Martha Carlin on Developing Probiotics with AI

This episode is brought to you by Nourish Me Organics, your gut health superstore. Nourish Me Organics is the premier online store for all things gut health, including probiotics, prebiotics, natural health supplements and home fermentation kits. So head to www.nourishmeorganics.com and use the code Happy Gut for 10% off. In this episode, we chat with Martha Carlinon fighting Parkinson's via the microbiome, how artificial intelligence is transforming probiotic development, probiotics for weight management, and much more.

Hey guys. Cribbing govender from the Gut Health Gurus podcast. I've got a background in food science and today I have an amazing guest, Martha Carlin. Martha and Martha and I connected on LinkedIn many, many years ago and finally I had the opportunity and the being completely blessed to have her onto the podcast. Martha, thank you for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me. You know, I've followed you over the years and we've kind of touched on each other's things we've been doing through social media and stuff. But it's great to be sitting here with you for the first time.

Thank you so much. And I just wanted to let you know your, your company, the Bio Collective, was the first sample fecal sample I ever sent of myself many years ago. So that was, I can't even remember the year, but that was the first data I ever managed to get on myself. So thank you so much for providing that amazing service.

Did you send it from Australia?

I did. It cost an absolute, it costed absolute fortune at the time, but I was just so fascinated by the, the microbiome world that I had to sit, I had to get some sort of data on myself. So. And another interesting side note, this is what I found kefir organisms in my, my stool as well. It was Lactobacillus kefarina fishins actually picked up in your stool testing.

Oh, interesting. I've had different people. I had, we had this one woman who, who we found the sour beer starters in hers and it was so funny because she's like, oh, I was, I used to love sour beer. And I. And she hadn't had it in years, but it had colonized her so.

Well, There you go. Fascinating. And what I like to do at the start of my podcast is just to get it from directly from the guest. Very open question. Who is Martha Cullen?

Oh, wow. Well, I think first and foremost, I would say nowadays I'm a citizen scientist and I came to that through oh, sorry. Trying to. Sorry. I came to that really 20 years ago when my 44 year old husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's and I took my business background. So I was trained in accounting as my undergraduate degree, which is a system that scholar got a balance. And then I came out and went to work as an auditor for Arthur Anderson. So never take anything at face value, always examine the evidence. They also trained us in systems thinking and how to look at a system or look at the systems in a business and look for the breakpoints. And so when John was diagnosed with Parkinson's, I was like, I think this is a systems problem. And so I started to kind of relearn science because the last time I had had science was in high school and kind of went along the. And then in 2014 came across Martin Blaser's work missing microbes and was just, it was such a eureka moment for me. I was like, this is it. The gut is the general ledger of the body. And so that has really consumed my life since, since 2014. You know, went on to found the Bio collective and start the Biotic west brand. And it's. But I'm also, you know, a wife, a mother, a farmer, and, you know, just a citizen of the world trying to make a difference.

That is an amazing backstory because we all fall into this space from so many different avenues of life. And I've never come across someone that comes in from almost in accounting, auditing field and then applies the, the knowledge and the methodology of auditing and then bringing that into a scientific field like the microbiome. That is the beauty of humanity because we come in from so many different angles and then your perception and your point of view is then slightly different from someone else. But we all add so much value. So that I just wanted to commend you on that. That's, that's amazing. How about we, we delve. When you mentioned the age 44, that kind of hit home for me because that's around my age. And how about we delve a little bit into your, your backstory because I think you also did a TED Talk on, on this subject. So I'd love to hear just a little bit more because I think the audience would really appreciate your journey.

Sure. So in 2000, it was 2002, my husband was 44 and he had a bit of a tremor in his pinky and I had noticed actually his loss of facial expression because he had always had a very lively, you know, vibrant face, big smile. And he all of a sudden had Flat expression. And I happened to pick up Michael J. Fox's book, Lucky Man, I think was the one that was out then. And I read it and I thought, you know, I think maybe he has Parkinson's. And so we actually went to the neurologist and. Well, no, we went to his internist, and he went through all these tests and everything. And the internist came back and said, oh, you know, everything's fine. And we're sitting there in his office. And I said, well, like, what about his shaking pinky? And what about his loss of facial expression? And of course, you know, doctors nowadays, they don't. They haven't known us our whole lives. They. They don't. They don't have enough time to spend with us to know that now we have a flat facial expression. That. And so as soon as I said that, I could see the expression on his face. And he said, I think maybe we need to send you to a neurologist. But when we went to the neurologist, just watching my husband walk down the hall, when we walked into his office and sat down, he turned to me and said, you know what I'm going to tell you, don't you? And of course I. I did. I mean, they're. Neurologists are notoriously blunt and unkind. And, you know, so we came out of that. You know, he's like, here's a pill. There's nothing you can do about it. You're just going to get worse. And, um, you know, I am a fixer. I have been a fixer my whole life. You know, I'm business turnaround person. And I came home and I'm like, I'm not taking this laying down. And, you know, I started doing research, and I just instinctively, very intuitively knew that food was a big part of the problem. You know, didn't know anything about the microbiome, but I'm like, okay, well, what you're putting in this pipe, like, that's going to be the biggest problem. So I threw everything out of the cabinet. But in 2002, there really wasn't a lot of organic food. So I started researching, okay, well, what is the food supply that we have? And that's actually when I, you know, I was shocked and surprised at how many chemicals were used on our food, how much genetic engineering was already going on in the food supply. And, you know, I didn't know anything about that. But then I started studying all these little pieces, and in my head I'm thinking, there's got to be some way to Tie all these pieces together, you know, all along the way, as I'm studying Parkinson's proteins or, you know, the. And people with Parkinson's have. It's like a designer disease. You know, this person over here has these three symptoms. This one over here has five symptoms, and they only share one Sim. I mean, it's, it's kind of crazy. And, you know, so changing the food was really interesting because by going as much organic as possible and home cooking the meals, you know, he was getting more nutrient dense and less chemicals preservatives, all that. And his tremor went away. And so he's never really had much tremor since we made those changes. But over the years, you know, he's had, you know, different sort of ups and downs. And when the microbiome came along, I mean, we've done a hundred, over 150 whole genome samples of John's stool.

