EP 68: WTH ?!? The Gut-Brain Connection with Wade Lightheart

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Welcome to what the Health an independent approach to your health span. Have you noticed how our healthcare system may not have your best interest in mind? Join Dr. Eckel in this fun and sometimes disturbing exploration of the state of healthcare and what it means for you. Now, here's your host, Dr. Eckel.

All right, welcome back, everybody. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel and this is what the hell. My guest today is Mr. Wade Lightheart and he has some accolades that I really want to highlight here. He's author, athlete, nutrition and expert on fixing digestion. Three time Canadian national all natural bodybuilding champion. Say that five times real quickly. Who competed as a vegetarian. He's a former Mr. Universe competitor who host of the awesome Health podcast. Wade is one of the world's premier authorities on nutrition, natural nutrition and training methods, which we might bring that into our topic today. Having majored in sports science at the University of New Brunswick, has authored numerous books on health that have been sold in over 80 countries. Wade also serves as an advisor of the American Anti Cancer Institute, co founder and president at Bio Optimizers, a digestive and health optimizer optimization company. Wade, welcome aboard to what the health.

I love that. I love that. Interesting because it's one of the things that we used to say with a lot of my friends is like what the health is going on. So I love the title. Thank you for having me.

Indeed. You know, our topic today, I want to really tie into the gut brain connection with you and also with the natural training and weightlifting. I am sure you are still involved in that realm deeply and with your kind of natural health background. Those are some big. How did you get into that aspect of, you know, being?

Sure. I was a kid growing up in Canada playing hockey and I was relatively small for the sport, although I was probably stronger than most of my regular or contemporaries because I lived at the end of a, end of a dirt road five miles to my nearest neighbor in the middle of the woods. And I was regularly, you know, cutting up trees and plowing the land and, you know, clearing the land and hauling rocks. So I had a very robust lifestyle. But I wanted to be bigger and stronger for hockey. So I started lifting weights, built a gym. I saw a bodybuilding magazine with my sister, gave it to me with Troy Zucloudo on the COVID He won Mr. California, had two pretty girls on it with them. And I was like, wow, maybe I could do that when I was 15 or getting muscles and stuff. So I, I got in, built my own Gym in the barn, started training, went on to do exercise physiology at the University of New Brunswick. Concordantly, my sister died of Hodgkin's disease during that time. So I watched her go through the medical model for four years. And I remember where that made such an impact on me was I remember when she'd be getting the treatments that we'd have to come home. The 55 miles ride home, she'd get out and she'd vomit maybe six, seven times on the way home. And I remember thinking to myself, it doesn't make sense. Why is the treatment seem to be worse than the disease? And that is what led me to study exercise physiology and workout. Because I thought, well, maybe if I had muscles and if I was training and eating right, maybe maybe I would be healthier too. Well, long story short, I got bitten by the bodybuilding bug when my hockey career ended in university and went on and after 16 years won a bunch of national championships, went to the worlds at Mr. Universe, which was my dream. However, after the contest, I gained 42 pounds of fat and water in 11 weeks. I went from Mr. Universe to Mr. Marshmallow. Wow. And I met a doctor during that time and he had helped Bernard Jensen recover, the guy that wrote the book on the digestive system and iridology, brought back and all these sort of things. And I went to him. This guy was at the picture of health. He was a senior citizen, he was vibrant, he was energy. And I was like, what happened? I got the best coaches, I got the best nutrition, I got a background, I've got spartan like discipline. And I am a physical wreck. And he said to me something that changed my life and was the foundation of my company today. He said to me, wade, I am going. You have learned to build the body from the outside in. I am going to show you how to build it from the inside out. And he introduced me to the concept of digestive health enzymes, probiotics, you know, inflammatory reactions inside the body and all these different things which I engaged in. Matt and I, my co founder, started a company just dealing with bodybuilders. And back in then we didn't have Facebook and boards and we coached over 15,000 people to get all this kind of clinical data of how to optimize digestion for performance. I also was working, I ended up working in a clinic, a holistic health clinic in Vancouver, Canada at the time. And turned out that many of the things that were applicable in a high performance level turned out they had applications from people who were suffering from a Variety of conditions. And I thought, well, this is interesting. So a number of years later, we went on and we changed the company eventually into Bioptimizers, which was as we got past the sports side of the athletics, and we're like, we really were on a mission to end physical suffering and optimize human health. And we've been on that mission. It's been. Great ride.

Lovely. Oh, that's awesome. Who's your hockey team?

Ooh, that's a great question. Well, when I was growing up, it was the Montreal Canadiens and Gila Fleur skating through the ice with his blonde hair blowing in the wind. I'm blonde. Probably the pinnacle of being a hockey player was Guy Lafleur in the 1970s. I was a Vancouver Canucks fan for many, many years living in Vancouver. So now that I'm down here in LA County, I'm more into football, so.

