Poop, Bacteria & You: The Latest Cutting-Edge Science Of The Human Microbiome (& How To Affordably

Yellow.

That's how I pick up the phone when you call me on the phone.

Yellow.

That's actually, I just got back from Japan. What they say over there is mushy, mushy, mushy, mushy. I like mushimushi better than yellow. Anyway, so this is Ben Greenfield making all these annoying sounds for you. And I went to Bellevue. Bill Gates, neighbor over there, this billionaire named Naveen Jane.

Brilliant dude.

I got a chance to interview him about viome and answer, or rather ask him a lot of the difficult questions that a lot of people have been wondering about this whole viome thing and kind of put him in the hot seat. We record this with a video crew in their office. So the audio might sound different than what you're used to. And you can also find some cool videos to go along with it. If you go to the show notes, along with a special link to viome where you can get moved to the front of the line to get your viome test. Because a lot of people wait very long line for months because they use Los Alamos laboratories and they have kind of like a scalability issue as far as you being able to get your tests as fast as you want it. But fear not, if you use the link I've got in the show notes, which I'll tell you during the show, you're gonna be good to go. So the other thing is that when it comes to your microbiome, one of the best ways to feed your microbiome is via wild plant extracts. And the polyphenols they're in, they do a really good job. Balanc microbiome. And in addition, there are ingredients like rock lotus extract, for example, that cleanses the liver and that is associated with a reduction in the rate at which telomeres lengthen. It has a longevity effect. It lowers the levels of insulin and insulin like growth factor. It's a calorie restriction mimetic, which means it mimics the effects of fasting as well. There's another one called bitter melon extract. It's very similar, like exercise in a pill. Does the same thing, but significantly reduces blood sugar levels, especially if you pop a couple before you eat a higher carb or a higher starch meal. Higher carb and higher starch are kind of the same thing, aren't they? But anyways, this is all over at Kion. You go to kion getkeion.com and the supplement that you want to get for this is called Kion Lean K I o n lean getkeon.com. and you want to look for Kion Lean. That's the one that has the rock lotus extract and the bitter melon extract in it. This podcast is also brought to you by Organifi. And Organifi makes this turmeric infused powder that I drink almost every night. I tend to blend it with cbd. You can take it all by yourself if you don't want to throw hemp in your smoothie. But what they did was they combined turmeric with coconut milk, cinnamon, ginger, lemon balm, two different super mushrooms, including reishi, to give you this warm relaxation beverage. You sip this thing at night, like after dinner as a substitute for whatever dessert you're craving. And oh my goodness, it's super fulfilling to your taste buds. Reduces cravings. It's an anti inflammatory. You sleep like a baby. You get a 20% discount off of this or their red juice, which is chock full of antioxidants. Their green juice, which is chock full of nutrients. Use code greenfield. Get 20% off. You just go to Organifi. That's organifi with an I. Organifi with an I. Use code Greenfield. You get 20% off. And may I recommend to you their gold juice. All right, let's go talk to my buddy Naveen Jain in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

Is the food healthy for you or unhealthy for you? You know what he said? One man's food is another man's poison. And then he realized the way to modulate these functional aspect of the microbiome is food. So he said, let food be thy medicine. Let thy medicine be food. This generation, Ben, you and I have a shot at fixing this. And if we don't, we're going to watch our children and graduates children suffer from chronic diseases and I'm not the one is going to be for lack of time. So I'm going to do everything it takes to prevent and reverse chronic diseases. And that's my moonshot. I hope we are able to successfully do that.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest.

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Well, in Addition to.

Getting most out of the brain and the body, one of the things that I am most infatuated with that I have been for a long time, is me, the gut. Well, also my friend Naveen, who, who has already jumped into the conversation, obviously, but it's the gut. And if you heard my last podcast with Naveen, you know very well that he is intimately involved with the microbiome, with the human gut and the profound impact that it has on human health and disease. I actually, and perhaps we can touch on this later on in the podcast, Naveen, just two days ago, I actually drank a giant cup of helminthic worms and parasites from China and Thailand to induce a few so called old friends into my own gut. So if I do melt into a pile of explosive diarrhea during today's podcast.

Yeah, we have a microphone to record that.

We do have a microphone to record it and a backup microphone at our feet, which could get messy. So now that we've already forayed into the wonderful world of the gut, I do want to remind you about who Naveen is because he has been on this podcast before. It was one of our most incredibly popular podcasts of last year, recorded at your house after we handled your moon rocks. Which is, which is not meant to mean anything other than the fact that we literally held moon rocks in Naveen's office because he has had the pleasure and the ability to be able to get his hands on moon rocks from the moon. And, and we talked all about that in that episode, which you can go back and hear. But we also touched quite a bit on biome and a lot of Naveen's past century successes. His list of accomplishments are nearly too long to list, but I can tell you that just of late, he's been named as Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, been given the Albert Einstein Technology Medal. I received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, was named the most creative person by Fast Company magazine, which is a pretty incredible accomplishment in and of itself. Top 50 philanthropists of 2018, a humanitarian innovation Award. He's won a distinguished Global Thinker Award, awarded the most admired serial entrepreneur, which means that he does not have the ability to focus at all. Top 20 entrepreneurs and lifetime Achievement Award. And of course, one of his latest projects that we've talked about before and that we're going to take an even deeper dive into today, along with a lot of Naveen's keys to success that he talked about in the last episode that we did with him is Vial the Gut Meta Transcriptome and microbiome analysis service that allows you to actually look into your gut health and is focused on changing disease around the world by looking at what's going on inside of your gut. So Naveen and I are going to hit on that. And if you want to actually look at my own biome results, if you want to access any of the previous blog posts, I have a really comprehensive article Biome and also the previous podcast with Naveen. If you want to get to know his backstory a little bit better, go to the show notes there@bengreenfieldfitness.com viome2 that's bengreenfieldfitness.com Viome V I O M E the number two so Naveen, if you're game, I would like to jump in here. One of the things that people were most intrigued about the last time I interviewed you was how you get to know topics so well, so intimately and then actually create successful businesses serially as we've already named around that topic. You explained this process of diving in via Twitter and then reading a copious number of books and research articles on the topic. Walk us through your mechanisms for actually learning something as well as you learn something so quickly as you do it.

So first of all, I mean as we discussed last time, once you become an expert in any field then you somehow at the point can at most do an incremental improvement on it. That means you're more or less useless when it comes to disrupting a field that you already know a lot about. So if you want to disrupt a field you have to be a non expert. That means you have to be able to challenge the foundation of everything that experts have taken it for granted. And I now started seven companies and no two companies that I start are ever in the same industry because you're able to essentially rethink about what the problem is. So my previous company, as you and I discussed last time, was Moon Express where we really about how do we create a multi planetary society, how do we save the humanities from a potential extinction? We're not just talking about saving the planet. We may be really arrogant. This planet will be just fine without us. In fact, this planet was just fine before humans came about. So the interesting thing is if we all on this spacecraft, we call lovingly the planet Earth and it's flying up in the space, if it gets hit by a large asteroid, we, the whole human species could be wiped out just like it wiped out dinosaurs. And we could be the dinosaurs, right? So the idea really is unless we are able to Move away from one planet and to be able to distribute ourselves on the moon and the Mars and the Europa and Titan and lattice and all other places, the species may completely get wiped out.

