and make it medicine, make it prescriptive. And when you're there, if you're going for a hike, don't just have your hands in your pockets and walk around, touch things, touch trees, touch rocks, pick up things from the ground and touch bushes and so on. And then grab a sandwich or grab an apple or something like that and eat it. Because that's how we interacted with nature back in the day. And that's how we got some of these outside microbes into our system, which can enhance the diversity within our microbiome. Those are two simple things you can do. You can get a dog into your house. Studies do show that dogs increase the diversity of households and actually reduce the incidence rate of allergies, asthma and immune dysfunctions in kids. You know, you can of course, and as you should really start to work on mindfulness work, right, Managing the stress from the outside, whether it's meditation or, you know, some sort of escape or breathing techniques, there's so many things you can do to try to manage that stress response from the outside in. Another thing to do is try to improve vagal nerve tone, right? So activate your vagus nerve. And there's a lot of tips online. There's even now devices that you can use and hold against your vagus nerve to activate your vagus nerve. This gargling, there's different types of breathing and all that. So if you just Google vagus nerve support, and I know you might even have it in your books.

Yes, I do, I do. And I was going to say, I mean, one of my favorites for myself lately is singing. I mean, I never was really singing, but now I purposely set myself up with singing lessons because I know if I'm singing, I'm activating and healing the vagus nerve function. So it's. Yeah, there's ways to do it that can actually be fun. I think so much of this can, if we look at it that way, we can see it as fun. Going for a walk on the beach and enjoying nature can be Actually fun. Even going to a local farmer's market and buying different foods you haven't had before, right? This is, these are ways for us to actually just kind of like have fun with it too. And I think sometimes we have to remind ourselves and allow ourselves that.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, a lot of times we deprioritize those things because they're not work, they're not the school, they're not taking your kids here, there and doing all the errands and all that, right? They seem like, like they seem like luxuries that don't necessarily afford ourselves. We go, I don't have time for that. Right? But they're just as important as anything else you do for your health, right? They're just as important as eating. They're just as important as taking whatever medicine you might need to take. They're just as important as brushing your teeth, right. And having certain level of hygiene and all that. All of those things you do for your day to day health. And in practice you have to go outside and do those types of things. You have to enjoy singing, like you said. And in fact, I'm glad you bring that up because one of the things I realized during the pandemic is, you know, when, when everyone's kind of locked down and stuff, right? I mean, there's nothing open, you're not interacting with people. You know, I get like kind of worked up in my mind and cooped up and all that. And one of the most relieving things for me was just to get in my car and just drive. And I'd have the music blasting and singing at the top of my lungs, right? And I'll just be driving down the highway, you know, going nowhere, nowhere. I'm just going like 20 miles in one direction, get on an exit, turn around and come back. Put it on cruise control. And it was so relieving, you know, it was so like. And I still do that now, like if I'm just, you know, stressed about something, a hot shower where. And I insisted in my new house that we have speakers in the shower for that very reason. So I can listen to music in the shower. And you have a hot shower and you're singing and you're enjoying yourself. So it's a, it's a really great tip that you do. Now a couple other things that are super fun but also have been scientifically shown to reduce cortisol response and stress response and actually help your gut. Microbiome number one is massage, right? So that's one of my Go to things. So even a 20 minute massage actually dramatically increases oxytocin, which is that bonding love hormone, and dramatically reduces stress hormones, Right. And inflammation. So I travel a lot, I try to get a massage at once, every couple of weeks, at least release. And it's so reducing and it's so calming for me. The other thing is physical interaction with people, right? So when you see people hug them, hugging has a profound effect on your microbiome and your stress levels and complimenting people, right? So, and this is counterintuitive, like if you compliment people and you say something nice to somebody, studies have shown that it actually increases your oxytocin person and brings down your stress hormones. Right? So being kind, being altruistic, being social, these things all actually have biochemical benefits in your overall health. So those, when you add all these things up that we talked about and you start doing them in practice, you'll start to see a dramatic change in the health of your gut, the resilience of your gut, which is really important, and the diversity and so on. And then when you add in things like the Zenbiom, it has a more dramatic effect because you're putting it into a really healthy system. Right. Or at least a benefiting, improving, functioning system. So, yeah, so you have a lot of capability in the palm of your own hands and within your own minds to be able to impact your health in a profound way. And it doesn't have to be complicated.