Wow.

Like, so, like we have so much data on him. But, you know, when I first started looking at it, I didn't know what these things were. And so I'm just looking through the literature trying to figure out, well, what does this bug do? And what does this bug. And back then, even, Even in like 2015, when we were doing his stuff at the University of Chicago, there wasn't, I mean, there's so many more publications now on all these gut microbes. But, you know, I'm looking at it and I'm looking at what, what are the acute symptoms if you have an infection with this? And I'm like, all these little pieces sort of tie into what's going on with people with Parkinson's in this designer. So I'm like, I think this, you know, the, the microbiome really could be the key. And we, you know, so we started focusing even more on the diet. You know, one of the things I had a huge, huge focus on probably starting in, I'd say maybe 2006 or 2007, was exposure to glyphosate and really looking at that and so really started focusing more on where were the other places of glyphosate exposure that I hadn't been in, you know, getting them off wheat, getting them off sugar, getting them off, you know, really shifting the microbiome. But that in 2016, which was like two years into founding the company, I went to a Parkinson's conference. And that was. There was a group there that was showing that the sugar alcohol mannitol could stop the aggregation of the proteins in Parkinson's in a Parkinson's mouse model, and actually Pull the aggregates out of the brain. And I was like, wow, that's pretty remarkable. So I came back from the meeting and I bought this little book on mannitol chemistry. And I was like, wow, this is like one of the most amazing molecules. I think, like, read about it. It's amazing. It's a free radical scavenger. I mean, it probably depletes deuterium when it comes out of the. You know, it does all these amazing things. And they use it in medicine for all different things. And people with Parkinson's definitely have osmotic stress in the body. They have. About 70% have severe constipation. And mannitol can help with that. But anyway, the first chapter of the book had a discussion of the microbes that make mannitol. Most microbes use it, but there's a handful that actually make it. And that's where I kind of first started coming up with the idea of, can we, like, put back a system in the gut that would make this. So you have a little factory. And one of my advisors, Steve Cosmi, had been in the nutraceutical business for and probiotics with nutraceutics that was sold to Probi. And he just. We sat down and kind of put together the concept of the formula, and he was able to help us prototype it basically in about two months. And John started taking it. And we're measuring his samples and we can see he's moving back closer and closer to. To the healthy human microbiome. But even. Even more remarkable, at the time, he was having to walk with a cane. He was really having posture instability. And it just, poof. He was. He was not walking with a cane in about a month. So. And then we went on from there to develop computational models to prove out that what we had come up with really worked to do what it did. And then we did before and after tests on other people from John and took. Then we took that concept in that computational model and built these other working systems of probiotics.

I'm just fast. I was going to ask. I'm fascinated to hear, how's he going now.

He is doing real, really well. He. So at that point. So there's something called the UPDR score, which is how they score how advanced your Parkinson's is. And the higher the number, the more advanced your disease is. Well, in 2017 was his highest score. It was a 35. And he started taking the probiotic, and we also found an intracellular parasite in his samples. And he was treated for the parasite. After we did all the probiotic testing, we found the parasite, we treated him with an antibiotic. We saw we had totally wiped out everything we had done to improve his microbiome. And we actually did a fecal transplant. And what was interesting there is the fecal transplant bounced him back to where he was after six months of the probiotics. So it just worked much faster. But at the end of 2021, he got Covid and he had a really, really tough bout of it. And about seven months of lingering long Covid symptoms with the blood pressure issues. Just the whole adrenal HPA access was just a train wreck. And so we really focused intensely on some interventions there. And one actually came from one of my customers who told me she had a neighbor who developed severe Parkinson like symptoms after having Covid. And she made a yogurt with my sugar shift capsules and she put, she started with 10 capsules, so, and fermented for 36 hours. So she probably ended up with like 800 billion or a trillion CFUs. So a really high count. And she made that for him every week for a month. And he had a half a cup a day or a quarter cup a day or some and his symptoms all reversed. So when she told me that, I actually started making the yogurt for John and I. So kind of long story short, you know, he's kind of bounced back from the long Covid symptoms and is, you know, back on track. But he had a, he had a rough year as he was kind of coming back around from that. And there are, you know, there's some microbiome papers that have been published showing people who have worse outcomes in with COVID have low bifidobacteria. And in our Parkinson's data, we showed that they, they had low bifidobacteria or they only had one or mostly one strain that was Bifido animalis, which is different. It's quite different than the other bifido strains. And but there have been some other Parkinson's meta analysis that showed that bifido was higher. So I'm kind of interested in talking to some of the people who did the meta analysis because that's not what we saw in our microbiome, our Parkinson's data set.