Okay, got it. There you go. I'm a Pittsburgh Penguin, Die Hard through and through.

My dad is. He basically worships Sidney Crosby because he's from the Maritimes. We're from. And he's pretty much God.

Oh, yeah, there you go. I mean, all around, right? Yes. Oh, and we've got Cameron chiming in behind the scenes there, saying the Winnipeg Jets. So, yeah, it's. It's good. Awesome. Well, you know, that is. That's an incredible. I love that component of, you know, you were kind of pre Internet marketing, right. Doing this with real people, 15,000 kind of elite athletes and training and teaching on, you know, the inside out. Right. You know, I have my walls and my clinic are yellow because I come from the spleen and stomach camp and Chinese medicine and naturopathic and so really well aligned. I mean, I love, you know, I want to get into some of your products too. These are the mastimes I'll get it without the glare that I think are very unique. And so I want to kind of bring that down the road. We're going to talk about those. But so really looking at this inside out healing, right? So you go to see this really influential. Influenced you, the physician of great health there and really made an imprint on you. So much so that you now have a thriving company, really helping people with their health across the board. What is this gut brain connection? Right. So you're kind of a gut expert. So how. What are you seeing in that realm?

It's a massive thing and I'm going to back up a little bit from it. And I'll tell you why. Because over. It took us about four years to figure out a lot of the performance parameters around this. And when we figured it out, I made a comeback and won a couple more national titles, went to the world championships, didn't have the weight gain, didn't have any of the problems. So I knew, I figured it out. But one of the challenges that I started to recognize is that why do we have such a proliferation of digestive distress? 12% of the emergency hospital visits in this country are gastrointestinal related issues. 100 million people on any given day are suffering from some form of digestive distress. And 25% of those are on permanent prescription medications. And you see, you turn on the sports game and here they're talking about acid reflux and heartburn and, you know, all sorts of, you know, constipation and all these kind of symptom based things that lead to disease. As Hippocrates said so many years ago, all disease begins in the gut. And I was like, well, why is this so widespread? And the reality is we have completely altered the food production and distribution of, from what humans have eaten throughout all of life. And the challenge of that is we made a major shift about. People talk about when we went from the hunter gatherer to the farmer. There was a major shift in humans at that time. Very few people are talking about what happened at the end of World War II when we dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, ended the war and the baby boom, ushering in the baby boom and the mass production of food. Because governments are like, how are we going to feed all these people? They went to monoculture farming, okay? Monoculture farming started to strip the value out of the food. They took the leftover nitrogen from the bombs, started putting that on the soil to increase the yield. That decreased the protein, the enzyme content, and the mineral and vitamin content. The plant started to get sick. We added herbicides, pesticides, fungicides to those foods, and those disrupt the natural enzymatic activity of those bugs. And you need. Enzymes are the chemical workers of the body. They control everything from thinking to blinking. The difference between stones, plants and peoples is the amount of enzymes that you have in them and the chemical reactions they're able to elicit. Then we added preservatives, then we added dyes. We cook, we pasteurize, we add all these other elements in food production distribution. So not to condemn anybody, these are the unintended consequences of technological innovations that have happened. So a person born today, or person even born my age, you know, I'm getting close to 50, I was born into a radically disrupted food Supply chain from growth to distribution, and then an ad hoc amount of chemicals. Now it's a single canal from your mouth to your butt. I'm a nutritionist by trade and an exercise physiologist, and we were taught, you know, protein, carbs, fats, all these macros and all this stuff. But when you put food in your body, it's in the tube, it's not in the cells. There is a specific process that is involved, and I've broken it down to five stages that take whatever you consume and convert it into one of two things, an energy unit or a building block. The third piece is there's waste that is produced just like exhaust from your car, just like leftover materials at a building site. Your ability to remove that waste is also a component. So today, what's happening for people overall, to use that analogy, is that we've disrupted the supply chain of the food. We're not getting the same two by fours that our grandfather was. We're not getting the same clean, you know, energy products that we were using before. You know, maybe it's like instead of using, you know, really clean energy, solar energy, we're using dirty coal in the body. And the sewer systems are all broken. And what that means is, is that we have a buildup of toxins, we have a disruption in our bacteria. We have. We have incompletely digested foods. We have a proliferation of parasites, bacteria and viruses because of low hydrochloric acid components. All of this leads to a perfect storm where we are putting these inflammatory components inside our body. Now, your brain requires bacteria. Now, when I went to school, bacteria were these evil creatures that needed to be killed at all levels. That's all we knew about. Bacteria is bad, but the reality is, inside our guts, there is 10% good, 10% bad, 80% opportunists. And it's changing all the time. Depend on your diet. Anybody that's taken a vacation to some other place where you're introducing to new foods or a new place, or new bacteria cultures oftentimes got the run or got vomiting or stuff, because there's a shift there. And after a few weeks you can readjust and your body will adapt. Well, we focused so much on killing the bad guys that we wiped out a lot of the good guys. And we have a symbiotic relationship with these bacteria cultures, which make somewhere between 50 and 95% of our neurotransmitters. Depending on the neurotransmitters that we're making now, the neurotransmitters Are what makes the. It's the electrical soup, if you will, that we have connections between our synapses and. And, you know, between our axions and the dendrites. This is how we. Without that fluid, it doesn't connect. Their brains don't work right. If we can't make the polypeptide change to make the proteins in our brain, we have a hard time making the happy hormones. Or we might feel anxious or depressed or these times, or we might have difficulty focusing because of irritation in the nervous system because we ate some bad bread with some chemicals on it, you know. And so all of these things are disrupting our brain function. And they're generally thought as a feedback loop to say, hey, we shouldn't eat this food anymore. We used to take, you know, as a hunter grab, we'd eat a little berry. Does that taste good? No, that doesn't taste good. We'll throw that away. Take another one. Oh, that one's good. That one's food. But nowadays, we've done such a beautiful job of masking the nasty chemicals or the things that disrupt us as we think what tastes good is often bad for us. And over time, it leads to these inflammatory conditions which disrupt our health, increase the likelihood of all the major diseases that we suffer from today. And I do believe that neurological issues are scaling exponentially in ways that is devastating to our society.