I love it. I love it. And you know, one of my favorite products that you have at Microbiome Labs is the Megaspore product. And it's because to me, clinically, what I've seen is it's made such a huge difference. It has such an amazing capability to help address those opportunistic bacteria that you mentioned before to I refer to, and this is based on what I've, you know, a lot of what I read from the research and learned from you, Karen, is that, that I look at it as a traffic director for many years I've called it a traffic director, but you might enjoy this. The other day I started calling it the bouncer because.

It'S like if we just have certain bacteria that are just floating through La dee da, but they're not really helping us with an imbalance. What's the point of that? We want the bouncer to come in and be like, you guys can stay, but you guys gotta go. It's like we need a bouncer in our gut. Sometimes when things are all out of balance and right. Overgrowing we need a bacteria that can go in there and protect us.

Absolutely. So if you think about. And the way I always thought about the spores is that. So imagine. And I gave this guard, this analogy a lot. Imagine you have a garden out back, right? Yes.

The garden analogy. I love this.

Yes. Tell us like a diverse, healthy garden, but then it experiences some sort of chemical spill or something and you've got weeds overgrowing and you've got, you know, the good plants are dying off or their numbers are really low. You've got all these pathogenic weeds and so on popping up. It'd be like standing on the side of the garden and then just trying to throw a bunch of seeds into it. And then surrounding the garden, you've got acid rain coming down and you're hoping that the seeds makes it past the acid rain and gets to this, to the soil, makes it in the soil and somehow grows and competes against all of these relatively robust weeds that are now growing in there. Right. That's the approach that most probiotic techniques are using. The way the spores are, is that you actually have an intelligent gardener that can step into the garden, identify the weeds, physically pull them out and get rid of them. And actually.

Yes, that's what we want.

Yeah. Till and change the soil for the good plants, remove any sort of toxicity through the chemical exposure. And doing all of this by surviving through that acid rain because the gardener has protection. And then in a very intelligent way, modulating the space to bring back about the diversity and the complexity of a really healthy garden. That's exactly what the spores do. And what's so interesting about it is that we can't do that ourselves. Our immune system can't go into our gut and go, you're bad, you're good. Know, let's make some changes in what's going on in this ecosystem. We've outsourced that function to microbes in the environment. Right. So spores, you naturally encounter them in the outside environment. And nature never knew that we were going to develop to a point where we would divorce ourselves from exposure to these spores. Right. So through evolutionary biology is that we'll give this job to the spores because we're always going to be eating them. We're always going to be living off the land, we're always going to be drinking rivers and streams. Evolutionary biology couldn't foretell that we were going to be in these sterile, concrete jungles. Right.

We like. Yeah, we did. We separated ourselves from our exposure to them, thinking we were afraid of them even. And we're having to kind of, like, become unafraid of these microbes again and realize they're helping us.

Exactly. And then that's. And so that became. The first. Very first product we launched was megaspore back in 2013. And the whole idea of it was, number one, two to, like you said, kind of make those selections in the gut. These microbes do something called quorum sensing. They can read all the microbial signatures when they get in the gut, and when they. When they detect an overgrown or problematic organism, they will go sit next to them and actually starve them to death and remove those organisms. Right. And when they see good bacteria not growing enough, they will actually produce compounds like prebiotics to increase the growth of good.

I mean, that is, like, the coolest thing, I think, especially when I'm. I mean, and I. Because I'm. I'm measured, you know, like, I'm seeing patients where I'm doing a DNA analysis of their gut bacteria when they first come to see me. And then I'm using. Megaspore is the name of this. This product, the bacillus, along with some antimicrobial herbs, and, of course, the terrain healing and the stress healing and the. All of that together. But what then I observe is we go back and recheck and we. We can see that those overgrowing bacteria are gone, and now the person's feeling better. And we're turning off things like autoimmunity, that. And. And chronic HPV viruses and other infections that were in conventional medicine. That's unheard of, but it actually can happen with the help of the. And it's what I find, too, Karen, is that, like, you'll hear about a lot of practitioners, someone hears that they have bacterial overgrowth, and they end up throwing the kitchen sink at their digestion. Right. Like every different kind of antimicrobial and every different kind of biofilm disruptors. And I say to my patients, listen, okay, I understand those tools are there if we need them, but let's start simple on the things that are very likely to work well. Well. And if we need to, we can turn to a biofilm disruptor. But what I find is often. I often don't even need to, because these spore bacteria and the simple antimicrobials can do such a good job.