Now, I don't want to rabbit hole too deeply down this hole, but what about, I've heard people talk about this before. We're spending so much time and so many resources on space.

Yep.

What about the sea? What about deep underneath the ocean? Areas we haven't explored yet, right here on our own planet.

And the answer is yes and yes. So that means every time in life you have a choice. It's not about this or this, it should always be about you have to.

Choose between the sea and the moon.

That's right. You can do both of them. And we are doing both of them. I mean now we are exploring the depth of the oceans that we have never seen before. And we are going to find the organism, we are going to find the lives and we are going to find the mechanisms how these lives were created very differently. And then we're going to learn about human body more than we have ever learned. And that's really the key is to be able to understand how we evolved. And that means understanding how the planet was formed, understanding how the life was formed. And someday we can even discuss this story, or maybe later today about how humans were created. And this is my tongue in cheek story of how humans were created. But it gives you an idea that, that despite how much we think we know about our human body, we are really a walking, talking microbial ecosystem.

Yeah. If we have time, I would actually, I'd love to explore a little more of that creation story. The other, the other interesting anecdote of course, is that when it comes to the ocean, I was recently looking into some of the longest living species on the face of the planet. There's a particular octopus species and a jellyfish species that have the ability to regenerate their own cells to live this disproportionately long period of time. I think there's a lot of things we can discover. Absolutely.

And I think that as you mentioned, that it completely regenerates the limb. Exactly. The young part of the limb. That means it's regrowing as if it's the first time it's growing. So it's not going back to your 40 year or 50 year or 100 year old limb, is going back to your newborn limb. So imagine you're able to regenerate your own organs, whether it's your own heart, your own kidney, your own liver, Your so you can drink as much as you want. There's always a new level waiting for you.

I don't know if anyone remembers Loren and Bob and that whole. That technology would have come in pretty handy back then.

It would have been a much better strategy than the glass of milk and ice. But anyways, so your strategy for learning things. Your strategy for learning things.

So it's about staying intellectually curious. So to me, the day you stop becoming intellectually curious is the day you die. So the only way you essentially are alive is you're constantly learning. So it's never about, you know, taking the horse to the water and making a drink. It's about making them thirsty. So the way I look at the life is that every single person, if you can inspire them to be intellectually curious, you have created a society that will always be learning and moving forward. Right. The other part that I really like is that there has never been a time in the human history where individuals and small group of people are able to make an impact. That could only be done in the initially kings and the Queen and the aristocrats and then later came by these nation states and superpowers. The same things that were done by the nation states and superpower are now being done by individuals and a small group of people. Whether it's going to space, it's no longer done by, you know, the, the nation states is being done by private companies. Whether it's Elon or Richard or Jeff, they're all going out and doing things that could never be done. NASA did not invent reusable rocket. It is the private companies that innovate because they constantly have the reason to be cheaper, better, faster. Same thing is starting to see in other areas of the industries. Healthcare, health care is not going to be solved by Obamacare or Trump care or Putin care. It's going to be solved by some entrepreneur saying enough is enough. And we are sick and tired of the system that's constantly victimizing the humanity. When pharmaceutical companies have become parasite on humanity, the humanity must come together to kill the parasite. And that's exactly what is going to happen. Our education system will have to be completely rethought and reimagined. And that was designed for teaching you skills. And now we're living in the world of exponential technologies where any skill that you learn becomes obsolete by the time you actually graduate. And you have to completely rethink about learning to learn. Learning to be able to solve problems, learning to be multidisciplinary rather than unidisciplinary. Because problems tend to be multidisciplinary, not unidisciplinary. And coming back to how I learned is that I tend to go deep into the subject when I'm starting a company. So in this particular case, when I started on the company on about human health and we really wanted to understand why is it that people get sick, why is it that people die, why is it that people age and idea really comes down to is that it can't be your DNA because your DNA never changes. Your DNA is always the same from the time you're born to the time you die.

Is a computer program essentially made up of Alphabet.

That's exactly. So your DNA is really the Alphabet that can write any story you want it to write. And your RNA is really the story that's being written. So it's not the genes, the story.

That you can write or that anyone else can write based on the idea that our own electrochemical signals that we produce based on more quantum physics principles can actually affect the other way people think and feel and believe.

Absolutely true. So I mean there's a whole lot more to the things people. What I was trying to say was that your genes are not your destiny, it is. The gene expression is what your destiny is. And when you start to think about your gene expression, there is something that I never knew, which is if you look at just the number of cells in the human body, we have more microbial cells in our human body than the human cells. That means the cells you get from your mom and dad are less than what we essentially acquire after we are born and through these microbial ecosystem. But that's really nothing. What's really interesting is the human DNA only produces about 20, 22,000 genes. When it comes to the microbes primarily living in our gut, they produce 2 million to 20 million genes. That means at best we are 1% human. That means all the genes that are expressed in our body, less than 1% come from human DNA. And that's really interesting that if our gene expression is what makes us who we are and we have completely ignored the largest organ in our body. And that was a big breakthrough for me.

Well, not only have we completely ignored it, but I mean, I'd argue we've to a certain extent damaged it. Right. I mean back to that old friends hypothesis I mentioned earlier. The whole idea is that we have wiped out friends friendly species via our era of post industrialized antibiotic use and antibacterials that have rendered us microbially deplete to A certain extent.

And it is right? Yes, absolutely correct. But I want to also hit on the point in a little bit more nuanced way. It's not necessary that our microbes need to be what they used to be in the past or they need to be in something. You know, if you look at the AB origins or the people who are living on the Amazonian forest, they have a very different microbes and they have very different set of DNA mutations. And we can essentially get it a little bit more into science if you want. Now, for example, in the modern human DNA, we believe if you have a larger copies of a DNA called Apoe4, people believe that is associated with chances of getting a higher disease. Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's, yeah, to certain extent, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease. You know, I'm a carrier, the foe three four. Right.

So that I am four four.

So you make decisions in life, you don't need as much saturated fat.

However, what they found is very interesting. The people who are living in the Amazonian Forest have 6, 8 copies of Apoe 4 and they never get Alzheimer's. An interesting thing is that gene also tend to be extremely protective gene against infection since they have lot of these insects and stuff, a parasite that cause infection. ApoE4 actually protects them from these bacterial infection and mosquitoes.

Like the sickle cell anemia gene.

Exactly.

So sickle cell was designed to essentially protect you from malaria. And now people essentially get today, obviously, you know, gluten sensitivity and to some extent a lot of the other chronic diseases.

Now returning back to this concept though, because I do want to delve into biome individuality and some of those things that you've talked about, because since our last podcast I've actually gotten some questions about the sequencing analysis and also about how you can draw correlations. You know, say X bacteria allows for higher elements of health compared to Y bacteria.

That's just not true.

But how does it change from person to person? And I want to get into that, but returning back to this, this concept of learning, walk me through the actual process, let's say. Well, is there a topic right now? Obviously you're very involved in the biome along with, with aging and longevity. But is there a topic right now that you are very interested in or that you would see yourself being interested in? If so, how would you become an expert on that topic?