That's an amazing story because out of necessity, from having a loved one that's ill and not having necessarily the, the right treatment options to, to help that condition, it's almost you. You turned into a MacGyver in trying to find a, find a solution and Then you created this amazing company called the Bio Collective. And then from that trying to help your husband even further. Then you created this wonderful probiotic range and Biotic quest and Sugar shift, which I use myself. I love the product. I definitely think it helps me keep a lot of fat away. I don't know how it works. I was going to ask you a little bit more. Let's dig into that a little bit deeper. But a couple of side note questions that I had from your story. Firstly, I'm fascinated to hear more about the deuterium depletion aspect of the mannitol mechanism that you were speaking about. So just in layman's terms, if you could just explain that a little bit further.

So for listeners who may not know what deuterium is, it's heavy hydrogen and so it can sort of muck up the cellular machinery or make the mitochondria, you know, because the. A hydrogen versus a deuterium. A deuterium is heavier and it won't move through the reactions as quickly. Well, so when you. So manitol is A6 carbon sugar, it's a free radical scavenger. So it's picking up hydrogens as. And when you're, when the microbes are making it, you know, it's, they're making those molecules and then you are eliminating the man. So humans don't use mannitol. We take it in, it goes back out. And so you're either, it's either going out in your urine or your stool. And so, you know, the microbes are making mannitol from glucose and fructose and picking up six deuteriums and taking them out. So I actually had a conversation with Laszlo Boros who's one of the kind of people who talks about that. He's supposed, he was, he's supposed to be writing a paper for me on that mechanism. But our last conversation with that was before COVID And you know, a lot has changed in those two years. So I actually need to follow up with him on the, on, on that, getting that paper done. But, and I think that it is potentially one of the mechanisms and I listened to a talk with Stephanie Snef, kind of connecting the dots with deuterium and microbes and glyphosate and, and all the kind of complex pieces of that puzzle. One and one of the other things that is this is not one of the mannitol producing microbes, but we have a Lactobacillus plantarum that is ours. We found it from fermentation of wild fruits from. In my neighborhood in Colorado, elderberries. And it breaks down glyphosate. There. There are three pathways that break down glyphosate. One breaks it down to ampa, which is more toxic, and the other two, one's called the third pathway, and one's called the sarcosine pathway. And our mic, our microbe, has both of those, and it breaks it down to phosphate and water.

So that's incredible.

That's another mechanism.

Incredible. Just, just as a side note as Well, I interviewed Dr. Jack Cruz quite a few years ago, and he was the first guy that started to talk a bit about how microbes use deuterium. So it's so essentially in their growth pathways, just like a. Like a baby uses a lot of deuterium during that growth phase. So it's so good to hear that the science is advancing to a point now that we're actually understanding how these microbes use it and how they potentially eliminate excess deuterium from the body as well. So I'll be waiting with, with much eagerness to see this, this paper from Lazlo Borish, who's also been on this podcast so people can go back and check out the episodes with Dr. Laszlo Boris, Dr. Gabor Shumli, and also Dr. Jack Cruz to learn more about this subject. And then the next thing that piqued my interest when you mentioned the yogurt. So is that that yogurt that you are making, because your sugar shift product does have lactobacillus rotary, doesn't it?

Yes, it does.

So it's like the. The doc. The Dr. William Davis yogurt. So yours is like the. The next iteration of Dr. Davis's yogurt that's a bit more specific to your. Your problems that you're trying to fix.

Yes. And actually, I mean, the idea for the Yogurt came from Dr. Day. I mean, Dr. Davis has been really fantastic to us because, you know, he's a. He knows so much about the microbiome, and he has been great with his people, you know, having us on to talk about the product. And a lot of his people take it and use it and make the yogurt. So it was one of his people who told me about helping her, her neighbor, because it was her idea to. She goes, okay, well, we make the Rooterai yogurt. Let's, you know, she made this for her husband with Parkinson's, and he's got symptoms kind of like Parkinson's. So I'm going to make yogurt with the. So then it was kind of like, ah, wonderful.

That's so interesting. So you're probably very well versed to talk on this. So a lot of people might be wondering what's the difference between taking the capsule versus making a yogurt out of the product? Is any benefits or, or good causes could good reasons to use this methodology?