Yeah. I mean, you could go with a single berberine, for example, with the spores, and then you get a lot more intelligent and precise changes in the microbiome. Right. And one of the problems I also see with the overuse of the antimicrobials and so on. On is at the same time they're starving out a lot of the bacteria because those individuals can't eat any fibers, they can't eat any prebiotics and all that. Right. So which are the critical components to feed the important large bile bacteria that need to produce for you things like short chain fatty acids and all that other healing compounds? Right. So if you're going through a period of just barraging and hitting.

The microbiome really hard with things and you're not feeding it adequately, then you're really causing some turmoil in the system. And oftentimes it becomes hard to rescue the system back from that turmoil. Right. Because it doesn't naturally go back to a healthy state. Once you remove all of that stimuli, you need the dietary management, you need the spores, you need some of the other things that work on the balance as you're trying to reduce some of these pathogens down.

It's a much more effective approach where you're thinking about it because, you know, we see just too much as bombarding of the gut. And then people, their guts often are in worse shape because they weren't. The guts weren't assisted to come back to the right state. Right. So. And you know, in general, like any other ecosystem, just killing a bunch of things is not a process of healing. Right. We need to do some killing to, in. In some methodical way as part of the rebirth and regrowth. But you know, it's no different than having an intelligent gardener go in your garden and specifically pull out weeds versus just going in your garden and blowtorching every plant in there. Right. Hoping and then leaving it and then hoping just the good ones come back. Right. It doesn't happen that way. So. So I'm glad you mentioned that. But at the end of the day, so then if you use the spores, which are foundational, really, we have to just add that back to our system, right. Because. Because we're designed to gain exposure to them on a regular basis, which we don't. So they do such foundational things to our gut, including sealing up leaky gut. We were the first to publish studies on a probiotic that sealed up leaky gut so effectively in a short period of time. So you have the spores as foundational, you start adjusting your diet and your lifestyle and so on. You may use an antimicrobial under the care of a clinician, but then you want it. Then you can add in things like the Zen biome for the mood issues and the stress issues and the sleep issues. Right. So you can kind of tack on some of those things to improve the symptomology that you're, you're going after. But the beauty of all of this is that it's all possible, it's all within your reach. Right. The right information, the right knowledge. You can start making all these choices that'll impact you in a positive way. And it's all additive. Right. So we mentioned a lot of things that you can do. The best approach is really doing a little bit of all of them. Right. Because when you combine them all, when you combine the diet, the lifestyle, the supplementation, the food, all of that stuff, then you start to see the profound difference because you're going at it with. In many different directions.

Yeah, I talk in my, I gotta send you one of my books. My book that I talk about the, the stress recovery protocol. I know, right. There's, there's three phases. One is, is calming down the stress response, which is what you're talking about. We got to get out of that stress mode first. And then we can rebalance, we can tend this garden and get the, not only the garden and our gut, but our whole body, everything back in balance again. And then it's about, to me the third phase is resiliency, maintaining it over time. But by the time you've now integrated all of this into your day to day, you can maintain it now you're, you know, it's part of your normal routine too to be doing these activities. And that's how we can then maintain that resiliency so we don't find ourselves right back in the same spot again.

Absolutely.

Oh my gosh. So, so fun to talk to you, Karen.

It is with you as well. And we probably do this for two more hours. But you know what? I think one of the other important things to mention to people is that when we talk about stress response and the messed up gut and all that everyone lives within a microbiome cloud in your households, right. So you shoot microbes. All the, has been shown through a couple of really awesome creative studies. So if you are an individual that really cares about your health and you're going through a lot of stress and emotions and you want to improve that, it would behoove you to actually try to get the other people that live in your house to also think about the same, maybe engage in some of the behaviors because collectively your results will be much better than just one person trying to let it alone when they have two or three people who are negatively influencing their Microbiome. Right. So turn them onto this program, turn them on to this, to this talk. You know, if you have Donnie's book, either share it or have someone else within your household also get a copy so they can read it. You know, share supplements and foods and things like that. Because you have to do it as a household for it to be supremely effective. Right. You can help yourself to a certain degree. But if you really want to see that progress and then build a long term resilience, you're talking about that in the household needs to be healthy as well.

Well, wow, that's such an important point. Thank you. And it's very motivating and inspiring. I feel like I want to come hang out in your house for a day and just see everything you guys.

Do there.

Biome activities here. So yeah, we want to diversify the home, keep the home microbiome itself healthy. And it works, you know, it works. It provides resilience.

So cool. Oh my gosh. Well, thanks again so much for joining me. Anyone listening the products that we mentioned you can find@drdonnie. And if you have any other questions, please be sure to write in to me. I'd be happy to answer them for you. And thanks again, Kiran for joining me. I look forward to talking to you again soon.

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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