So first of all, you know, obviously I'm spending a lot of the time not just microbiome, because microbiome is a piece of the puzzle and it's an important piece of the puzzle. But you also have to look at on the host side. So you're looking at the microbial side and then you have to look at the host side. That how does the microbial ecosystem releasing these enzymes and peptides and when they are absorbed in your host site, how does the host gene expression changes? How do the metabolites released by the microbiome are causing pro inflammatory compounds or anti inflammatory compounds? How are they modulating our immune system, how are they modulating our mitochondria and how they're modulating various gene expression that actually make us who we are. So a lot of the times what you're realizing is that even the cardiovascular diseases are not caused by the fat we eat. In fact, it's the lipids that are produced by the microbiome. That lipids are the one that actually causes the hardening of arteries.

Now just a second, walk me through that. Because most people are under the impression that when you consume a fat, such as, let's say a triglyceride, that would go into the bloodstream and if energy stores were elevated, could potentially cause excess triglycerides or fatty acid deposition. But the microbiome is really discussed as being a player in that scenario. So walk me through what you mean by that.

So imagine every time we think of our body as a donut, as you can imagine. So there is a tube that goes through us and there is a whole body around us. Every time you eat a food, who do you think actually ends up digesting it? So think of our microbiome. Not only is the information processing unit, think of a food as the input information. So food is the information. And information processing unit is not billions. The trillions of these microbes that reside inside us, they digest the food, we feed them in turn, they synthesize them and they metabolize them. And what they release is actually sometimes can be very beneficial to us. So it could be nutrients like short chain fatty acids, or it could be harmful to us, such as lipopolysaccharide that could be highly pro inflammatory.

So the bacteria, you know, there's of course the concept of prebiotics and the idea that those would feed the bacteria. But are you saying that carbohydrates, proteins and amino acid constituents, fats in general, would also be digested by the actual bacteria and protein?

As a matter of fact. So very interesting thing is lot of the people think that certain foods are good or this certain foods are bad, or certain bacterias are good, or certain bacteria are bad. There is no such thing. There is no such thing as universal healthy food. A food that's healthy for one person can be completely harmful to another person. And more than that, it's the food. Exactly the same food, depending on the quantity that you are eating in, can be beneficial or harmful. For example, protein is a great example. A lot of the people at least who are listening to this podcast are into fitness world and they believe that protein is absolutely essential to, to building the muscles and really keeping the body healthy. What happens is when you eat a lot of protein, the protein that needs to be digested in the upper intestine essentially starts to go into the large intestine where it starts to feed the gut microbiome. And these gut microbiome convert these protein using fermentation. So these are called protein fermenters. And these protein fermenters, when they start to ferment protein, they're releasing ammonia and sulfites and, and they cause massive amount of gut inflammation. Yeah. And not only they essentially make the intestine permeable, that it starts to have a massive amount of gut lining being shedding constantly.

Do you think that that is why to a certain extent, in addition to excess activation of MTOR pathways, that we would see something like excess protein confirming decrease in longevity because of the inflammation, the ammonia and sulfite based inflammation produced by the microbiome?

Absolutely correct. So you look, that's just one example. So you know, think of your microbiome again as a detoxing also. It does a lot of detoxification. So if you really think of the people who are living in say in China, they are able to eat MSG and they have absolutely no impact on it because their microbiome have essentially evolved to be able to digest, to detox msg. You and I go eat msg, we get headaches and we get all kinds of issues.

Right. I've heard that's a myth. I've heard that's a myth that, that was actually propagated against of all things, like almost like a, like a, a racist myth towards Chinese restaurants wanting to limit. And this could all be an old wives tale, I don't know. But the idea is that when they induce excitotoxicity in rodent models in like a lab to give them copious amounts of MSG or glutamic acid. But if we were to eat let's say smoked salmon, which would have MSG in it, or even small amounts of like you know, Chinese food that has added glutamic acid or umami that it all winds up being the same thing in the gut.

No, again remember it's the gut does whole bunch of detoxification. So you would see detoxification of the food that we're eating that has toxins in that. So your gut actually does a lot of detoxification. It also converts one type of nutrients into other types of nutrients. So it could eat fiber and turn them into short chain fatty acids such as butyrate. That's extremely beneficial. It's anti inflammatory compound, fixes your gut lining, it's able to be absorbed in the blood and at the host side it has a lot of anti inflammatory benefits.

Right, right.

In addition to that, what's really interesting that what we are seeing and we'll come back and describe actually how we do it as we get into IO but one of the things that we found, I mean personally to me it was just mind boggling that people who are vegetarian for generations their microbiome have evolved to convert carbohydrate into branch chain amino acids precursor to protein. So who would have thought that vegetarians are able to convert the starch and carbs into precursor to proteins.

And is that based on their microbiome?

It's based on their microbiome. So we see them like people like me who have been a vegetarian for 10 generations.

Yeah.

And we start to see lot of them.

I remember having a wonderful Indian vegetarian meal at your house. I didn't miss the lamb or the goat or the chicken at all.

No. So interesting thing is they're able to convert them into. And we always wonder how do vegetarians got protein? And now we know how do you.

Not build up huge amounts of like sarcopenia and muscle loss, et cetera from protein deficits?

And it turns out your microbiome actually makes up for it. And it's just mind boggling to me that you start to see that even the things that are supposedly neutral where they can be beneficial or not, allergic acid is a great example. So pomegranate juice has allergic acid and most people believe the pomegranate is really good for you. And the reason they believe is the allergic acid actually is neutral, it doesn't do anything. But if you have the gut microbiome that is able to convert the allergic acid into urolithin A ula that is antioxidative. But if you don't have the gut microbiome that can convert allergic acid into urolithin A, then you at best you're pissing off Your money. Yeah, or worse.

And a big part of that from the pomegranate standpoint is the pomegranate juice only contains a small amount of what the bacteria actually need to produce. Not only that, but the Omega 9s from pomegranate. And so if you have pomegranate, you technically want to figure out a way to eat the skin, to eat the seeds, to get all the oils and to get the juice itself, because you're actually feeding that those contain prebiotics, postbiotics, a lot of phytonutrients, not postbiotics. They allow the bacteria to produce these postbiotic beneficial compounds. You've already alluded to. And then I think what they're called are mod biotics that you get from the skin, things that, that modulate the bacteria or keep certain bacteria from growing. What I understand, no pomegranate expert, but I did, I read something fascinating about pomegranates and the idea that you need to eat the whole fruit, including some elements of the skin. You know, the bacterial benefits of it. Now, now I.

And just because of fiber too, by the way.

Yeah, well, the fiber, exactly. You're getting from the seed, the fiber and the omega 9 oils. Exactly. The, the thing that I want to dive into before we talk about biome technology and how you're actually sequencing the biome and then how someone can intelligently use that information. Because. Because I know people are going to be screaming if I don't close this loop. Would be back to the concept of learning and your process, this whole idea of following certain Twitter feeds and books. So I'm going to let you off that.

I know I just got a habit of just going on a tangent and.

I got to reel you in.

So first of all, when I started this company, I did not know the difference between the DNA and rna and I had no idea what this microbiome thing was. So first thing I did was I buy probably a dozen books. And here's why. If you only read one book, the author's view becomes your own view. When you start to read 20 or 30 books on a subject, then you're able to synthesize the information from 20 or 30 different perspective and then you form your own opinion that's unique from everyone else because you're now looking at the things from a much farther view. So all of them are looking at the trees and, and you're able to look at from the whole forest and say, oh, this is the, what whole thing is all about. And you're able to Synthesize that information in a way that no author, individual has ever been able to synthesize. And then what I do is I look at every single scientific journal and then I actually subscribe to them on Twitter and that's all I read.

