Keith Bell on The Citizen Science of Microbiome Stool Testing and Mental Health

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Hey, guys, this is Criben Govender from the Gut Health Gurus podcast. I've got a background in food science. My sidekick colleague right next to me, James Shadrach, has got a background in psychology with a deep interest on the gut and brain, which is an absolutely hot topic when we talk about mental health and things like that. And I've got a really interesting fellow for you today. His name is Keith Bell and he's got this really fascinating group called the Gut Club on the Facebooks and he's also got a very interesting group where they look at stool analysis. And so I thought it would be a great exercise to get Keith onto the podcast because he's got some pretty insightful information coming through his group on especially the stool analysis side. But then he's got some other projects that he's working on. So, Keith, how about we get it from the horse's mouth? Who is Keith Bell?

Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me here today. It's an honor to be here. I've been following what you're doing there and I'm completely with you on a lot of topics. But who am I? I'll tell you right now, I'm 9,715 miles away from you in Florida, where the sun's going down and you're right outside of Melbourne, Australia, is that right?

Absolutely.

Wow. It's amazing that we can be connected here. What is it about a little after 9am there now, is that right?

Yeah, it's in the morning here. I think it's just after 7pm there. I should an absolute honour to have you, Keith, and sincere thanks for coming on and having a chat with us. So, yeah, keep going.

Thank you very much. Well, you know, the Internet is an amazing thing for us to have this conversation over 9,700 miles away. But one thing I like to do is put things in perspective and that is that only half the world, I believe that's the current percentage. Only half the world has Internet access. So we really have our work cut out for us when it comes to having conversations on a global scale, because most People don't have this way of communicating or they don't have this way of being educated. And there's so much to learn on the Internet. We're putting out a lot of information about gut health and gut brain health in particular on the Gut Club Facebook page. And we have our page on the Internet as thegutclub. Org. But the group that you're talking about, we have about 3,500 people now on our closed group Facebook page, and that is called the Gut Club Stool Test Discussion Group. And thank you much. Thank you very much for joining the group. And you've been providing some good input, too. It's really all about. All about people hosting their microbial DNA stool test results. And as you know, there are so many different types of tests. We focus on a few in particular, but we're able to look at these charts and analyze them. And really we're pioneers in this regard, because I think it's safe to say that most doctors wouldn't understand fully how to look at a stool test chart and analyze it for imbalance and really know what to look for. And if I were completely honest, I would say that it's open for me, too. There's so much to learn about it and to interpret. In fact, one of the things I've been adding to my knowledge base in order to more accurately look at these results is ancestry, because there are a few very amazing ancestry studies showing the differences in microbiome. Tell me, what's your ancestry? Cribben and James?

Yeah, absolutely. For me, I was born in South Africa, so my family originally came probably three to four generations, and my great grandfather was from South India. And they essentially, during the, I guess, the British conquest of India, they sent a lot of. And South Africa. They sent a lot of, I guess, indentured labor from India to South Africa. So my. My ancestry is essentially South Indian, but with roots in South Africa. Really, I identify myself with South Africa probably, probably as my ancestry, but obviously now I'm Aussie. Being in Australia.

Yes. James, do you have similar ancestry?

Yeah, similar. So my dad is from Singapore and he has Indian ancestors. And then he came to Australia and met my mum, and she's half Australian and half Greek, so bit of a mix.

Well, it's somewhat serendipitous that you both have some. Some Indian ancestry because the studies are showing that India. And by the way, this can also be divided by region in India, but the population in India has a different microbial balance than, say, one in North America. And the difference being it Seems that there could be higher levels of a gram negative bacteria known as Bacteroides. And you know, there are two main groups of bacteria that we, that we're looking at in these stool test results. We have the Firmicutes and the Bacteroides and most countries are dominated by the Firmicutes, but some, including Spain and India, some parts are actually dominated by Bacteroides. So I like to think of this as really the underlying beauty of diversity that we're talking about here and how this has been really developing over thousands of years based on geography and diet, environmental factors.

A side note there a little bit and I'd love to get your thoughts on this Keith as well. Say when we do analysis here in Australia because we do gut stool testing through allele microbiome. So the results that we see, if someone has a high Bacteroides level or Bacteroides, I should say at the phylum level, they tend to be more the obese cohort that have that high level. So it just shows, you look at some studies to say that our Firmicutes a driver of being overweight. But then we see the opposite in some cases with obese people. So what's your thoughts on that?