Yeah, we're seeing that across the board with mild cognitive impairment, dementia, Alzheimer's. It's like the rate by one turn, 65 years old in North America, it's 50% now of the population is going to have neural cognitive deficits, like significant. So this is a huge, huge piece. And I really love how you painted that picture from the farming component after the Great War, let's say, and then going forward and even looking at the enzymes in the soil, you know, some are even educating around bringing back soil health as a way to get us out of the global warming debacle that we find ourselves in. And I think there is a lot to be said there. But I love that, you know, where you have really put together like that enzymatic aspect in the digestive tract. I mean, we do call the gut the second brain for a very big reason. And we're seeing a lot of this, you know, digging your grave with your fork, et cetera. You know what food is medicine. And that is such a great way of putting it all together for folks. I test everybody with neurodegenerative conditions wherever they are on that spectrum. I do actually look at Their gut health, because it is that important. We do manufacture all of those neurotransmitters in the gut. So what other component of that, when you're saying neuro, you know, neurologic issues start in the gut. What, what is one to do? Like, how do you know if that's happening for you?

There's some great information. There's a guy by the name of Dr. Tom O' Brien who's. Who runs. Talks about the inflammatory. Inflammatory proteins and how they get into the body and start an autoimmune reaction. In other words, anytime that you get a protein, an inflammatory protein, whether that's an undigested protein, whether it's a chemically bonded protein or it's something that you know is coming out of wheat or whatever it happens to be, it has to pass through between the cells inside your intestinal wall. And there's a mucoid lining there called the biofilm. And this is where the bacteria live. And when you penetrate that, the body will start to say, hey, there's a. This is good, this is not good. And there's these series of immune system defenses. And what happens is we start to put up inflammatory markers. So you start to feel tired, or you start to feel bloated, or you start to feel a little brain fog in the morning, little crust in your eyes when you wake up, bad breath. You need a big coffee to wake up. Okay, that's one level. The next thing is, you know, all of a sudden you can't remember things and your memory starts to go. Then you start to forget where you are. And this is largely in part not because of one thing, but it's the repeated assault on our digestive system by all of these foods that human beings in their form right now have not adapted to because the change has been so rapid. The unintended consequences of technological innovation. And so what happens is our immune systems are in this constant state of reaction and attack and attack. And when you hit a certain point, when you go, and he has stages that he breaks down in his level, when you get past a certain point, this is when you get into massive cognitive decline. Now, what most people do unknowingly is they say, oh, I'm feeling that I'm losing. I need to lose weight. So I'm going to switch to the. Whatever the fad diet is. I don't know which one will come out this year. There's one every few years. And they cycle. If you've been in the industry long enough, they come back every 10, 15, 20 years. It's kind of a new version on the old version things. Now what happens is, and this is a really important part, we're actually writing a book on this, you have to realize is that the response to any dietary practice, whatever diet you can pick, people are going to fall on a bell curve. And that bell curve means that the people that are going to be advocating and said it cured my disease and made me feel young again And I lost 100 pounds or whatever, those are people at the very far end of the bell curve of what's positive because that diet eliminated the most inflammatory based products out of their diet, let's say. Then there's the haters of that diet which are on the other end of the bell curve that got sick and got brain fog and almost died. And you know, and then that was totally wrong. And they're the advocates of the next diet, right? Which, where they're at the top of the bell curve and everybody else kind of follows in between, depending on their general state of health, their age, all that sort of stuff. And so where that leaves a person is, is you need to be able to drill deeper in the response. So for most people, you need to discover and find out what is the inflammatory agents in your diet and eliminate them. The second stage that you need to do, and I always say you can't supplement your way out of a bad lifestyle. The second thing you have to look at is what is my genetics and epigenetics on what foods are going to work really well for my body and between family members. This can vary significantly and this information is great. The third thing that I think is important is where I actually got started is looking at the exposure to CAM contaminants that may have disrupted various enzymatic pathways. So for example, almost always when I find people that suffer from anxiety and depression, I find their inability to break down proteins properly. When I see people with skin conditions, almost always the inability to break down fats properly. And when I see people with diabetes and things like that, very hard time metabolizing carbohydrates, most often they've either been, if it's carbohydrate, they had a lot of sugar when they kid. If it's been fats they were often exposed to. Particularly farming areas are very common with that where there's a lot of chemicals that have been used which often disrupt fat, fat metabolism in the body. And then with proteins it can be a variety thing. It's usually a lot of inflammatory based proteins that didn't break down Particularly, or the use, prolific use of antibiotics early in their life, which destroyed some of the essential bacteria to break those products down. So when you adjust those things, we start to see benefits. So you can, you can mitigate what's happening of your past if you find out what's going on. And so what our company does is we've built a variety of products that are specialized for each of the areas that can go wrong in digestion and also concordant with the right bacteria or the right enzymes based on the diet that that person is following, so that we can optimize the digestion assimilation of that food, even if they've been compromised from past choices. Got it.