You subscribe to the journal's feed on Twitter. What would be an example of a.

Journal that has a feedback so every one of them. So Microbiome, There are probably 30 journals that on Microbiome alone. And you subscribe to them. Then I subscribe to Nature, New scientists, scientists. I mean every single that you know, if you look at the Guardian.

Feed.

Because the point is, the world of Offline magazine is gone and by the time it's printed the information is already too old. So I'm getting as of today, what papers are published this morning. So for example, I can tell you in the last two weeks alone the latest cutting edge research that shows that mother's microbiome is being shown to have influence on kid having an autism. Think about that for a second. Mother's microbiome during pregnancy has impact on the children having autism. There are a whole bunch of the research now clearly shows whether the cancer therapy like immunotherapy is going to work or do not work, does not work. Depends on your gut microbiome. Even if you do a chemotherapy, how do you recover from chemotherapy and rebuild your microbiome and even able to recover or not able to recover from chemotherapy depends on your gut microbiome. Right? And breast cancer being caused by microbiome, the pancreatic cancer being caused by microbiome, the depression, the anxiety, the adhd. An interesting thing is even PTSD is now shown that people who have a certain gut microbiome have a propensity or tendency to be able to get ptsd.

Now when you say the microbiome in these diseases, do you mean that a lack of proper amount of bacteria, meaning a desolate bacterial profile, would cause this? Or are you saying specific bacteria in the microbiome? No matter how robust that microbiome is, the balance or the amount of certain bacteria would cause this.

I'm going to have to change the discussion slightly different. This is why this science has never been able to be successfully deployed. And that's a big change. We did. The fact is everyone in the universe was focused on the taxa, the taxonomy, what organisms are there, what organisms are here in this yoga. The fact is the organisms in themselves have very little meaning. What really matters is what is they are producing. And interesting thing is you can have 10 different organisms producing exactly the same thing like butyrate. So it doesn't matter, you have this, this or that, as long as they all producing butyrate. So what matters. So what matters is not the taxa, but what actually is being done by these microbiome.

Is there a name for that, by the way?

Yeah, it's called transcriptomics.

Transcriptomics. No, but I mean, is there a name for something functional that a microbiome produces?

Yeah, so it's called metabolites.

Metabolites.

And also the, you know, the peptides and enzymes and I think they're all metabolites.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, got it.

And interesting thing is that this part of it is what we call the functional analysis of microbiome rather than what used to be in the beginning. Everybody understood in the last 10 years that microbiome is responsible for almost all of the chronic diseases. There are few very rare genetic diseases that are caused by the DNA mutations and you will see them when you're born. But very few the genetic diseases are called rare diseases. And you know why they call rare? You know they're rare, so they're. Everything else is really caused by the dysbiosis in the gut. And when you say dysbiosis, the reason we knew in last 10 years, in fact we knew this 2400 years ago. Remember Hippocrates, what did he say? All diseases begin in the gut. He was a doctor. And then he realized that like we talked about, there is no such thing as universal healthy food. It really depends on the person. Is it healthy for you or is it unhealthy for you? So it's not the food that's healthy or unhealthy, it's the food healthy for you or unhealthy for you. You know what he said? One man's food is another man's poison. And then he realized the way to modulate these functional aspect of the microbiome is food. So he said, let food be thy medicine. Let thy medicine be food. Think about it. 2400 years ago, it took us billions of dollars of research, all that to come back to the same principle which is all diseases begin in the gut.

Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to tell you about this company that I went down to and saw in Salt Lake City. They combine acupuncture with stem cell treatments and the acupuncture actually increases increases blood flow and circulation when you get the stem cells injected along with them. It's a company called the East West Clinic down in Salt Lake. They also do brain regeneration Meaning they can deliver stem cells intranasally. Some very interesting research on that behind slowing down the aging process in the brain and reducing inflammation and disease risks in the brain. They do umbilical cord injection. So if you don't have your own stem cells banked, this is a way that you can still get some of the benefits of stem cells without having to go through the long process or the painful process of getting yours extracted and bang. So there's no risk of surgery, early recovery, no big hospital stays, 100% safety record down there. And I've been down to their clinic. They do a good job. You can even go watch a whole video of me getting my treatment done. And basically what they're going to do is they will give you almost a $90 discount on their procedure and a free consultation. If you mentioned Ben Greenfield, you mentioned Ben Greenfield. When you contact them. They also have a really good book where you can learn more about stem cells, like a downloadable ebook. And they're going to give all that to you for free. So here is how you get hooked up with these folks. You go to accueastwest.com that's a C U East west acue eastwest.com like acupuncture. Acueastwest.com and they do well, they do acupuncture. They do a really good job acupuncture. But you should try the acupuncture mixed with the stem cell treatments that they do down there. So check them out. This podcast is also brought to you by Goshas. What is Goshas? They make these very interesting Ayurvedic blends that you can take a little bit teaspoon of and put in your mouth to eat because they taste absolutely amazing. But you can also blend them with teas and with coffee. So for example, one of the ones that I like is their blend called Clarity. And Clarity is a blend of wild, raw honey, bee pollen, freeze dried marine phytoplankton. They've got some red rishi fruiting bodies in there. Eleuthero root, rhodiola, ginkgo, biloba, astragalus. I'm writing a book right now on longevity and a lot of these, these things are very much associated with longevity as well. Organic turmeric root, chaga. They got shilajit in there, which is a really powerful mineral. Organic green tea, matcha leaf, organic ginger. And they put all this together, they put it in a special biophotonic violet glass jar which protects the quality of it. My buddy Paul Check, who's been a podcast guest three times on this show. I trust him implicitly when it comes to his nutrition recommendations. He introduced me to this stuff in his kitchen and I was blown away. So I eventually reached out to them and tried all their products and they're all just amazing. Very high quality company, Gosha's Organics, they're called. So what they're going to do is give everybody who's listening a 10% discount. Now, the coupon code that you use on their website is Ben 10%. As in like the percentage sign. Ben 10%. Like Ben 10 percentage sign. And that will give you 10% off of anything. If you just go to goshasorganics.com that's G O S H A S like goshasorganics.com you gotta try this stuff out. It's really unique, really special. Tastes amazing.

You're gonna love it. When you subscribe to a feed on Twitter, are you then chunking those feeds into categories? You have like the microbiome Twitter feed.

And then so I have a scientific Twitter feed. So I'm gonna just show it to you and then you can essentially I.

Can, I can describe it to folks who are listening via audio.

Yeah. So look, look at the things here.

So you've actually chunked. You have like a health and longevity Twitter feed.

So what happens is I go there and I say, look at my list and there's a list here and I can look at all my members. So think about the feeds from mighty Microbiome. Microbiome articles, Microbiome movement, gut microbiome, microbiome.

These are all microbiome based. Yeah, journals, individuals you're following on Twitter.

And then it's nature, right? The brain facts, the neuroscience, molecular biology, microphagy.