That's a fantastic insight. Well, we're seeing a lot of people in the group that are dominant in Bacteroides and, and when you look at the studies based on their ancestry, they shouldn't be and the symptoms are showing up. And what this probably gets down to is how our immune response is guided by microbes. And in fact this all takes place in parts of the intestine. It's said that 78%, 70 to 80% of our immune system is in our gut. And if you want to zero in on the location in the gut where that's taking place, it's known as Peyer's patches. And you know, there are studies that show that for instance Lactobacilli are different in how they guide immune response there in the Peyer's patches compared to Bacteroides. And you know, you know this, this is my theory regarding vaccine response. Actually, you know, people that are dominant in Bacteroides may have a hyperactive immune response to a vaccination leading to an adverse reaction. We can talk about that a little bit later. But the, the point is people are different. And you know, you have high levels of gram negative bacteria. How does that relate to obesity? Well, they're producing different types of lps, lipopolysaccharides, but you can put that even through A finer tooth comb and read the studies that show there are different kinds of LPs even within Bacteroides and completely different types compared to Proteobacteria like E. Coli. So, you know, we can't just pigeonhole LPS in general, but gram negative overgrowth is an issue. If you want to look at what might be a healthy balance where gram negative overgrowth might be a natural thing. For instance, it seems that way in populations in Africa and also in India and Spain, possibly in Iraq, where people were traveling actually, you know, centuries ago to both India and Spain. So I have, I wonder if, if Persia wasn't the, you know, the cradle of Bacteroides, not just the cradle of civilization. But what's, what's really interesting is that in the Bacteroides family is also Prevotella, and that is a bacteria that's known to utilize fiber. And a study came out recently, you may have seen this. It was showing how when people migrate to other countries, in fact, it was a study they showed with people from Thailand. It was done out of Minnesota, where they also have a large Somali community. And they were part of this group. The Somalis were part of this group, this study group as well, but they weren't actually studied. It was only the Thai people that were studied. And it was shown that when people come to the United States from these countries, they have a very distinct flora shift away from Prevotella and toward Bactruides. And that's a mystery as to exactly why that's happening. Is it diet? Is it that they're being, well, they're being affected by environmental toxins that they weren't in their home country? Could it, you know, it could be for many number of reasons, children may have a flora shift based on being vaccinated when they weren't in their home country. So what's happening is people are more prone to obesity and hyperactive immune response when they have that shift away from Prevotella, their natural dominance toward Bacteroides, the gram negative bacteria that seems to have the ability to cause more trouble.

So let's take a little step backwards and original story of the gut club. Firstly, what were you doing, I guess vocationally at the time when you conceptualized this idea? What's your background?

Well, my background is really as an environmentalist. I have, you know, my view of the gut is that it's really the, maybe the environmental issue of our time. It's an environmental issue of the highest order. At the time when I was forming the idea of the gut club, I had been Writing articles about the gut and also leading up to part of the GUT Club, which is our microbiome vaccine safety project. Because I was inspired by a family member that was very ill. It was our dog. Back in 2008, she began having a seizure disorder. And that's really the inspiration for what we're doing now with the GUT Club as the GUT Brain Epilepsy Project. And James, you may have a lot to say about this subject because only in the last few years at most have we seen new papers coming out explaining the gut origin of seizure activity. And this is a really important subject because seizure happens to be really a problem, a symptom, I should say, associated with many different illnesses from Ms. To Parkinson's to Alzheimer's to autism. They all can incorporate seizure activity, I think even diabetes. You probably couldn't name one of the non communicable diseases that doesn't have seizure as a symptom. So it was a good way for me to learn about this. Through trials and tribulations, I ended up being able to control the horrific seizure clusters that our dog was having. And she got sick by swimming in a local lake many times that I later found out was sewage contaminated. And then while she was experiencing obvious gut symptoms, she happened to be vaccinated. So that put two and two together for me that there may be a microbial predisposition to an adverse vaccine reaction. That's the construct. So in 2014, I was writing articles, in 2015 and 2016 started the gut club. That's what happened. So it's been a nice journey about three years, but I was pretty prepared to open the doors of the GUT Club, having put together a pretty massive file of studies. I admit I can be kind of boring to my friends and family talking about things from a GUT centric standpoint. Most people don't want to talk about microbes the way I do. From an environmental standpoint, it's very exciting. Last year, a friend and I published a book. My friend is the art teacher at our local high school. He illustrated this children's book about rain making bacterioids. It's called I Wonder what it's like to be a Raindrop. And most I like to think of it really as an adult book in disguise. You know, it's packaged as a children's book. But any adult reading this book to their children are going to be, you know, experiencing a surprise because most people have never heard of rain making bacteria. These are the bacteria. We haven't.

Please explain.

You know, rain or snow without bacteria in the clouds. These are special bacteria that are on plants and in the soil.

Please repeat that. Please repeat that part. I think I cut you off.