Oh, wow, that's awesome. So that's where you've got the enzymes, you've got the hcl, you've got the probiotics.

Yes.

You have that. A ketone product along those lines.

Yeah, we got another one in biofilm. We actually have two PhDs, actually now, three who are experts in biofilm. And what we do is Matt and I are kind of crazy experimenters. And, you know, we talk to them every week. We're like, okay, but let's expose the gut to. Let's put these bacteria, let's give them vitamins and minerals this week. Next week let's hit them with EMF radiation. Next week we're going to put some dyes in there and see what happens. And what's fascinating is you start to see that these bacteria respond to just about everything, either positively or negatively. And that helps us determine what's going on in people's guts so that we can give them the right probiotics or the right things to repair leaky gut. Or if you're on a keto diet, you're going to need something very high in lipase. Right. If you're on a traditional athletic diet or North American diets high in protein, you're probably going to need something, an enzyme that's high in proteolytic enzymes. If you tend to eat out a lot and you're exposed to gluten, you're probably going to need something that breaks down gluten. So by making these mitigations, we can help adjust people's lifestyle systematically.

I will tell you, the gluten defense has come in handy. And I don't even have the bottle here because we just went through the holidays. And I'm very grateful. My family is as well. We really put that one to the test. And it's. That's a really good. That test very positive. Around Our dinner table.

Thank you. Appreciate that.

Yeah. So it is so right. And like you really mentioned and I'll drive home again is that you cannot supplement yourself out of a bad lifestyle.

Correct.

And so that is, you know, that's so crucial because I see so many people that come in well researched. They've got the garbage bag full of supplements. It's like, well, you know, what are you actually eating all day? And you know, your body has to process it. You know, the I call it the Zhang of the formula is the Chinese medicine kind of herbal formula directory is less is more and it's more directed to actually get your motion in a certain direction. So you know, you have offered it. It's really nice. I put it in the show notes a link over to your website for. I believe it's a 12 week course of to health.

It's called the awesome health.

Thank you. Yes, Healthy. Awesome. Yes, that's awesome. All right. And I think because I just moved my screen, I got you paused out.

There we go. There we go. There we go. Good. What I did with that course is I was able to kind of. I have been interviewing and hanging out with health experts all around the world. And what I noticed is there are 12 habits that they have pretty much ubiquitous. But there was seven particular buckets that I overarching principles that I looked that would make cells operate the best. And I looked at the human body as a collection of cells because a cell is the single unit that is although there's different types of cells in the body, the primary function of those. And so what I did is like, okay, if I'm building a lifestyle, how do I address the most important thing first and move sequentially through a process that would allow a person with absolutely no experience or nowhere to go or anything else to go? Like, how do I systematically put my time, energy and resources in a philosophy, an overarching philosophy and based on the economics that I could put towards it. I could do things in order. And it came down to awesome was the acronym I ended up creating Nice and it was Air was first Water exercise. Those three are non negotiables. If you haven't spent time on those three, forget everything else, stop right now and just go work on those. Then I looked at the world as sunlight and I see everything is condensed life. It's all frequency vibrations and it sucked. I was a physicist. I had an aptitude for physics more so than I did chemistry. And so I always looked at everything as waves and oscillations and frequencies and chemistry being a result. Then I got into the optimizers, the things that maximize cells, enzymes, probiotics, which are the only things that do work. Essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, minerals, vitamins, and then herbs which could move qi in the body to different areas, which is where Chinese medicine comes. Then I dealt with mental beliefs and attitudes and education, testing and coaching. And this became an overarching philosophy that you could take supplements within once you got the other things right. And so some people just want to take a product and fix the problem. That's great and it can do that, but it's not. That's fixing the symptom, not dealing with the cause and the causes is we have to take ownership of our health, end of story. And you have people such as yourself which provide the intellectual and expertise to help a person run tests to get the information so they can make the adjustments based on their lifestyle, their genetics and their goals. And without those people, it's very difficult to figure it out with the mass amount of information that seems to be conflicting because it should be conflicting. It should be conflicting because the information is dealing with the various people in the various spectrums and the various backgrounds in their lives.