Have you ever written an article about this that teaches people how to categorize? Or maybe I'm just a Luddite and I don't know how to categorize. Certain, certain.

But literally you go there so the people you follow and you can add them to your own private list and no one else can see it. This is my private list of different things I'm reading.

You could have your own series of different private lists.

Exactly. And that's literally. So now in the morning when I wake up at 4am, first three hours, I'm going through everything. By the time the first person wakes up in our household, I have now figured out every latest science research that have come out since I went to sleep and what is going on. So next day I can go and say how does it impact what I'm doing?

So I'm writing a book right now on anti aging and longevity and I could go and follow. We were talking about Peter Diamandis earlier and and the Human Longevity Project and Josh Mitteldorf and Dan. I could follow all these people. Not only that, but have them not be getting getting lumped into or confused by all the other tweets that I'm following.

That's right. And you can also start to follow a whole bunch of things. So a 4M. I mean you know all the scientific journal they're talking about the things because most of the times you'll start to see if you're looking at longevity it's really the people in the longevity who is going to come up with ideas. So what I do is I follow all other tangential fields because you are the one who is going to connect the dots.

Yes.

So I am suddenly reading that says, you know, the mitochondria during aging changes its expression. It's not going to be showing up in some longevity journal. When I read that I'm thinking that's very interesting. Isn't that impact aging?

And you could also ask yourself how the microbiome affects the mitochondria.

Exactly.

Because look for headlines on that.

So most people may not realize that mitochondria is the ancient bacteria captured in the human cell. It has its own DNA. So mitochondria has its own 13 DNA different from the DNA that is from your mom and dad. And something I'm going to tell you that I haven't announced yet. Very soon we're going to be also launching just like we did the microbiome transcriptomes we're going to be doing for the host side with a couple of drops of blood, we'll be able to sequence the whole blood transcriptome. And when you do the blood transcriptome for the first time, we'll be able to look at all gene expression from your mitochondria, all the blood cell gene expression including all the inflammatory markers. So think about just to do a cytokine panel on the blood test today. Cost thousand dollars is going to be. My cost is going to be zero, not pennies.

Are you saying that this would be a way to determine whether or not you have healthy mitochondria?

Healthy mitochondria and also inflammation in the host side. So not just the microbiome inflammation, you all or the gut inflammation.

See microbiome inflammation and host inflammation.

And when I mean host inflammation, I mean all the interleukins. So IL17IL, 16IL, 15 IL1s, and you're looking at CRP, you're looking at TNF Alpha, you're looking at all the transcripts. Now, right?

When people ask me the top two things that they could track when it comes to their longevity, I typically say.

Mitochondria, microbiome, that's, that's not what I typically. You tell them telomere, which is wrong.

I say glycemic variability.

Yeah.

And inflammation. Both of which are advised heavily by mitochondrial health and by the microbiome. But up until now, wearing a continuous blood glucose monitor, testing your blood glucose is not rocket science. And many people can track glycemic variability, but inflammatory markers, you know, most people are trying to do a quarterly measurement of crp, something like that. Crp, just saying is a couple drops of blood. You can analyze everything all the. From an inflammatory standpoint, but also mitochondrial health.

And here's the best part of it. There's no doubt in terms of human longevity and human health, low grade inflammation is the absolutely the key to maintaining good health. Every single chronic disease as we talked about, from depression, anxiety, Parkinson's, Alzheimer, autoimmune diseases, heart diseases, cancer, diabetes, depression, every one of the chronic diseases, they're just names, but they really come from low grade chronic inflammation. Right. You don't wake up one day and say, honey, last night I was with Ben and I think I drank too much. I might have caught diabetes today. You don't catch diabetes, you don't catch obesity, you don't catch.

You have to drink with Ben a.

Lot chronically and, but chronically low grade inflammation is what causes that. So not only understanding what is going on for human longevity, you have to understand both the microbial side and how the host is being impacted. What gene expressions are actually changing. So what happens is the microbiome. And we'll come back to the story about microbiome are constantly working with our immune system and they're constantly working with the host side to change the host for their own benefit. And they work their job to some extent in this symbiotic relationship is to keep the host healthy only to an extent when their life is not in danger, but when it comes to protecting themselves. They would kill the host to protect themselves or they will at least harm the host because they can now move to the new host. We are purely a container for these microorganisms. Right.

So.

So they move from host to host. Right.

Fascinating. I want to ask you about biome, but the final question about your learning process, how do you read so many damn books?

So one of the things really is that I am actually, I have to admit I'm a slow reader. And first of all, I still can't read in electronic books for whatever reason it may be my age. I'm just not young enough to be able to read electronically. If it's 300 page book, I can't read them on Kindle. I actually always buy a nice hardcover book and good thing is I travel a lot. So on the plane I get plenty of chance to go sit down and read a book.

Do you ever do audio podcasts?

I love audio podcasts. I love audiobooks because that's really the easiest way of actually to be able to read the book and read and you can actually speed them up at 2x or 3x and still make sense out of it.

One of the more profound things related to what you talked about regarding learning and education, I don't remember who told me this story and tell me if this is true. You actually with your own children, when you would attend conferences like business conferences or conferences in the sector that you are working in, would bring your children along and kind of drag them to the conference and just expose them to a lot of big thinkers and like minded individuals.

That has been actually honestly has been one of the key to their act today.

What they are doing today is absolutely, absolutely mind boggling. I mean, you know our 28 year old is just absolutely killing it out there, right? Not only when he was 17, he started Kairos when he went to Wharton. When he left Wharton he started a company, he sold that company and now he's working with eight, 10 companies that are solving the biggest problems facing humanity. He did not get sucked into building Alexa neighbor toilets. He's working on how do we take care of senior affordable senior care, affordable housing, student loans and really thinking about these problems very differently. And how do we apply technology to solve these problems? How do we get rid of $45 billion that are sitting in the security deposit because they need a security deposit first last month and he just simple fact, he said why can't we come up with a 10 bucks a month insurance and just not have a security deposit and bring back $45 billion back into the economy.

Did he or your other children ever get bored or embittered or anything like that? When you bring them around to expose them to all these ideas, I mean.

And obviously it's written up, you can see that our daughter felt that she really wasn't interested in learning about science and the fact I told her that she gets to decide her passion after she had been exposed to enough things. And when I took her to Singularity University and when she learned about neuroscience and then she learned about genetics and she said, dad, I really want to help women and the only way I can help women is to understand how their brain works, how their genetics works. And today, after she graduated from Stanford as a Stanford Stamp Fellow, Stanford Mayfield Fellow, Board of Stanford Women in Business, and she's a UN Ambassador for women empowerment. She, she started, she's working for head of product for a company that is focused on removing gender bias from hiring, using artificial intelligence. So imagine she's still doing what she wanted to do, but she's using technology to solve that problem now. And our youngest one, by the way, the rising senior at Stanford, that's the key, isn't it?

My wife and I were talking about this at dinner last night, about how it's imperative that you expose your child to as many new things as you possibly can because it's unlikely that on their own there are things that they would discover. From Jiu jitsu to cooking to art to science, etc, children will err towards getting involved with that thing that they're most interested or passionate about. But they want to know. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't expose them to other things, you know. And so my wife asked me just the other day, do you think the boys will just not like bow hunting? Right, right. Because I'm teaching them how to shoot a bow now or I'm going to take them on their first hunt down in Hawaii. And I told her, I said, we'll never know unless we expose them to this. And if they go through all of this and they come back and they say, dad, I want to become a gardener and eat vegetables for the rest of my life and I never want to go hunting again, fine. At least we tried. At least we expose them.