Oh, okay. These are special types of bacteria that are on plants and also in soil. And they are wind swept into the atmosphere where they enter the clouds. And they have an ability to. To turn water into ice at very low temperature. And it so happens that 99% of all rain comes from ice clouds. So, you know, it's really factual at this point that we wouldn't have rain or snow without bacteria in the clouds. The higher level clouds can also use dust and other particulates like fungi can. Also they can perform what's called ice nucleation, where they have the ability to freeze water. There's a video on YouTube that shows an experiment. They have a little tube of water and they dip some tweezers that are coated in bacteria into the water and immediately it freezes. It's like a magic trick.

Oh, my God.

It's really fascinating. Yeah. So there we have. Yeah. So from a, from an environmental standpoint, bacteria are regulating our weather. And also this plays a very large role in climate change because they are holding CO2 in soil and also our oceans. You know, people think that climate change is all about fossil fuels. It's nowhere near that simple. In fact, by far, most CO2 is held in our environment by microbes, and that plays a role in our bodies as well. You know, you can learn things about the macro and apply it to the micro in our bodies and consider things like gases that can regulate our brain activity that are really regulated by microbes. In fact, there's something that most people aren't aware of when it comes to epilepsy. James, this may rock your world. Have you heard of the breathing method? I have a mental block right now in the name of it. But essentially what you do is if someone is having a seizure, you can exhale your breath directly into their nostrils. I'm sorry. It's called the exchange breathing method. I wish I knew about this. While my dog was suffering, I must have witnessed thousands of. Not thousands, but hundreds of seizures, literally. And being helpless, trying everything like putting an ice pack on her spine and pressing down on her eyeballs and various things that actually did work to halt a seizure. But I wish I would have known about the exchange breathing method and also how CO2 as part of our exhalation, when you exhale into the nostrils of a person having a seizure, most of the time they will immediately halt the seizure. And that is no one can really explain that. But my view of that is how the CO2 and is affecting, and also nitrogen is affecting things like nitric oxide sensors which impact the serotonergic system, our serotonin levels, and that has an impact on the glutamatergic, the excitatory system. And I'm sure there's a lot more to it that we can go into the details. But the idea is there's this cascade that can take place when you simply exhale into the nostril of someone having a seizure, which is. Yeah, it's an amazing thing. There's just recently been a new paper where I'm part of a group on Facebook even before I started the gut club called Diets for Epilepsy and they are pioneers in this exchange breathing method. I think what I brought to the table there, and also to the table and other epilepsy forms on the Internet is the idea that we need to focus on the gut. Whereas most neurologists are not there yet. They're treating these disorders from the neck up with a cocktail of drugs where the drugs may be effective, but most of the time, or, you know, maybe half the time they're not. So they add another drug and hope that that works. But it just so happens that a lot of pharmaceutical drugs we're learning are really successful when they are by way of the gut. The quintessential example might be metformin. That's the leading diabetes medication. And there are many studies now showing how that is affecting the gut microbes doing things like raising Akkermansia and lactobacilli and how that can attenuate diabetic symptoms. So, you know, it's an exciting time when you're a gut centric person connected with the web of life. That's the idea. That's what we're trying to do.

Totally. And isn't it interesting, Keith, that I guess the very early researchers were kind of against bacteria, like bacteria was disease causing agent, but now it's really flipped on its head. Now we're starting to appreciate how important microbes, bacteria, yeast, fungi, parasites, all these things are so essential for life. And who would have thought, James, that they're responsible for the weather? Yeah, I mean that is just staggering. I'm. My jaws hit the floor.

Yeah, me too. I think we should rejoice in this potential for shattering egos worldwide because we need to focus more on what's outside of us and what's deep inside of us. Even viruses now are considered to be essential for our balance Absolutely, absolutely.

Couldn't agree more.

And this goes back to infancy. In fact, in our earliest days as babies, it's been shown that viruses outnumber bacteria and these are the phages, you know, the bacteriophages. The bacteriophages are targeting particular bacteria and keeping them under control. And if we want to, you know, bring this full circle, we can talk a little bit about India and the River Ganges. You know, people use this river that is so polluted, of course, with, with sewage and who knows what else. It's a toxic river, but for centuries it's also been known as a medicinal source and people religiously go into the Ganges and can be healed. There's a very eye opening school of thought that the reason the river is healing is through the viruses that are there. Bacteriophages that are coming from the beginnings of the river in the mountains where the snow is melting and these viruses are entering the river and have healing properties. So it's a form of phage therapy.

That's such a fascinating thought experiment and I hope someone listening out there will take some of this information on board and hopefully we can see some data on potentially validating this. It'd be really fascinating.

Yeah, go ahead, James.