Well, I do think there are some reasons to use the yogurt methodology because there are a lot of bioactive peptides in milk and we make the yogurt with a high fat. So I'll either make it with organic whole cream grass bed or grass fed organic half and half. So it's a very high fat content. And I think what it's doing is making the minerals and the, you know, the, the vitamins and everything more bioavailable than just, I mean, I think that capsules are great and I have wonderful, you know, testimonials from people who take the capsules. It changes their energy. We have people who report weight loss, but we don't, we do not advertise weight loss. And it's mostly because they, they are able to do a longer intermittent fast or they just don't get as hungry, they don't crave sugars. You know, there, there are a lot of different mechanisms behind that. But I, I think the yogurt one, you're getting a very high count, so you're, you're doubling about every 12 hours. So, you know, our, our label on the bottle says 18 billion, but you know, it's probably closer to 25. And you know, I started with four capsules, so that's a hundred billion. And you double that for, you know, it's, it's 800 billion. Is that right? Yeah, or, and so when she was starting with 10 capsules, she was getting a lot. So, you know, if you're really looking for some, I guess I would say intense bioremediation and cleanup. You know, the, the yogurt's probably a great idea and you're going to get, you know, you're going to get a lot of, a lot more bioactive compounds in the yogurt. I don't know and I don't know if you've ever seen this book. It's called the Life Bridge. I said I'm going to sell out all the. Because it's out of print. But I talked about it in Dr. Davis's group and they were all out buying it on Amazon. But it's the Life Bridge, the way to longevity with probiotic nutrients and they go through in here and really show how microbes make inorganic matter living and much more bioavailable. So a USP nutrient that you're buying in a bottle versus one that is, you know, fermented and provided in, you know, like the ye, you know, the nutritional yeast you don't want to get the fortified stuff you want to, you want to get unfortified. But the, a yeast like that or you know, a microbial blend, like we put together a blend and they're making and using, you know, metabolites, you're going to get those, those compounds in a much more accessible way for your body. And you know, that book was just a real aha for me. And then it has like 10 pages of the fermented foods around the world and what strains of bacteria are in them. And of course that was a eureka for me because I found this book after I had made my formula and you know, three of the key strains in my formula are found in global, you know, fermented foods around the globe. But not so much probiotics.

Amazing. That's, that's incredible. And I think just, just a side note there, I can definitely back up your, your comment on the bioavailable peptides because I've done a lot of work on, on kefir and a lot of the benefits of milk kefir come from the conversion of these milk proteins into all these extremely bioactive and bioavailable peptides. So your, your comments on making that reutery yogurt is, is so apt because firstly as you mentioned, the higher dose dose level, effective dose level, but then also the, almost the pre fermentation of the milk peptides into all these potentially beneficial active agents. So that, that's incredible. Thank you for your insight. And if anybody wants to learn more about the yogurt process you can go back to, I think it's the previous episode where I talked to Dr. William Davis on all these very interesting aspects. So let's, let's move on. So I'm really interested in your bio collective work because you have potentially access to incredible amounts of data on the microbiome, perhaps one of the most in the whole entire world. Myself with my research as well through allele microbiome have a lot of data on the microbiome. Admittedly I haven't advanced this as much as you guys in terms of the machine learning and the artificial intelligence side to extract more insights out of that data set. But how about just very quickly, in a nutshell, if you could just tell Us about three of the top learnings from getting all this data from thousands and thousands of people. What's your three takeaways, your elevator pitch for your data?

Well, you know, probably one of the things that it was an original hypothesis of ours and you know, it held up pretty well is that, you know, we call these things diseases and put them in these singular categories, but really what we have is metabolic dysfunction kind of across the spectrum. And so maybe where, where your different weak spots are, it pops out as a, you know, a different sort of disease classification. But much of it is in this dysregulation of, of lipids and sugars in the body. And so that was a big epiphany for me. You know, I continue to have kind of eureka moments with the Parkinson's data because we have made that data and those samples available. You know, we gave a set of this Parkinson's samples to Circus Masmanian at Caltech and they published a really interesting paper on it. We took our whole genome data and worked with Artigen, a company in Poland and, and they applied their machine learning and you know, came back with all these incredible insights, potential biomarkers and you know, I continue to sort of send those out to Parkinson's researchers who can do something. I mean that's not what we do. I'm kind of an explorer, but not the exploiter, I guess. But, and so there, there have been some interesting insights there that go back to Mycobacteria actually, which has been an area of interest of mine for, gosh, probably two years into the bio collective because some papers came out with some potential connections to Parkinson's and I started looking at sequencing and it's actually an organism that's very hard to, to get because it's low abundance in the microbiome. It is difficult to lyse, so it often gets missed. And then we actually just published a paper on sample collection methods and how it biases the data. And when you're using a DNA RNA preservative or freezing, you have a significant impact on proteobacteria and actinobacteria. And those are two, two, you know, those are two key things in disease, I believe.

You know, absolutely. It's your, your bluffer or your what's, what's that often shows up in test.

They actually just came out. I think it was the Finnish researchers that came out and with the hypothesis that disulfo vibrio may be a cause of Parkinson's. And that's I think too because Stephanie Sinef has showed this sulfur dysregulation with glyphosate. But there, there's also published literature, at least here in the states of disulfa bivrio in the public water systems, in the pipes. And it's also pretty prevalent in the cafo, you know, the big agricultural waste operations. So, you know, there's some potential there from what we've done environmentally.

So, Martha, the next question I had for you was around your insights on lipopolysaccharides. So how does the, how does, what's your data telling you on lipopolysaccharides? Firstly, when it comes to Parkinson's, let's hone in a little bit on that and then more broadly on other disease mechanisms in the body.