So by the way, one of the best thing I did with all three of our children, I took them to Singularity University and I tell you, the.

Bottom of the what is Singularity unit?

It's all about exponential technologies. The technologies that are actually at a curve where they're doubling or quadrupling year over year. So that means these technologies are at a curve that they're going to be so far out in five to 10 years, if you don't understand their implications, you will never know how your life is going to be fundamentally changed. Right. So I took every one of our kids to Singularity University and I really Believe that if ever you went, there is a Singularity University global summit for two and a half days in San Francisco on August 20th, 22nd. Bring your children. Just the fact they sit there, even though they're going to nod their head and they're going to say, dad, what are we doing here? The things they take away after that is going to be in their mind forever. It's going to change how they think. It's going to fundamentally change every problem they look at. They're going to think about the solution. Oh, I just heard someone talk about that. Why can't we apply this here?

Amazing.

So every problem becomes simply an opportunity to solve it.

I think we're going to be fly fishing Lake Coeur d' Alene that weekend, but the next year I'll add that.

Or come to abundance. 360.

A360 is on my list now. Vinyl. The last time that we spoke, you were using a unique form of sequencing to actually determine what the microbiome actually looks like in the gut. To do almost like a full sequencing of the gut. Bring people up to speed on the technology and what you're doing right now and also when you do. So I, I've had asked to me this question about how you're actually sequencing the full genome of the gut and how this would be different than something that I think is called shotgun sequencing, where you take little snips of DNA and pair them all together. And what traditionally has been like the gold standard of sequencing technology, how is what you're doing different? Accurate?

So DNA sequencing is essentially again looking at the DNA. That means everything that can potentially happen. What we do is we look at the rna. So as you know, the DNA is a double stranded thing and it's Alphabet of anything that can happen. RNA tells you exactly what is currently going on. So we use the RNA analysis but to analyze the rna. It's still the same thing, it's still the shotgun sequencing. It is identical to what the DNA sequencing will be. Except instead of doing DNA sequencing, we are doing the RNA sequencing. But underlying technology is still the same. Illumina identical.

What about the argument that RNA could degrade or be unavailable before it even reaches the stool?

First of all, so RNA that is only true for the dead rna, right? So what happens is when you're doing a DNA sequencing that is actually one of the biggest problem is you see a lot of the dead stuff. So if you were to look at the food that you're eating, whether it's the plant based food or the meat Based food, you're going to start to see whole bunch of DNA that's coming from the food and by the time it goes through your digestive canal, it is all dead. But you'll see the dead DNA because DNA lasts forever. You're going to be able to see all the dead DNA and you don't know those things are actually there or they're simply dead. RNA as you know, obviously degrades, but in this tool it's still replicating. And we are able to. As soon as you take this tool out and you put in the test tube, we preserve it right away so instantly it gets preserved. We lyse the cell, we open up the cell, preserve the RNA and it's gone.

Now a lot of people, they might not be aware, so we'll inform them. Now, biome is a poop test. Basically you send me a tube and I don't actually poop in the tube, I poop in it. I forget what it is now. Toilet paper, hot dog and you swab it and put it in. Another question that I've gotten is how you can say that a small sample from, from one daily poop is accurate versus analyzing it over time. Like taking three days worth of stool analysis and getting all the different variables from the stool.

So first let me. There are two parts of the puzzle. One is, can we take it from one place and is it good enough? A second part is if I do my test today versus I do my test, you know, tomorrow, is it going to be much different? So we actually did all of that. So we tested the things in different places in this tool and then we took the same person, the things for 30 days in a row and then we took 20 different people for 30 days in a row and said just eat what you normally. Just eat normally what you eat in.

A tube for 30 days in a row. Yeah.

And then interesting. I mean they poop every day, right? So it's not like lock it up.

It's just so much harder to poop when you know, you got to put.

It in a tube tiny bit. I mean, you know, you're talking about like just touch, right? Anyway, let's not get there too much. But the point is we were able to say exactly who is this thing belongs to for all 30 days? Because the microbes, even they change a little bit unless you change your diet drastically. So if you are a vegan and you change your diet to become a, you know, start eating meat or you were completely on this diet and you change it to this diet, then you fundamentally, your microbes will change. Otherwise we are able to predict that these are the same people this came from. That means there is a minor change, but it's very temporary and transient.

Got it. So you've actually done your own.

We absolutely have done all this study and we're publishing that paper, by the way.

Amazing. Okay, so once someone has actually tested their stool and they've sent it off to you, what happens next?

So we essentially take that stuff. And again, remember, as soon as you put in the test tube, we have now preserved this RNA. And this RNA preserver would last for at least 30 days. So you can ship it in the regular mail and it doesn't really matter whether it gets to us tomorrow or it gets us a week from now. So we get the samples from UK and it's just totally fine. And then we take that sample and then we prepare it in the prep side, what we're doing is really amplifying, removing some of the RNA that we know exactly what it is. And we're able to remove what we call housekeeping rna. And then we sequence everything that's out there. And by sequencing and amplifying it and sequencing it, we're able to now see exactly how active each of the organisms are. But more importantly, now we can look at these transcripts of what is going on. And by looking at the different pathways, we can say how much of butyrate you are actually producing, how much of LPS you're actually producing, how much of flagella is going on, how much of vitamins, the folic acid or vitamin K you're actually producing. And then we look at what you're capable of producing. And then we go take all of this information that's coming from your RNA test, and then we take all of the information that you provided us, and then we feed it all into the.

Artificial, introducing the information like surveys and questionnaires. The questionnaire answer as you can complete.

And you take all of that. Then we feed into the artificial intelligence. And the artificial intelligence does couple of interesting things. We have a complete food ontology. That means we have now the nutrients in each food, what they are. And then we see if this food were to come in contact with these microbes, what this ecosystem will do. So, for example, if you say, hey, I'm eating spinach, and I say, oh, Ben, spinach is really not going to be good for you. And you say, how can you possibly tell me that Popeye was wrong? Popeye was always right. You need spinach. So spinach has oxalic acid oxalate, unless your microbiome is able to detox oxalate. So if you have oxylobacter that is able to detox oxalate or oxalic acid is going to be harmful to you. So we look at this stuff and say, are you actually be able to metabolize this oxalic acid or not? And if we don't, you can't. Then we have to say, hold off on that spinach. And then we looked at your poop and say, you know Ben, you really, really need to cut down on protein because we're seeing a tremendous amount of ammonia and sulfites being produced in your gut because those protein fermenters are fermenting all the protein, excess protein that's not being digested. So you need to ease off on that.

Right? Win, win. When these changes are then made, what have you been seeing in the follow up? Like what actually happens as far as either the way the microbiome changes or even the way some of those things we were talking about like inflammatory markers or glycemic variability changes. How do you actually track.

So let me give you. So I think you have multiple questions, I'm going to break it down and answer for you. So obviously we have people now done it one, two or three tests and then they do. What we see is the inflammation activities continue to come down. So we have inflammation activity score in your, in your biomap. You can see, you can start to see your metabolic flexibility or the metabolic score is going up, the digestive efficiency is going up.