I was just going to ask Keith. I'm really interested to get into, I guess, some of the ways people can start to heal themselves through all this information. So I wonder, in terms of a person who maybe comes into the gut club and maybe they're suffering from some type of gut related issue or maybe some other type of health related issue, what are you starting to learn? What are the group members starting to learn about their guts and their health?

Well, that's really zeroing in on probably the most important personalized medicine that we're developing. People are realizing that, that it needs to be personalized. And so when you look at stool test charts, you can see, you know, how someone is different from another person and then start to develop a strategy based on microbial balance and how to bring that into homeostasis. So when we're looking at someone say, with Bacteroides dominance, my theory these days is that a high dose vegetable diet similar to the Wahls protocol may be the way to go to raise the firmicutes to balance out the Bacteroides, that's like nine cup a day vegetable diet. Terry Wahls, you may be familiar with, she was able to reverse her ms, so and in fact a lot of autoimmune diseases are shown to be high. Bacteroides type 1 diabetes is high bacteroides in places like Finland. So that's one way to consider handling that type of balance. But that's not to say that a strict carnivore diet therapeutically or a low carb diet also has its function. And in fact, someone with high levels of firmicutes, which are mainly clostridium, may benefit more by that route, by going the route of a paleo diet, for instance, in order to raise bacteroides. In fact, the ketogenic diet is known to lower clostridia. These days ketogenic diet is kind of trendy and people that are using that diet are not using the classical ketogenic diet, which is extremely high fat. It's more like a paleo low carb diet that they're calling the ketogenic diet. I like to think the ketogenic diet is really not about ketones, it's about flora shift. And the ketogenic diet itself may be a misnomer. We need to come up with a new name for that plan. All along, I think the ketogenic diet, which has roots in epilepsy going back, gosh, what, 80 years now, I think all along it's been about flora shift. Yeah.

I wonder what you think on the mental health front as well. I know there are some studies that I've looked into where there are differences in the types of bacteria between people who were, I guess, categorized as not having depressive symptoms. And then there was another group of people where they had, they scored higher on these depressive symptoms and quality of life. And in the study that I'm thinking of, they were missing certain types of bacteria. We can probably add this in the show notes.

The Dar lista Darlister was one.

This is the one was a coprococcus. Yes, yes.

The other one.

Yeah. Well, there are also some really cool papers that are promoting fiber in order to raise the butyrate producing microbes. I was moved by your recent video Cribben. You posted it on May 1st. So not even a week ago or just about a week ago about your background with anxiety. Did you do a stool test at that time or what? Let's talk about what may have been the mechanism for your return to health.

Yeah, absolutely. I think my struggle was. Would have been about eight years ago now. But when I look back, it was a combination of different factors. I would say looking retrospectively, an extremely high level of stress was one definite kind of obvious, glaring, kind of highlight the other things. My diet was very heavy in processed foods at the time. I was working for one of the biggest, certainly in Australia, one of the biggest food companies. So as you would. When you're working for a food company, you're. You're accessing a lot of their products. So it was extremely processed in nature. What else was the other causative factors? Subsequently, I have tested my stool on numerous. I'm probably one of the most heavily stooled persons on the planet because we have a company with testing stools. So I very often send my stool for analysis. But it was very clear I was very high in firmicutes and probably lacking fiber would be the other. The other thing. So extremely high in processed carbohydrates. Clostridium would also be very high back in those early days.

But were they the. Were they the type of clostridia that are in the clusters that don't produce butyrate?

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely not the good. The good type, the good clostridials, that's for sure. I was very low in. I've always been pretty low in bifidobacteria as well. That's another. Another. Watch out for me being a very important agent for the brain, production of tryptophan and things like that. And certainly not enough sunlight. Not enough sunlight and way too much blue light exposure, way too much electromagnetic radiation from WI fi. I think these are all the environmental factors, microbial factors and also mitochondrial factors that were driving my anxiety and depression. Also just having. What's really undervalued as well is the impact of talking about your problems. There's studies out there that show that cognitive behavior therapy causes shifts in the microbiome. It's an axis that works both ways. Would you agree on that?

Of course, yes. You know, when you. In fact, an interesting way to think about it is the connection of the vagus nerve from the gut to the brain. A lot of people may know this already, but I still like to repeat it. 90% of the communication on the vagus is from gut to brain. Only 10% is brain to gut. The first thing you mentioned is stress. Stress is known to lower protective bacterial counts like bifidobacteria and lactobacillus. So that's a direct brain to gut connection. So of course I'm a big believer that our emotions are a huge factor. But going the opposite direction, you can see that we need to have, for instance, adequate levels of lactobacilli because they are able to through the vagus create, pardon me, higher numbers of oxytocin receptors. And from there you can Extrapolate higher levels of things like empathy. So, you know, that's being able to feel things and be connected with the outside world. In fact, there was a study just came, came out this week. Those people that are, that are having a greater level of oneness, that's connection to, you know, an interdependence with the outside world have higher levels of life satisfaction. They didn't give the mechanism for that. But I happen to think it's about, you know, things like precursors being gratitude, empathy, oxytocin and lactobacillus. Yeah.