Yeah. And with on different genetic platforms as well. Right. So that is, that's great, you know, because everybody does come in saying, hey, you know, this year butter, organic butter is good. Now it's evil again. And I've always been a pro high fat organic butter guy myself. But we'll, you know, it is individualized and I really like that approach. And so thank you so much for giving that as a gift to the the listeners and viewers of what the health. I am going to take a quick station break. Just saying this is what the health. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel, this is Wade Lightheart and we are talking about the gut brain connection. If you like what you're hearing, please go out and give us a review on your favorite platform because it does make a difference. This is how we get the message out to our communities and that's how we get people back into their creative, healthy selves. That's the world I want to live in. That's the world you all want to live in. So please help us out get this message out. Think of three people. Share this one because this is. I really like how Wade is really laying out in really understanding terms of here's the framework. Here's. This is the step by step approach to get your health back from starting in your gut. So full on. You've been a listener of the show for a while. You know, this is the information that you've been looking for. So okay, we will continue back. This is what the health you can if you're just tuning in now, it's naturecuresclinic.com podcast. That's where they're all listed. So back into the digestive tract, the gut as the second brain we now just talked about. You've got a 12 week course that you've offered up as a gift. You've got a company designed to help people on the different digestive hurdles, let's say that they may be faced with because of their backgrounds, where they grew up, what their lifestyle is now optimizing. So let's get into some of those optimization things. Right. So we definitely have foundation. I've had Dr. Tom O' Brien on here a few times. I love talking with Dr. Tom. Always fascinating stuff and we gel well together and it is really, you know, it is congruent the message that we've got for who we've brought onto the show around actionable items and really some insightful ways. I love how you have laid it out in your analogies and just on how to explain what the heck is going on with these fascinating meat suits we run around in. So on that on the optimization front, so some folks that have, let's say we've got the bases covered now we're moving up into some of the enzymes, et cetera. I know. So that's a good lead in. I mean I'm going to shamelessly plug your product but I'm the host so I can do that.

I appreciate that.

So the mass Zymes, this one is really unique when I look at the formula. So I know you guys have a reason why you've got this specific blend in there. So just tell me about this one.

Well, one of the problems that I ran into early on and what caused that big weight gain stuff was inflammatory proteins. In other words, I wasn't breaking down the protein into the utilizable nutrients. And when I looked at the enzyme formulations as strong as some of the ones that we were using medical grade, most of them are really chintzy when it came to proteolytic enzymes. And I also learned that there is different types of proteases. Proteases is the types that break down proteins and inflammatory proteins is pretty much like that's 50, 60% of the problems that people have with digestion, why they feel bloated or that stone sitting in their stomach after the meal. Well, we went through this And I said, well, we needed to build a product to fix our own issues. That's how Matt and I always address things like, well, so when we manufactured that, we went. We wanted to have an enzyme that covered proteolytic digestion. So there's five different proteolytic enzymes, but there's 12 other enzymes inside it. We wanted to cover fats and carbohydrates and milk protein or milk that would be in there, all these different things, fibers, everything that could possibly happen to diet. So it's really an enzyme for the masses, so to speak. Something that could be a kind of go to product to start the digestive thing. And we've been able to make some improvements by adding an extract out of astrologous root, which improved the enzymatic function by 30 to 60%, which is a very common element in Chinese medicine. And we took that largely in part, that was to improve my recovery, to improve my athleticism, to also aid in my own digestive aids. And it worked like magic. And it worked with virtually everybody. We tried it with like, wow, we got that. And then we went on to a probiotic that was proteolytic. And one of the issues that I had with probiotics and for anybody that's been exposed to the medical industry, and I have a friend, his name is Dr. Horst Filtzer, who is a vascular surgeon that put the first stent in the body. And he said, what's interesting, over the course of his years, he's 80 years old, he says, you wouldn't believe the evolution in surgery. So one of the challenges is, though, he says, today in surgery, although it's so way ahead of where it was before, we don't lose people from surgery, we lose half the people from infection from surgery because we have these antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. And enzymes are the front part of the digestion, hydrochloric acid is the second part, and the enzyme or the probiotics are the third part. Actually, it would be second, three and four, because chewing your food is first and then elimination, the food is the fifth. Now, when I looked at that and we were working with Dr. O' Brien at the time, we got this idea and it was a crazy idea. We know that we have resistant strains of bacteria in hospitals which have been exposed to decades of antibiotics. Well, what would happen if we took a. To make literally super bad, super bad bugs? So it's like, what if we subjected something that was good for you, a probiotic that was good for you, to very harsh conditions and what would happen? Could we make super good bacteria? Well, it turns out you can. Now, there was a lot of failed experiments, but we were able to take a probiotic called L. Plantarum, which is a very robust strain, throw it in a toxic soup that would kill most of it, run a sine wave through it that would allow just a small margin of those bacteria to survive. Then we take those bacteria and grow them on a variety of different mediums to see which ones that it grew best on. And guess what? We were able to get a patent that was able to demonstrate that that bacteria showed very unique properties. Being protolytic, being able to attack a variety of things. I won't make all the statements because it could get your site shut down or whatever, but we put the patent up on our website and you can go look at the research to show what it does. And it's extraordinary what you can do. And I do believe this is where the future is. And that's why we have PhDs and we're testing strains and what we're doing because we plan over the next decade to make a vast array of probiotic strains to deal with the increase of complications that we're suffering from in a technologically advanced world with poor food supply. So we believe that we need to use our brains to make super bacteria. And that's where we are. And that is why we develop. I think we have now three different enzymatic formulas, and we have three different probiotic formulas that achieve different functions in the body.