Well, so I wasn't originally that focused on lipopolysaccharide in Parkinson's and I, I can't remember exactly how I came back around to it, but I was like, oh, I know. So there's a researcher, he just passed away last year. I think he was 95. His name is Isaac Ginsburg and he worked a lot in sepsis. He was a, a dentist researcher, prolific researcher, was still writing papers all the way up until he died. But he had a hypothesis of post infectious sequela from bacteriolysis. So basically, you know, the cellular debris from the bacteria that's still floating around in the system that's causing inflammation. And I read his paper, I think in 2015 and started emailing back and he actually invited me to call him, I talked to him on the phone. So that sort of started me thinking about that. And as I looked at it, there's actually an animal model for Parkinson's called the LPS induced Parkinson's model. And I'm like, okay, well if you can make a mouse get Parkinson's with lps, why aren't you asking what LPS producing bacteria are in people with Parkinson's? And let's address that. I mean, it just seemed pretty logical to me. But so then I started kind of expanding from there about how lps, you know, is this inflammatory trigger for so many different diseases. And so we did a clinical trial last summer in diabetes in Cuba, where my chief scientific officer, Raul was born. And you know, we're doing all the standard, you know, fasting blood glucose, postprandial homa, IR, insulin, you know, HbA1c. And I said, can we, can we do serum LPS? And they're like, sure, we can do that. So. And that turned out to be one of, one of the fastest moving markers that we had. So in the, at 90 and 180 days, at 90 days LPS had dropped substantially in the serum and at 180 days it was, it wasn't non existent, but it was much, I mean it was almost non existent. So we definitely are, we don't know exactly the mechanism at this point. We haven't spent a lot of time digging into that and we're still working on the microbiome paper from the data that because we first did 16s and then we decided to go ahead and do the shotgun sequencing. So we're in the process of doing all the analytics around that to see if there's signal in the genes from the whole, whole genome sequencing that can give us a clue to how, how that might be working. But it was very exciting and I think that's probably one of the ways that it was helping my husband too.

Oh, it's fascinating. Just this is a side note. So LPS lipopolysaccharide, basically cellular walls of gram negative bacteria. So it's a certain staining methodology that sort of highlights which ones have this LPS hexa. LPS is the particularly inflammatory version. But there's a lot of work happening on the LPS space in terms of how it could pass through the gut into the blood, into the brain. So it's very exciting to again see information coming hot off the press and how your, your study evolves and what sort of data and insights we can get out, get on out of it. So again, watch this space on, on Martha's work in terms of lps. Anything else you want to say on LPS and other disease mechanisms?

You know, I, I probably leave that to, to somebody who's dug deeper down that pathway. I'm actually been off in a totally different direction related to minerals availability. And I think that the other thing we talked a bit about the yogurt but making minerals more available. So for the last two months have been very deep in research with Morley Robbins, I think you know him. You know, looking at this enzyme called the PAM enzyme that a lot of people have never heard of. It is required for amidating about 279 peptides that we have found so far. And there's probably more than that. And it requires two atoms of copper and glyphosate chelates copper and a number of the microbes in my formula have multi copper oxidases. So we think they may be able to chaperone and bring that copper where it needs to go to, to help some of those things and that, you know, and reuterie may be one of those microbes too because as you know, Dr. Davis is looking at that in oxytocin. And oxytocin is one of those peptides that has to be amedated with the PAM enzyme.

So it's incredible because your, your formula just touches so many different avenues. You got deuterium depletion, you got the, the copper mechanism as well with, with Morley's work. So it's incredible that you've managed to formulate it. So how about we talk more about biotic quest, your, your baby that you created. How did you, how did you formulate, how did you pick those particular strains? Because I think it's very important for people to, to, to realize that strain is, is everything. So you know, genus species is, is not enough and not enough detail about the organism. It's like, you know, difference between a cat and a particular breed of cat or just saying dog or saying Rottweiler, German Shepherd. So it's very specific. So what was your mindset when you formulated, let's talk about sugar Shift and then some of the other amazing products that you have on the market?