That'S so interesting that you mentioned oxytocin because when I was at a conference there was a speaker that spoke in length about the impact of oxytocin and shifts in the gut microbiome. And speaking to, I guess some of her subjects. I think she was in that sort of autism research field. And it's like the child almost can't stand the smell of the mother and they can't make eye contact. And I find that so interesting because even simple things like human touch and eye contact, key drivers for production of oxytocin. So that's really fascinating that you connect that link to the gut microbiome as well.

Yeah, it's fascinating to me too. And I'm not sure if I came up with it independently. There's a researcher by the name of Susan Erdman who's written papers about this. So I may have suspected it and then found confirmation that's, I can't take credit for that. So here's the, you know, going back to your situation and what pulled you out of, out of anxiety, if it's true that you had high levels of clostridia, you know, these clostridia are also known to regulate levels of serotonin in the gut, gut drive serotonin. And also there's some evidence that the clostridia are also impacting tryptophan synthesis in the gut. So it's not just about dietary tryptophan. So it may also be that you have high levels of gram negative bacteria or the clostridia themselves were also degrading those precursors. Those amino acid precursors like tryptophan and other amino acids that cross the blood brain barrier and are the precursors to the neurotransmitters like serotonin. Because serotonin that's produced in the gut, it's actually 95% of all the serotonin produced in the body. But what's not so well known is that that cannot Cross the blood brain barrier. The serotonin that's produced in the brain is the product of tryptophan that does cross the blood brain barrier. And the competing amino acids with tryptophan can guide what, you know, what crosses the blood brain barrier. So what's not so commonly acknowledged, I think, is that these amino acid levels are really both made and broken. They're degraded and synthesized by microbes. And I think we need to put that out there for common knowledge, because right there you see a very powerful gut brain connection when amino acids are guiding neurotransmitter balance and how that all goes back to the gut. So with your situation, you may have had. If you had a clostridium overgrowth, it's possible that you had too much crossing the blood brain barrier leading to something akin to serotonin syndrome, where you have high levels of brain serotonin. Everyone seems to think it's about low levels of serotonin. So they know the doctors put people on a, you know, an ssri.

Where.

The reality may be, for some people, they have the opposite problem. And this can impact the glutamatergic system and cause excitotoxicity and even brain cell damage and how that affects what are called the cardiac vagal neurons that regulate our heartbeat. So there's. There's actually a gut brain heart connection and that is studied in relationship to sudden Infant death Syndrome and also sudden death by seizure Sudep. So that gut brain heart connection is something I'm still learning about. It's. It's a powerful construct, I think, to explain, especially sids, which is an excruciating problem.

Absolutely. Now, Keith, how do we, I guess, provide some actionable recommendations for the lay audience that perhaps might be struggling with a mental health issue like anxiety or depression? How do we kind of wrap this into some nice recommendations that you have to optimize your mental health using this information?

What did you do to change your diet? What do you attribute your comeback to? Were you eating a lot of greens by chance?

I actually stumbled across the work of Natasha Campbell McBride and the GAPS diet. So I followed the GAPS diet strictly for around memory was around four months, very strictly searched.

You were making your own kefir?

Yeah, and I started making my own kefir to introduce fermented foods. And I also. It wasn't only the way I felt that was so substantial was the weight loss. You know, I was extremely overweight at the time, probably a good 14, 15 kilos heavier than I am now. And it was a transformation from, from a mental health perspective and from a physical perspective as well, those were the two kind of most glaringly obvious changes that I made. Really clean diet, not much carbohydrates, not much things. Like anything that was fodmaps, I was pretty much taking it out.

Were you eating potatoes and rice and.

Grains that was eliminated out as well during that period?

That was a lucky call on your part. Well, that's, that's the GAPS diet. Yeah. I consider Natasha Campbell McGrido one of my heroes.

Absolutely.

And I think she recommends in her book to start with very low dose of kefir. Some people say kefir like a tablespoon dose. Is that what you did? You started with a small amount, otherwise you can have an adverse reaction.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, there's something about kefir or kefir that I learned recently, the work of Richard Sprague, who's one of those quantified individuals, a kindred spirit of yours, he discovered that if you use your kefir grains, and my understanding is the best grains to buy are from goat farms. Would you agree with that?

I think that's the traditional, the traditional method with goat, for sure.

Okay. But you buy the grains from the goat farm and then you can use bovine milk to produce kefir.