Ooh, I love that. I love that. That sounds like an awesome. Where's your lab at?

That sounds like it's in Sarajevo. And like I said, we have these wonderful PhD ladies who are just, well, they're just excited that we can spend the money and the time and the effort. And for us, it's to get people way smarter than Matt and I, who are very specialized in this field, and we just kind of dream up experiments. Hey, what happens if, you know, let's try it out. And, and, and, and that fun, creative experimentation allows us to lead to breakthroughs. And we have had some major breakthroughs, particularly in cognitive health recently with our Cognibiotics product and also our Leaky Gut Guardian, which have been. Both of them are being. We will be releasing papers in double blind studies later on, probably the end of next year. We've got the anecdotal evidence and the lab results. We've just got to get them periodically reviewed. But we do know that they actually work under those conditions.

Love it. Oh, I Love it. I want to talk more about that cognibiotic as well, because that is a big, big piece of our focus here is neurodegeneration, brain health and longevity. So those three camps is kind of where I put my flag into the earth saying, hey, this is what we're gonna take a stand here for. So let's, let's do that. I want to talk about the proteolytic enzymes though, before we move on to anything else, because this is, I mean, I'm seeing again why I have the walls colored yellow. Besides, this is the flavor that I want to live in. In Portland, Oregon in February is. It is the spleen and stomach camp. So it really, you know, your message on digestion resonates because we do treat from the gut. You know, all disease does start in the gut. And I've seen it over 20 years of clinical practice of, you know, people come in for pain and they're like, why are you addressing my diet? And I was like, well, if you don't have the building blocks there, it doesn't matter what kind of fancy supplement we lay on top of that. We're just not going to get the motion. We're looking for even up to stem cell therapy and treatments here. So you know, on the proteolytic enzymes and inflammation, you're saying on your recovery. So when you're using the mastimes now I get the name, it's for the masses. I was like, why is this called? I thought it was maybe somebody's name. So it is. You're using them with every meal and you take what, three to five of these things?

Yep, yep. I've been using those literally now for 17 years, since I fixed my own digestive system and never let off the gas and done all kinds of crazy experiments with them. And it's a lot of fun. We even have a video where we actually show it breaking down meat in a cup.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Just the enzymes.

Yeah, just the enzymes actually digesting meat in a cup. It's on our video websites and stuff. And you can. So we want to prove that this stuff actually works. It'll work better in the body, but we want it to show a visual representation of how these things actually work.

Outside of the body. And what are you noticing with your recovery time? So with, with and without enzymes?