Sure. So, you know, when I started out to make sure shift, I, you know, I was looking to just make something to help John. You know, I was like, can we, can we make mannitol in the gut? And so the key organisms we were looking at were Bacillus subtilis, Leuconostoc and Ruderi that all make mannitol. But we knew, you know, we needed a combination that was sort of sustainable and could keep itself going. And so, you know, we looked for a method of kind of putting a mixture together that would balance the ph and be self sustaining for let's say 10 to 12 hours. And, and we already knew we had the plantarum that had the glyphosate remediating, so we wanted to include that as well. So yeah, we've kind of just played around and in some ways got lucky. So my Steve Cosmi, the fermentation chemist friend of mine who helped me with the formula, he had actually his own Lactobacillus reutera that he had done a lot of research on and was working in animal health, hadn't used it on the human side. And so we used his Lactobacillus reutera and we used it at a pretty high percentage of the formula because we knew it had some pretty powerful capabilities from some of the research that he had done. But you know, in some Ways like when we first formulated was a little bit of a just sort of luck, I would say. And then we said, okay, we've got to figure out does it really do what we think it does. And so, you know, we were looking at the before and after microbiome. And then we had more people do the before and after microbiome. And we could see upregulated genes involved in butyrate mannitol production, citro fours. And then one big surprise is we had a huge drop, like a 60% drop in multidrug resistant like antibiotic resistance genes, which is interesting because apparently mannitol also can make antibiotics more effective. So I guess it can overcome the efflux pump or some of that. So that, you know, that, that was pretty interesting. And in that same time frame, we had brought on board Nasir Sangawan, who had been at University of Chicag and Argonne National Lab. And he was probably one of the top people in terms of using whole genome sequencing because not a lot of people had big data sets with whole genome. Most of still, most everything out there is still just 16s. And I knew from the very beginning I wanted all the data because I wanted to see specific genes that were involved in 16 specific things, including anything that could give me a clue about glyphosate. And you know, I was like, it's all going to be. And it, I mean it really, it's a map when you start looking at those genes and you, you can see what's going on. I mean it, you know, it's just amazing. But so then we started taking his computational modeling capabilities and building what we call a bioflux model. It's a flux balance analysis, which, you know, sort of reminds me of Back to the Future and the flux capacitor, but. And you know, sometimes when we sit around and talk about that stuff, it feels like we're a little back to the future, but. And it's basically a model where you feed. So we had roughly 2,500 microbial genomes, individual genomes. And then we use a database from Argonne National Lab that had about 17,000 metabolisms metabolites that are all based on wet laboratory data of how, you know, microbes with different media and different interactions between different microbes. And so you take all of that computational information and you say, okay, I'm taking these eight strains, which is what ours is. You feed the genomes into it takes all that information and then, you know, you put like the complete media or you know, whatever your substrate is going to be and apply your constraints and run the model for however many hours you're going to. And then it shows you the growth curves of the bacteria during that time frame of each of the strains in your consortium. And it shows you how they cross feed each other. And then you can select, you know, different metabolites if you want to look at. So we were, of course, interested in butyrate and mannitol, and, you know, we could see how that worked. And then we did our modeling and said, well, you know, what if we take this microbe out, is it still going to work? And it was like, no, it doesn't work the same way. And, you know, we use that model to look at other people's products. And you know, we say like, because so many people just, okay, well let's throw 12 strains in here and see what happens. Well, you know, you may only get one strain really growing in the end. So that all proved out that, you know, the, the, our original kind of hypothesis that we put together did work. And so then we took that computational model and we said, okay, what are the other problems we want to solve and we wanted to address, like general immune system, cardiovascular. We actually have 20, about 24 formulas that we came up with. We only have five on the market right now. But, you know, just kind of underlying metabolic problems from, you know, you're not making vitamins right in your gut because bacteria, you know, make your vitamins or, you know, for mood, because some of the neurotransmitters aren't working right. So we, and my Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Kano, was professor of microbial ecology at cal poly for 30 years. I mean, he's, he's world renowned for his work in using microbes to clean up the environment for paleo microbiology, for being the first person to sequence a strain of lactobacillus, which of course now you can do in no time at all. But back then it took about a year and, and he's just a wealth of knowledge of, you know, okay, what if we did this, this and this, and then we put it into our system and it would come back out and it would either be what we wanted or. Or not. And so that's how we put together working systems.

That's incredible. I just want to highlight to the audience how, how brilliant this, this methodology is, because most of the time formulators will just draw upon almost buzzwords, you know, like the bacillus rotary or Bifidobacter or whatever the buzzword is in the market. And they whack together a formula and it's almost like you're hoping that it works. But the brilliance of this methodology is firstly, naturally your ability to identify experts in the space and then get them on your team and improve the, the knowledge base of where you're starting from. And then the, the second brilliance of this is you have a huge amount of existing microbiome data to draw upon. Thousands and thousands of different case studies, identify what the missing pieces are, and then you're putting it into a computational model where you can understand the interactions between different microbes and then have target postbiotics, if you like, different types of beneficial compounds that the bacteria process. And then using that sort of theoretical model, then formulating and then creating a product that's actually going to deliver on what your, your, your key outcomes are. So that's incredibly sophisticated. So I applaud you for, for the work that you're doing in this, this methodology that you've developed, because I think it's almost, you're taking a lot of the, the analytical thinking from your previous life and then bring, bringing something very unique to the, the microbiome space and the, the formulation of these brilliant probiotics. So that is so exciting. Wow.

And then on top of that, then, you know, because Raul is a fantastic microbiologists too, then, you know, we built out a, a bio bank of, you know, our own microbes. So, you know, in our formula not all of the strains are ours, but, you know, we have four unique strains that are ours. And we, you know, in the other formulas that we're, we have a suite of another 10 to 12 that we're looking to bring to market, you know, as we bring new products along.

Absolutely. And I love how you, you're actually factoring in the interaction between the different microbes because they're gonna, either, I think most of the time they're working together, so they're the, the numbers of the microbes of these individual strains are very much determined on metabolites that are then feeding the next one. It's almost a bit of a succession. And then the end outcome is what that metabolite that you're trying to produce is based on the combination. But you're doing it in a very clever way because it's using a, a model, I imagine a lot of artificial intelligence type stuff, decision trees and, and formulating. So. Wow. So how about we go into, I think, I think the audience is going to be really fascinated to hear about these different probiotic supplements that you've developed. So Biotic Quest is very much targeted towards sugar metabolism, is that correct?

The sugar shift is for sugar metabolism.