You could use coconut, you could use goat's milk, you could use bovine milk. It's a very flexible culture.

Yeah. But the actual grain, my understanding is it's best originating from a goat farm. I don't know if that's true.

That's a difficult one because, I mean, you could use goat's milk to feed the grain, but I don't think it needs to originate from particularly a goat farm. You just need to get it from someone who has very strict, you know, food controls, handling just to make sure culture is well maintained and with no contamination. That's the main thing.

Interesting. Well, here's the fairly new fact. It's not published in a peer reviewed journal, but as good as that. In fact, I don't even trust the peer reviewed process. But, but if you ferment the kefir for 24 hours, it will not be dominant in lactobacillus. It takes 48 hours fermentation for lactobacilli to become dominant. That's a powerful thing to consider because some people are, you know, they may only ferment for 24 hours and that's not quite enough if they're, if what they're going after is lactobacillus.

Yeah.

How long Were you fermenting?

For us only, it's around 48 hours. I mean, the kefir is ready for consumption at 24 hours. But for what you're saying, essentially Keith, is it's very easy to pick whether it's going to be high in latte bacillus because it's more sour, because lato bacilli produce lactic acid. So if you're having your kefir quite young, say at 24 hours, it's more bready and more yeasty. It's most likely to be yeast dominated at that point. But as you ferment longer and especially if you're fermenting anaerobically without oxygen, this is going to favor your lactobacillus and suppress your yeast. So you could potentially get a high lactobacillus content by fermenting with the lid closed, essentially because it is quite sour after 24 hours. But, but if you use the, I guess the typical method that people use, which is a cloth over a jar aerobically with oxygen, then what you're saying is most likely to be correct.

Interesting. I like that you're bringing up oxygen because this relates to another way to consider balancing a body to create an improved chance of, of good mental health. And that is with fiber that feeds the butyrate producers. And then what happens is butyrate signals our colonocytes in the gut. Those are the cells of the epithelial lining of the gut. The butyrate signals those cells to mop up oxygen and it's the aerobes, the aerobic bacteria that are mainly the gram negative bacteria that can be the ones causing the problem. So that might, that may be the mechanism behind a high fiber diet being applied to what's called neuroepigenetics and going after mental health issues. So without that fiber, what happens is there's not enough mucus generated in the gut lining for the microbes to live on. And then the microbes have a, they really have the free rein to start eating our cells. So we need to feed them fiber so that they don't eat us. That's actually part of really what's happening in diabetes and celiac disease when the microbes are going through the mucus, the mucosal, and they have direct access to our cells which are really intimately associated with the vagus nerve because they're what's known as the afferent nerves there. And that's a direct connection to the brain and that's taking place in the pyrus patches. Again.

Yeah, that's a fascinating insight. And you know, if someone's listening to the podcast and they're kind of following whether it's a GAPS diet or whether it's a fodmaps diet or they've got a sensitive gut, what I really recommend is looking at something like an acacia fiber or partially hydrolyzed guar gum. A A past guest, Dr. Jason Horolak, is big on this as well. To boost your and both these products also fodmap friendly, so they're not going to cause bloating or discomfort in the gut, but it's a great way to introduce fiber into the gut to help feed those lactobacilli and those bifidobacteria, which are absolutely critical for mental health.

Acacia fiber seems to be really safe. The phgg, however, the partially hydrolyzed guar gum, I heard people say it caused a negative reaction for them. You have to be very careful with any prebiotic and start with very small doses to avoid adverse reaction. Things like inulin, for instance, are known to feed proteobacteria like Klebsiella. And so for certain balances, even something that seems as healthy as inulin can cause problems.

And inulin can cause a substantial amount of bloating as well. Think about when you're having a lot of like a soup or casserole with lots of or curry or something like that with lots of onions and that's really high in inulin and that can cause some substantial bloating. So again, inulin could be really good to feed some good bacteria in the gut at the right amounts, but it can have some substantial adverse effects. If your gut is sensitive and it comes back full circle to what you're talking about earlier, it's very much now a personalized regime. It's personalized medicine. The microbiome is like a fingerprint. It's different for each person. So that's why it's great to experiment with your own body and try different prebiotics and work out what works for you. Something works for one person, might not necessarily work for others, and might cause adverse reactions because there's so many variables.

Even what is now known to be a very effective tool, fasting. A lot of people have an adverse reaction to fasting and my theory is they have a gram negative overgrowth where fasting can cause problems. And someone who has a gram positive overgrowth might have a better chance of gaining benefits by way of fasting.