And how are you measuring those?

So all those things essentially come up with tens of underlying scores. For each score, there are 10 underlying scores. Under each of those 10 scores we have thousands of gene expression. So we say these genes are overexpressed four times or eight times, these genes are under expressed. And then we look at these pathways and say if these genes are over expressed and these are under expressed, are they producing more butyrate or less butyrate? Are they producing more LPs or less LPs?

Got it.

Right.

So you can basically take the gene activity and extrapolate that to let's say inflammatory markers, which without necessarily having someone send in their sample along with let's say a tube of blood to test HSCRP and fibrinogen and all these other things.

Those things are on the host side. And I was mentioning that instead of testing that on the host side, we'll again be looking at the transcripts and gene expression and those gene expressions of the 1. Remember when DNA makes RNA, RNA makes protein. Right. So by looking at RNA we can see exactly what protein is going to be made. So by looking at the blood gene expression, we'll be able to say how much of these inflammatory markers, the cytokines, CRP is a great example, C reactive protein will be able to measure and say how much of CRP is being made.

Will you eventually be able to take these, these, this new measurement you alluded to a while ago? Take those? That's a blood measurement, right?

Yeah.

So can you take those and then combine them with the microbiome data to actually see what's going on in the host level even more specifically? Absolutely. And that is that with the microbiome analysis.

So very soon, when we launch the blood transcriptomic, it's going to be called genetic intelligence test. So we have now the gut intelligence test and we're going to have a genetic intelligence test. We're going to be able to now take your microbial gene expression, the host cell gene expression, your phenotype information, and then feed that into AI along with the thing, the food ontology, and say how that food is going to be impacting you if you take this supplement, how is that going to be impacting you if you take these things, how is that going to be impacting you? The goal of reducing the inflammation? Because at the end of the day, if you can get out of the inflammation, everything else, losing weight. So what's interesting is we don't go focus on diagnosing a disease or reversing a disease. The symptoms, the disease are simply the symptoms of chronic conditions. People name them these diseases. There is no such thing as disease. They are just your body is not at ease. So it's at dis ease is what disease is. So when you bring your microbial ecosystem, bring your body into homeostasis and you reduce the inflammation. What pharmaceutical companies do is they love chronic diseases. So what they do, they never want to cure any of the chronic diseases. They, they don't really care what's causing them. They want to suppress the symptom. So you have autoimmune diseases, what do they do? Suppress the immune system. Don't worry about what's causing autoimmune diseases. They don't. And guess what, when you suppress the immune system, there'll be three more other diseases that is going to be caused by it. They have pills for every one of them. And by the time you get to my age, you're popping more pills than blueberries. And there's another set of problems you get.

Right, right. How do you know with the microbiome whether the disease is causing the microbiome to be deleteriously affected or whether a poor microbiome is causing the disease?

So again, it's really. So think of it really as a circular path. So it's not a chicken or egg which came first. It is really. So think. Let me give you a better example. Stress. Your gut microbiome makes you essentially highly likely to be able to get depression or stress. When you get stress, you release cortisol. That changes your microbiome.

We talked about this a little bit last time too, about even the fact that, that the neurotransmitters produce such a serotonin and dopamine are heavily influenced by material profile.

No, no. 90% of all the serotonin produced in the human body is produced in the gut. In the gut. In the gut, not in your brain. Right. Almost all the neurotransmitters are either produced in the gut or consumed in the gut. So think about for a second. Your gut and a brain are connected through vagus nerve, right? And that vagus nerve is bidirectional. So your brain impacts your gut and your gut impacts your brain. And that is a circumference.

You're a fetus. The enteric and central nervous systems are connected.

And in fact, even before. Think about from the evolution perspective.

Lot of the original organism didn't have the brain. They all had the gut. This is. People say this is our secondary brain. In fact, evolutionary wise, that is our primary brain. That is where the brain was evolved. This is our secondary brain.

I know a guy who has done Jeff Leach, he did a fecal transplant, and I believe he was with the Hasda when he did this. Some hunter gatherer tribe. And it changed his, like the way he felt his personality almost instantly, probably because of that difference in neurotransmitter. What do you think of this idea of using fecal transplant therapy as a way to change the microbiome?

So first of all, one has to be extremely careful doing that. So if you're living, your microbiome evolves to essentially compensate for the environment that you're living in. Right. So if you take a mic, a microbiome from a person who's living in a completely different set of environment, eating completely different set of foods, and you take that microbiome bring into the place that.

I think that, yeah, that was, that was a pretty extreme scenario that he did. I think most people are, you know, they're going to like the Tame out clinic in Britain and they're, they're working with a healthy donor. I was just curious if you guys have even ever looked into that biome or even tested someone who's done it.

A lot of the stuff they've done in the inter species transfer and they have also done the human to human transfer. So there are a couple of very interesting cases. They took the microbiome from a human and gave it to the mice, which essentially had no microbiome. And if they took it from a fat person, the mice became fat. When they took it from a thin person, the mice became thin. Right. So they're able to show that obesity goes with the microbiome. They did the same thing with diabetes. They have done it for many diseases.

Jet lag and circadian rhythm.

So most people don't realize that microbiome have their own circadian rhythm. Right. And that's the reason.

Yeah, I didn't know.

Yeah. So microbiome has its own circadian rhythm. In fact, there is a whole bunch of interesting thing about microbiome. They communicate both chemically, they do the quorum sensing. They also use electrical signals communicating between themselves. So there are very interesting paper that came out that how microbiome use electrical communication to communicate themselves, just like a brain does. Right. So this whole idea of one thing we did not touch on that you were asking me the good bacteria or bad bacteria? That is, that is actually the old science. It is not the bacteria it is good or bad, it is the ecosystem that's good or bad.

Give me an example.

So C. Diff is a great example. C. Diff in itself is a terrible bacteria, but it's really, really good in an ecosystem. Almost 80% of people we tested, they all have a C. Diff. But anyway, yeah, so, but remember it's in.

A lot of people freak out when they see C. Diff on their test.

So but interesting thing is in a good ecosystem, the other bacteria are keeping this in check.

Right.

And you need these bacteria to essentially constantly keeping your immune system primed. So what happens is these bacteria are keeping your immune system ready to go. So when there is a parasite, it can attack. And this thing also allows you to renew your gut lining. So pro inflammation, a little bit of pro inflammation allows you to renew your gut lining.

So when you talk about immune system modulation, the microbiome's key, key role in that, something like C. Difficile, even though we would paint that as, you know, in old school terms, as you refer to a bad bacteria, it is in Fact imparting the ability to modulate the immune system.

And as a part of the whole good ecosystem, almost every one of them, 80% of the people we looked at have C. Diff. Right. So interest. So my point is same thing with Ekkermansia. Ekkermansia may be extremely good in some quantity in some ecosystem. In other places we have seen Akkermansia to cause, you know, psoriasis, multiple psoriasis or a whole bunch of other diseases. So it's really not the bacteria in itself. And that's really my point is the reason this science hasn't moved forward is because people were using these old signs of 16s. In 16s you're looking at the thing at the gene.

16S was the old way that you would normally sequence the microbiome.

Yeah, that's right.