Sorry, BioQuest sugar shift. And then you've got Biotic Quest. There's an immune supplement that you have.

Yeah. Ideal Immunity.

Ideal immunity which is very much to do with boosting the immune system. So how does that work?

So that, that also produces, produces butyrate and acetate. It produces reduced glutathione tryptophan, reduces gluta glutamate and it has a specific strain in it called Lactobacillus ruminants that has a pediocean that is very effective against foodborne pathogens. So we, we've shown that it can clear can kill 100% of listeria. It's very effective. It's Salmonella and E. Coli. In fact we have had some discussions with people who are interested in potentially using just that strain and in food safety.

Wow. Almost like a, just for the audience, if you, if you're making a, a salani in a, in a processing plant to, to add another hurdle onto the food safety aspects of the HASP aspects, you would spray the, the bacteria onto the, the meat as it's fermenting. If that's the process, smoking, whatever they do just to give another added level of security for the product. Is that the application?

Well actually for this it's, it would be more like in food factories and production facilities or restaurants where they have danger of listeria in drains or things like that. They would actually like use it as a prophylactic.

Gotcha.

A prophylactic spray. Or down, you know, put it down the drains and things like that. Yeah.

Which is brilliant because if you think about a high risk facility like an aged care where you've got immuno compromised people, most of the time it's just spraying with bleach or hypochlorite and using that sort of method to just nuke everything around. But this methodology is actually applying a, almost a bacteria that then goes and suppresses the growth of things like Listeria that could cause issues.

Right.

Incredible. Wow. I love the thinking.

So. But you know, I, and the, the ideal immunity does have all of our formulas contain the, our Lactobacillus plantarum that has the ability to break down the glyphosate. But the ideal immunity also has some of those core sugar conversion strains in it as well. Then we have our heart centered product that's designed to support cardiovascular health. So coenzyme Q10 production, tyrosine production, short chain fatty acid and Butyrate again, and then it supports nitric oxide production.

So could that help with things like. I'm just thinking when you mentioned nitric oxide, sports performance or erectile dysfunction or something like that.

So, I mean, it's interesting because after we named it Heart Centered Conversation with somebody, and they said, you know, you should really change the name of it and like, you know, like call it Force of Nature, you know, I don't. So we have talked about that. We, we should prob. Write a blog about it or something.

Yeah, it's this, it's another, another problem to solve, isn't it, with the, with, with the community. So absolutely. Highlighting these benefits will be definitely helpful.

And then we have a simple slumber product that we brought out last summer. So that was designed to make, make tryptophan. The bacteria also make melatonin. It increases the reduced form of glutathione and alanine. It activates the opiate receptors and GABA production. So that works. That system works together for about seven hours. So it'll start to wear off before, you know, before somebody wakes up. But, and that is, I think, six strains. And then we have one we designed for taking after you take antibiotics. Because what was interesting, there was a paper that came out of the Weitzman Institute where they had looked at a group of 11 strains. I, I think I was able to discern that it actually was a product. But it looks like in the paper it's just 11 strains, but I think it's actually a product. But they looked at that after taking antibiotics and they actually found that it was not beneficial. And so we ran that formula through our computational model. But even before we ran it through the model, Raul looked at it and he said, well, no, you wouldn't want to do that because it's going to make the whole system way too acidic and you won't be able to repopulate with a broader set of microbes. And so, you know, we sat down and said, okay, well, like, you know, what can we do? And Raoul sort of went away and did a little bit of his magic and came back and said, well, what about this? And then we ran it through the model and, you know, was like, great. And so we had had it kind of on the, we're going to bring this out, you know, when we start moving along at a faster pace or whatever. And then Steve, who I told you who had helped me with the sugar shift probiotic, his mother had ruptured her appendix. She's in her 80s and she was after her surgery and recovery, she ended up getting sepsis and having to go back and be on IV antibiotics for over a month. And she was having a lot of digestive problems after that. And her doctor's like, well, you know, that's, you know, they weren't really helping her. And Steve said, you know, when are you going to make the antibiotic antidote? You know, can you, can you make it? And I was like, let me look at my, you know, strain inventory and see if, you know, my manufacturer can make me a small batch. And so I made a small batch of 200 bottles. So Steve's mom could, could have some antibiotic antidote. And she wrote. I mean, she called me two or three times. She wrote me the nicest review. She's like, I mean, this has turned my life around. And Steve laughed because his father's a professor at the School of Mines. And he said, you know, I've been talking to my parents about probiotics for like, you know, because he's in the business. And he goes, they finally got it after your product all these years. But so we brought that product out and with just. And we said, this is a limited time. And, you know, it sold out right away. And then I had a couple of dentists that were interested in it because they give out antibiotics a lot of times prophylactically. And so I have some dentists who recommend that one. And then we have one called Perfect Piece that we haven't brought out yet. But it seems like these days there's so much anxiety and stuff, we should probably go ahead and bring that one out. But the Perfect Piece is designed for tryptophan production and aspartate reduction and again, helping activate the opioid receptors and reducing glutamate. Glutamate and increasing butyrate.

So that's. That's brilliant. So the, the antibiotic version, is that available now? The antibody actually. Antibiotic antidote, yes. And then. And then the, the mental health calming one. That's. Watch the space. Or is it really?