It's, it's so each person is different and we're pretty we're pretty much at time, Keith, so we'll start to, we'll have a couple more rapid fire questions and then we'll, we'll wrap things up. So Keith, you've got this amazing group of people that are all fascinated about the microbiome, the gut club. You've got the stool testing group as well and people are regularly posting. So I encourage everyone to go and have a look at these groups and start to share because there's something special about citizen science, isn't it? I mean you can go to ubiome or any of the numerous other stool testing companies and you know, and you can share your results and have an open conversation with, with people and you know, you facilitate that so beautifully. So what's, what's some of the common threads that you come across from people sharing their information?

Oh, you mean on the stool test discussion group that some of the.

Absolutely.

Well, you know, I'm moved in particular by the caregivers of children that they're having issues such as autism. That's one of the common threads in our group. And the imbalances is pretty stark. In fact, one of the first charts that I saw, it was like 49% Proteobacteria.

Wow.

And the mother's doctor didn't know how to interpret that. And when she finally realized that this could be the problem, she was able to make an informed decision about what to do about it. And she chose fecal microbiota transplant which is fmt. And sure enough that balanced the problem and attenuated autistic symptoms. People are also using probiotic enema to take care of that. I'm about to launch a new project for the gut club I call the Breastfed Baby Poop Project. That's the theory that breastfed baby poop preferably unvaccinated for various reasons because vaccines may shift flora. But and by the way, it's also the flora that are part that are that are there prior to vaccination that upon vaccination can alter the immune response. I call that microbial predisposition. Anyway, the Breastfed Baby Poop project is about using breastfed baby poop as donor material. Whether it's pre weaned or weaned makes a difference because pre weaning the baby poop has very high levels of bifidobacteria, can be 80 or even 90% bifidobacteria and also high levels of the healthy phages that we talked about earlier. But post weaning when solid food is introduced, that's when clostridia become dominant. And so if someone is needing high levels of butyrate producers, then that may be a better choice of donor material. So right now this is theory. There aren't any research papers published about this, but I have a hunch that baby poop might be the most important source of untapped medicine. So I think that will be interesting. And in fact, in the history of FMT in China, going back hundreds of years, maybe a thousand years, they were using infant stool and making the equivalent of a pupu milkshake. It was used orally. Yeah. And these days, people are using capsules. You have a more direct route to the small intestine as opposed to the rectal route to the colon. So anyway, what's another thread? I'm seeing a lot of people that have high bacteroides. I think that seems to be the number one issue. And what's happening and the reason for that, it seems, is reduced levels of protective microbes. They have reduced or absent bifidobacteria, lactobacillus and akkermansia. Some people have very high levels of bifidobacteria, but no lactobacillus. And that's a big problem that, according to one paper, may implicate magnesium deficiency. It was shown that high levels of bifidobacteria correlated with magnesium deficiency, as if they were trying to compensate for the inflammation. So you can have too much of a good thing. In fact, we're also seeing very high levels of Akkermansia causing problems. You know, these are, you know, always consider. Usually considered the super superheroes of things like weight loss. But you can have too much of a good thing. But all these things seem to go along with high levels of bacteroides and low butyrate producers, low clostridia. And there are few. There are a few cases that seem to be the exception. And that might be people of Indian ancestry, possibly Spanish or Persian ancestry, where. And possibly Africans as well. Part of the controversy regarding vaccine injury, in fact, is about high levels of risk in the African American male community. African American boys were shown to have increased risk of autism by the MMR vaccine and no one's been able to explain it. I think it may be about naturally high levels of gram negative bacteria that guide the immune response. And there are studies that show that, that being the case, that, that Africans and African Americans and even females, well, let's not get into that part of it, but these communities, these races, let's put it this way, floral balance is a Matter of race, gender and geography. People are different. And again, I call it the underlying beauty of diversity. And so it's not a one size fits all program. Everyone's different. Everyone's going to have a different immune response based on eons of interaction between bacteria and our immune system. And the bacteria are actually guiding our genetic expression and probably our genes themselves. They're definitely having an impact on mitochondrial function, which I know it's a subject we talked about. They're doing the backstroke in our cells and impacting mitochondria from the outside and the inside of cells.

Absolutely. And people, I think most people don't realize mitochondria, based on the latest science, are archaic bacteria themselves, or remnants of archaic bacteria. They've essentially lost a lot of their genes, but they're endosymbiotic, meaning they're now an organelle inside the cell. But they're very much bacteria in origin. So there's definitely communication happening.