So I don't want you to shove people under the bus, but we, we have to, I'm afraid. What would be an example of a, of a company or a product that was using so 60?

I mean anytime you have essentially got scammed by ubiome or American gut Project or in fact Most other labs, 99 of all labs just go there 16s because it costs couple of dollars. So they basically are scamming you, not doing anything.

Gotcha. But you're not getting the full picture at all.

You're getting, first of all you're missing out all the viruses, phages, RNA viruses, yeast, fungus, mold and even the bacteria.

What about parasites?

So depends on, I mean the parasites if they are bacterial parasite at a genus level, but you're not going to able to get them at a species level or strain level. Right. So it's like saying we see a lot of men here, we see a lot of women there. They don't know is it Ben or Naveen. But even worse, the strain level. Are they producing butyrate? Are they producing lps? Are they really a plumber or they electrician? What are they doing?

What are the metabolites?

Yeah, what are they doing? So that's the reason these companies have really essentially given a bad name to the good science.

When someone finally goes through the biome analysis and then the food recommendations are generated, how does that actually work? Do you just begin to eliminate food, foods that would feed parts of the microbiome? How does that actually. Because, because honestly there's a lot of people that really don't give a crap about what form of sequencing is used. All they want is what am I supposed to eat, what am I supposed to avoid?

How does that work. So by the way, that's what we do. So our whole job is to look at all these signs and give you actionable thing that you can do. So our job is to say here are the foods that are good for you and here are the food that you should minimize. And that's really. It is. Right. And how do we know what foods are good for? You know how to minimize? Remember I went back, we have the food Ontology database. So we say, what are the nutrients in each food? And then we say, how are these foods when they go to the gut, how are they going to be synthesized and how they're going to be metabolized? And that's based on that we can say, all right, for your gut microbiome, right now, here's what you need to do. An interesting thing is when you change your diet in next three to four months, your gut microbiome completely.

That's what I wanted to ask you. Like, does it change then the food recommendations change?

Absolutely.

When you do a follow up test.

That's right. So if you do a test in three to four months and if you change your diet, if you say, I got the recommendation, but I didn't change my diet, don't bother.

So you're saying I might be able to eat green beans.

That's right. And in fact it changed for me.

Tell me about what changed with you.

So when I started it said I need to cut down all the things that actually I thought were healthy for me. Spinach, lentils, legumes, tofu and.

Oats.

Legumes and lentils are pretty big staples.

It is, right? And avocado. So all those things that I thought were healthy for me, total bummer. Did that cut down? Four months later I did a test again.

You cut them. Did you do anything else? Did you introduce certain bacterial strains like probiotics?

So I took some probiotics, I took some probiotics and obviously I ate a whole lot more, you know, fibrous stuff that was recommended to me.

Did you take specific probiotic strains? Like specific to what you were shown to be deficient in?

Exactly. So we took exactly what I needed. So one of the big things is it's not the probiotic that is really healthy for everyone. As a matter of fact, people who take probiotic could be harming themselves significantly. Because if you have a SIBO and you take probiotic, it's going to make it worse.

Yeah. Or a histamine intolerance.

Yeah. Or if you already have too much of those bacteria, by giving More you're going to make it worse. The good thing is 90% of probiotics are so useless they never actually get hold anyway. So sure, I mean it doesn't make it as much bad, but you're just pissing off or you're shitting off your.

Money, they never actually see the actual seed.

And that's one of the interesting thing is I'm looking at another biodefense technology that's coming out of another lab that is able to show that based on this microbial ecosystem that's in your gut or my gut, if you want to introduce this specific strain, what other strains have to go with that? So they can found a symbiotic relationship, what prebiotic it needs and then you can package them to see when it goes down. It has all other. These are the friendly ones that are going to support it and here are the antagonistic ones, they're going to attack it and how they're going to be able to survive. And you can show and prove that personalized probiotic will work in your gut.

If that failed, I mean we could have a whole different podcast about the field of future genomics and personalized nutrition just based on that alone. Customized supplement.

So we are actually working with this high throughput sequencing for microbeats and micro microbiome that's going to be able to be able to modify and God knows why they developed it in this national security lab to introduce a particular set of bacteria for a specific person. But who am I to ask?

Yeah, you know, conspiracy theory, thirst. It's a lot more targeted though than eating a dirty pomegranate. Okay, so walk me through this part of things. Someone tests, they send in their stool or they do a repeat test and the app that you have your biome dashboard on or the online portal that you access will show you your first results, your second results. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the food recommendations and everything kind of change from result to result. How does it work in terms of just the business itself? How do people actually sign up and what's the testing protocol? How have you guys changed a year ago? I think your business model has changed a little bit since.

Not really. No, not really. So what we have done actually is we have learned a lot and we have able to make it more simpler. So when we started we needed to do a metabolic intelligence test and a gut intelligence.

Metabolic intelligence being the shake that you drink to see what your glycemic response.

That's right. So we no longer need to do that. Anymore because. Because what we did is we took 1,000 people, put them on a continuous glucose monitoring, gave them, we bought The Whole Foods, 50,000 different foods to give it to these people. And we are able to monitor for each set of gut microbiome how does the glycemic response changes. And now we build the whole machine learning model. So I can now predict that you eat that carrot, I can tell you exactly what is going to happen.

Of course more for that after that drink the nasty sugar.

That's all gone now. And so we come now the kit is beautiful silver looking box, right? Another thing we did is really is constantly reducing the cost for the people. As you know, this is not something that I'm trying to make money from. This is something to me to be able from my way of giving back to the humanity of how do we help billions of people live healthy? As you know that you know my dad got diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer and we all know it came from gut microbiome because there's a very interesting research that shows that how the pancreatic cancer is caused by gut microbiome through leaky gut moving into pancreas, shutting down the immune system, allowing the cancer to grow.

And at this point I wish I had started this company two years ago because if I had started two years earlier, I would have had by now all the information I need to keep him healthy. I don't know how much time he has honestly to live right now. But I promise, I don't know if I can save him. But I can promise you that people behind him are going to be saved. And that is my goal that I am going to focus and I am absolutely focused on a simple moonshot. How do we make illness truly a matter of choice? And this chronic illness, we need to be able to eliminate these chronic diseases. We as this generation, Ben, you and I have a shot at fixing this. And if we don't, we're going to watch our children and grandchildren suffer from chronic diseases. And I'm not the one, it's going to be for lack of trying. So I'm going to do everything it takes to prevent and reverse chronic diseases. And that's my moonshot. And I hope we are able to successfully do that.

Pretty noble effort. I think that's a perfect place to wrap it up, man. So if you're listening in, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Biome2 that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com biome the number two if you want to see what my results look like. I'll put them there. If you want to get a test for yourself, I'll put a link there and we'll work on a special code that you can use when you go and get your own test that will get you some perks that Naveen and I will talk about later. But I'll work out something for you guys that I'll put show notes and I'll also link to my previous episode with Naveen because I know we didn't get into his history too much. But listen to that one because your mind will be blown about everything else that this guy has done. I of course have plenty of work to do myself on setting up my Twitter feeds and amping up my books game and continuing to learn from some of the smartest people on the face of the planet like Naveen and just incredibly honored to be able to sit down with you and impress with your passion and your devotion to healing the human race. So thanks man.

Thank you.

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