Yeah, watch this space. You know, we, we'd like to bring it out this year, but, you know, a lot just sort of depends on the pace of the world has. Is so unpredictable these days. You know, we, we like to just stay on our toes and. But I have, I have had a lot of people requesting that. And we are also, we're bringing out in the next month a yogurt starter with this. So it's sugar shift, just in a powder with a scoop. So, you know, because so many people from Dr. Davis's group make the yogurt with it. I was like. And I've had some people who, you know, when you're doing the capsules there. So we use a cellulose. But you know, there are some people who have sensitivity to the cellulose who have asked me, can you make a product without that? And so I was like, oh, okay, I'll make the yogurt starter. And if they don't want to make yogurt, they can just sprinkle it on their food.

Right. That's so clever. Brilliant. I don't think there is a product on the market that's a reutery yogurt starter. I think it's all, it's all about people just using capsules of probiotics at the moment. So there's definitely a gap in the market for that. That's brilliant.

Yeah, not that one. Not, not rid Rob by itself. But there is cutting edge cultures I think makes one that has, or they're pretty, they, they're coming out with one that has. Because his combination is bacillus coagulans, gasseri and the Rootera. And so I think cutting edge cultures maybe has that. But most of those, most of them are by an individual. And you're right. Just opening up capsules.

That's it. Exactly right.

Mad science.

So one final question to tap into the mad scientist that you are. So a lot of the times when we, when we name these supplements, it's like, okay, it's good for your heart, it's good for your, your sleep or your mood or sugar metabolism, whatever it is. But sometimes there's some left to field ailments that some of these supplements could tackle. You know, IBS or constipation, diarrhea. Is there anything that any of these products mentioned could potentially tackle? Dysbiosis is another one. So any of these supplements you can recommend for any of these left field type of concerns.

So sugar shift, one of the. So in Parkinson's. Many people with Parkinson's have chronic constipation and report to me that it's the only thing that's ever helped them with constipation. So mannitol is an osmotic diuretic. It's also an osmo protectant. So it's, it's got some sort of osmotic sensing ability. And I have had people with like. So I have a doctor in Hawaii who basically got a virus from a patient of his who went to the jungle in South America back in 1970 and it caused him to have severe chronic diarrhea. From 1970 forward, he tried everything. He was taking Lomodil several times a day. Nothing was working. He tried all these different probiotics. And his daughter found us and said, you know, you need to try this. And he's like, it's not going to work. And it worked for him. And you know, he wrote, he's. But you know, for him, whatever it is that he has, he, he can't stop take. So if he stopped taking it, whatever is that it's keeping in check is still there. It hasn't gotten rid of it. It's just, it's like you, you know, you brought the police in and they're keeping order. So, you know, I, I do think by changing that metabolism, you can certainly make some of those things better. But none of these are specifically targeted to that. But I will tell you, we are working with another, actually a scientist I met through my Parkinson's research who does a lot of autoimmune related work. And he has done work in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Lupus, Pretty interesting. And we're working on a strain of bacteria that he had that has the potential to be really beneficial in like IBS, in that sort. And they've shown it in dairy cattle that it, that it works for a similar issue in dairy cattle. And so we're in the process of doing a safety study right now. So our relationship with the hospital in Cuba where we did our clinical trial, we're now doing safety studies for different strains for other people. So we have a. Raul has two strains with his company, a Bacillus clausi and a Bacillus coagulans. And then Dr. Dow's strain, which I'll, I won't say what that is yet. It's a surprise. And then. Yeah, and then I have, I have this other strain in the back of my mind that I really want to bring to market someday that like, it's. And I actually grew it up, I grew it up in the lab and took it myself a month, like a year ago. And I was like, I think this, this microbe is going to be amazing, but it might be a little while before we can bring that one to market.

I'm so excited to, to hear more about it. I think you've left a lot of bookmarks for, for the audience to come back to after listening to this episode. So perhaps we have to do around two at some point.

Well, that would be fun.

Well, I won't take up any more of your time. I really appreciate you coming into the podcast. I think there's a. There's a wealth of knowledge and information on this podcast. So thank you so much. And what I like to do at the end of all my podcasts is to get it from the horse's mouth. What's your best recommendation? If it could be one thing you could do for your. Your gut health today, what would be your number one recommendation?

Avoid glyphosate.

Wow, that's great. That's amazing. That's a. A good way. It's perfect for my company called Nourish Me Organic. So we're all about.

Yeah.

Getting away from all the chemicals and especially negative aspects of things like glyphosate. So thank you so much for your time. Color. Lovely to speak, Martha. Sorry I've jumbled up your name.

That's okay.

Martha. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Gut Health Gurus Podcast with Martha Carlin. If you found this podcast valuable, leave us a kind review and five stars on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast podcasting app. If you want to connect with our host, Cribban Govinda, please follow him on Instagram, Facebook and TikTokthealthgurus. Also, check out our Gut Health Gurus Facebook group. With 17,000 plus members ready to help you on your journey to amazing gut health. This episode is sponsored by Nourish Me Organics. Head to www.nourishmeorganics.com au and use the code HappyGut for 10% off. Make sure to check out the new BioTQuest range, including the groundbreaking Sugar Shift. Until next time.