Right. And there's a school of thought that is not that large of a school yet. But I'd like to promote the idea that antibiotics may have their effect by way of how they're causing mitochondria to release ros. Reactive oxygen species to balance the cell. It's not just about killing bacteria, it's about affecting microbes. I mean, mitochondria. In fact, there's some studies in autism showing how vancomycin, the antibiotic used to attenuate autistic symptoms, they think it's about lowering clostridia. And then when you stop, you know, using the antibiotic, the spores from Clostridia are able to grow back. It's a spore forming bacteria, but that's not the way I view the issue. I think it's about, and there are studies to back this way of thought, that the antibiotic is affecting mitochondria and release of things like hydrogen peroxide that can balance the cell and kill intracellular microbes that are causing the problem.

That's a fascinating insight. Wow. I think we're pretty much at time now, Keith. And we'll start to wrap. So the question is, we always ask at the end of the show, if there was one thing, Keith, that a listener could do for their gut health today, what would it be?

Well, the most obvious thing would be to stop eating sugar. That's a very powerful thing in and of itself. And maybe the hardest thing, sugar addiction is so hard to tackle. I fight it. You know, I'm 50, I'm almost 58 years old now. And I think for the first 50 years of my life, I ate enough breakfast cereal to the sink and Navy ship heading down the wrong path. And I still battle carbohydrate and sugar cravings. But I know based on my own experience that when I stop eating that for a month, it changes everything. It's a very simple thing to do to eliminate sugar, period. Other than that, you know, from a mental health standpoint, you know, take a hike, get on into the greenery, get out into nature.

Great advice.

Yeah.

James, anything? Any questions?

No, I think that was great. And I agree with getting out of nature as well. I think that's super helpful.

It's so helpful. And I think it's just, it's common sense. Spending more time in nature, eating clean, going to your farmer's market. These are all the things that help transform my life. They're very simple, but pretty hard to put in practice.

Getting out in the sunshine itself is known to raise vitamin D levels, which balance microbes in the small intestine, which are the center, that's the center of all health, the duodenum. That's the upper small intestine. That's how vitamin D does its job. But it's not just about sunshine. Otherwise we wouldn't have kids in Bangladesh, millions by the million having rickets when they're not wearing sunblock. It's been shown that microbes regulate our vitamin D levels. So what's thought of as the sunshine vitamin really isn't about sunshine. And probiotics are known to raise vitamin D levels.

It just, I mean, past the past guest, Dr. Jack Cruz, he's a huge advocate of the sun. You can always go back and listen to some of the past episodes when he talks about, I guess, light in the microbiome. But I agree, Keith, it's such a complex, complex system, the body, you know, all these things that we don't typically associate with things like vitamin D. There's complex interactions. And the microbiome seems to be this massive organ that's right in the front of regulating a lot of these hormones and vitamins, enzymes that we need. So 100% agree?

Yes. And with the sunshine, also, if people ate a lot of dark leafy greens, I like watercress and arugula. And there was a study that's very provocative. The chlorophyll interacts with sunlight and you end up, you know, when you're, when you're in UVA light, which is late afternoon light, as opposed to uvb, which is when the sun is directly overhead, you can raise nitric oxide levels through that interaction with UVB and chlorophyll. So have a dark leafy green salad and take a hike in bright sunlight at 4pm.

I love that. That's a good way to wrap up. And Keith, huge gratitude for you coming onto the show. And it's great that at times we're not talking to university professors, but people who are really passionate about the microbiome gut health. They're hugely interested in waving the flag of protecting our environment. So we love to give people like yourself an opportunity and have a voice to have a conversation and put some thought ideas, put some ideas out into the ethos for people to consider and keep an open mind about.

Thank you. You know, but the fact that I'm not a university professor or a research scientist, even though I'm associated with some. I just put out a paper, it's just been published called Do Microbiota Mediate Adverse Vaccine Reaction? The idea is because I'm not tied to a large organization that gives me more potential for putting out some wild ideas and without the fear of jeopardizing my funding or being fired.

Exactly. That's such a good point. And you know, if people want to, they're resonating what you're saying. They've had some stool testing done. They want to get involved with Keith Bauer. How do they find you on the interwebs?

Well, they can go to thegutclub.org the gut club on Facebook and the Gut Club Stool Test discussion group. Please join us, everyone's invited. You don't have to have test results to post, but we look forward to everyone joining the conversation.

Awesome. Highly encourage our listeners to go check out Keith's wonderful group. There's some very interesting and insightful discussions happening. Keith, thank you so much. Huge gratitude.

Thank you. Same to you from 9,700 miles away from Palm Beach County. With love.

With love. Thanks, Keith.

Thank you.

Hey guys. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Gut Health Gurus podcast with Keith Bell. You can find show notes and links@www.podcast.nourishmeorganics.com. If you're enjoying our podcast, please give us a positive review at 5 stars on iTunes and share our podcast with your friends and family members. Don't forget to check out Allele Microbiome for cutting edge and actionable metagenomic DNA based stool testing and nutritional support to optimize your gut health.