Yeah, so there's some great research. If you go on our mastime site, it'll actually cite it where you'll see they took. For me, it was relatively quick because I was also a plant based guy. I was only eating about 85 grams of protein a day, which is most of my competitors would be eating 200, 250 grams to compete at an international level at bodybuilding. But the thing was, it's not how much you eat, it's how much you would digest, absorb and utilize. And I was able to outperform my competitors who are eating far more protein than I was because I didn't have the energetic drain of breaking down all that protein, which protein is huge metabolic cost to break it down. And that's part of the benefits from fat burning, but it also draws down your enzyme reserves. So that was the first thing. Second thing is my recovery times between workouts dramatically improved. And then the research started to come out. A while ago we're showing karate expert, like karate students who would have hematomas, bruises, damage to their body that would take 15 days to heal, were healing within two days using proteolytic enzymes. I even had people that had scars that diminished on their shoulders over time and things like that as the, the protein was getting broken down into the amino acids that's required by the body. So I think what it is is we've been so removed from an enzyme rich diet and this is not allocated for in our definition of food, enzymes and probiotics, which if I go to my mom's garden, I eat a carrot, there's live enzymes in that raw carrot, there is live probiotics on that carrot that go with that food. And every animal, whether it's a carnivore, a herbivore or an omnivore, eats its food in a live state and it gets the enzymes and the bacteria from the food to go with it, but we've stripped those away from our diet. And so that was the foundation of it. So definitely improve that. The other thing I noticed, which was cognitively and that was when I was leading up to my Mr. Universe contest. I mean, I was in a brain fog. My joints hurt, it was just another day, it was a grind. I literally hurt all the time. Sleep was like, it didn't matter how much I slept, I felt tired all the time. When I came back four years later, I was laughing and joking backstage. I didn't have any cognitive decline. In fact, everybody was wondering, what's going on with you? And I'm like, I fixed my digestion. And so what I had found is that as an athlete, we just aged ourselves faster than the general population because we demanded hard. You know the old saying of the candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. And so we built a model that was aesthetics, performance and health. Many people will make sacrifices for their aesthetics or sacrifices for their performance, but ultimately there's going to be a price on the bottom of that triangle, which is their health. And that's usually when they roll into your life, you've made those sacrifices. And so those are the things that we notice. A lot of people notice a big difference in how they feel. Anxiety and emotions particularly or prone to depression. Usually that starts to improve significantly when they're using masines.

Interesting.

Cool.

So how about on the cogni balance then? Is that the name of that one?

Cognibiotics. So one of the things that we were looking at with this gut brain connection specifically was okay, well what bacteria actually are in charge of making the converting the pre digested proteins into the specific amino acids that our brain needed to make these neurotransmitters. So we discovered those bacteria and we put them in combination with each other. When you put together probiotics, this is an important distinction. You have to make sure that the probiotics, if you're doing a multi strain probiotic, they're not competing for the same resources. The second thing is you need to make sure they have enough prebiotics that they are going to be able to get traction when you first bring them into the body. In other words, that's why I'm not a big fan of like refrigerated foods because oftentimes the bacteria could be run out because they ran out of food supply. We I like the freeze dried capsules which you can control the environment. They get into the wet, moist, hot environment, they come reactive and if they have the prebiotics. So that's why you also want to eat a diet that supports the bacteria that you're eating. And then we married that with a concoction of Chinese herbs which should have been used for thousands of years to treat all these neurological conditions. And there was a guy by the name of Charles Poliquin, the strength sensei, who coached gold medalists in 27 different sports and the who's who of sports. He was the first guy to make the bridge between the Chinese elements and neurotransmitter dominance. And so he would train his athletes based on neurotransmitter dominance of how often they could train, how frequently they can train. And when we saw that we were able to get a neuroscientist who happened to be an expert in Chinese medicine, we took that with our probiotic research team, put the combination of the Two together. So you get an initial response from the Chinese herbs and then over the long term, as those cognibiotics, as we call them, the probiotics that affect neurotransmitters. They were able to get traction and start making those chains. You add that with a little bit of magnesium, and people are feeling calm, relaxed, and better than ever.

That is awesome. And so needed. So I'm very excited to see that research come out next year on that. I'm wondering if you could lift up the hood a little bit and give us a preview as to what we may expect in the published research.

Yeah, well, biggest thing is a reduction of anxiety and help with mood swings, also improved memory. And of course, in order to get these things done, you need a long term. But the most common element that we find, there's stages. Almost everyone that deals with anxiety and depression or those type of things also suffer from almost uncontrollable food cravings, oftentimes at night, which they'll eat sugar or they'll eat things. You know, I always say the bacteria do the talking. They need to be fed. So first thing that we notice is a stabilization of blood sugar, less food cravings. The second thing that we see is an overall sense of they have less crashes where they go into that component that would create them to feel anxiety or have social avarice or would be prone to depression. Those are the first few stages that we notice. And then usually it becomes easier to stay on a diet that's been given to them by a nutritionist. They find, you know, before they would go off at all the time, but after 30, 60 days, they're like, you know, I feel pretty good. Like, I'm not. I'm. So basically, it starts to flatten the roller coaster out to the kind of a more flattened ride. It doesn't cure all these things. I'm not here to say that. But what I would say is that it's very difficult to get your neurochemistry right if you do not have your digestion right. In fact, I think it's impossible. And so, you know, I think it's something that is not as well explained. But we're entering into the golden age of this research, and I'm super excited to be on the forefront.

I love it. Yeah. That is so cutting edge, Wade. Super excited to see that because it is so necessary. I mean, you know, even this year, we are seeing, you know, rates of anxiety, depression go through the roof. You know, there's not really an end in sight to the world situation. So, you know, everything that we can do to get people in a kind of a more balanced place, the better. And we really. You did state, and I'm in full agreement. We need to take our health in our own hands. It's not coming from above. It's not coming from the media. I mean, it's like, basically, wait for the vaccine. It's like, that's the. I mean, maybe for some, that's a good choice. But really right now, there's a lot we could be doing. This kind of taking, eating food as medicine, understanding that really maximizing our probiotics to manufacture certain amino acids that get turned into these neurotransmitters. What else on the brain performance front do you have for us here?

Well, funny you should ask that, because a week and a half ago, we actually released to the world the first customized nootropic formulation. And basically, we're working with a very highly specialized neurochemist. And what you do is when you go to our site and we have a webinar on it, and basically you take a little test which will kind of give you a background. From that test, we can kind of determine some of the neurochemical biases that you would have in your brain. And we build customized individual nootropic formulas. And for those who don't know what nootropics are, these are the cognitive enhancers that allow you to elicit various types of moods. And there are eight primary neurotransmitters. And some will make you feel calm, some will help you feel focused, some will feel like you make you have social fluency. There are all these different things. And so we look at that as that your brain function is largely part of the axource of chemical resources and the connections that your brain is making between neurons. And if you're deficient in these, either one of those elements, it doesn't work. So we go to Dave Asprey's 40 years then to increase the connectivity in their brains. And we work with Dr. Drew over there. He's amazing. And you can train your brain to do new things and learn new skills or have new abilities. And it's. You can do this nowadays using technology. And then what we provide is the chemical components to make the speed of those connections much faster and much more efficient or even possible if there was an area of deficiency. And then each month the person gets to give the feedback to our scientists. And what they do is they tweak that formulation based on your own feedback to kind of give you the results that you want. So it's a really new breakthrough in neurological brain function. And I gotta say, I'm so delighted and I can't wait for more and more people to experience it. Because when you realize the power that is lies within your own brain, when you understand your neurochemistry and we don't have the side effects of drugs, we don't have anything. All our extracts are from 100% pure extracts without all the weird stuff in it and doesn't have the nasty metabolite. So it's clean, it's easy and the, the performance is obvious.

That sounds so personalized. Neurotropics, I love that. I can't wait to get on those. Seriously, I mean, that's so up our alley. I'm going to share it with my lead physician here too. We're really into that stuff. So exciting. That's awesome. So a week and a half ago, you guys released this to the world?

Yeah, we just released it to the world. And I'm excited because we have a lot of our executives that are already using us and are performance over the last four months and we've been using, we've been growing at 20% month on month, but it feels like we're not working that hard.

Yeah.

And so as the testimonials start getting out of the bag and we start seeing this, we really feel that in a technologically advanced world, being able to monitor and modulate your neurochemistry with all the technical interventions that are happening nowadays, whether you want them or not, is really the key to manage this growth.

Yeah, that's. Oh, that's outstanding right there. I'm going to hop on over there after our talk.

You bet.

So we're coming down. Last five minutes. Any gems at the end of the show here? I always like to ask, you know, we've got some actionable items for folks with the 12 week course. Talking about the gut is the second brain. You really laid out some good foundational work there. Got to take care of the foundations, then you work on optimization. Second, you're not going to be able to supplement your way out of a bad lifestyle. So what kind of insights or anything that you would like to share with our listeners and viewers here?

Sure. Thank you very much. Well, I think the first thing first, in order to really transform your digestive system, you should allow for 90 days. In that 90 days, you want to have a professional person in your camp, at least one that can give you the feedback of what you need to eliminate from your diet quickly and how you're going to optimize that moving forward. At that stage, you can add supplementation if you've got all the lifestyle things working. And it's going to take about 90 days to recondition your entire digestive system so that it's optimized for the diet program or the philosophy that you're doing. Again, having that, as I say, assembling your Jedi Council is having these interpretations, persons that can give you that feedback directly for you, not for your mother, not for your spouse or your kid, for you. And just like they said, when you put the oxygen mask on on the plane, you put yours on first. So if you have somebody in your family that's suffering, if you have somebody that's struggling, instead of preaching to them and telling them what they need to do, do it yourself and be the example in the world so that they're like, hey, what are you doing? But more importantly than say, what am I doing? That's right, is that I've got a philosophy, I've got an expert to give me individualized feedback, and I follow that to the letter so that I use Target MIT supplementation to augment my lifestyle. And I get that constant testing. And I can guarantee that virtually anyone listening to this will be able to completely transform and experience what I call awesome health.

Awesome. That is awesome health. So thank you so much, Wade Lightheart, for all of the information, the free gift to our listeners and viewers. Again, everybody, this is what the Health. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel. We are here on the Contact Talk Radio Network on Tuesdays from 2 to 3 Pacific Standard Time. We are also found on all of your favorite players naturecuresclinic.com podcast get out there. Share this information. You can make a big difference in yours, your family and your community's world. Thank you all for tuning in. Wade, it's been a pleasure. I look forward to our paths actually crossing in real life soon again. And thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.