Human Milk Oligosaccharides: The Newest Prebiotic

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today on the show I have Beau Berman, co-founder and marketing director of Layer Origin Natural Supplements. They're sponsoring the show today, and Beau's gonna be telling us about an interesting new product on the market called human milk oligosaccharides, or HMOs. Not the healthcare entity, but supplements. Something entirely different. So welcome, Beau.

Hey, Lindsey, thanks so much for having me on the show. And yeah, the first time I ever heard of HMOs in this context, I thought the exact same thing. I thought it sounded like the health plan from the '90s that was very popular then.

Or yeah, I'm still on one. Yeah. So tell me what human milk oligosaccharides are.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So they're better known, as you said, by the acronym HMO. When you find out the benefits of them, sometimes it's almost sounds too good to be true, but the reality is that there's research indicating that they can boost your immunity, sharpen your cognitive abilities with the brain, and most importantly, I would argue, have a positive net impact on your gut health. And so you did ask what they are. So human milk oligosaccharides are a component of like the title says, of human milk, of breast milk, mother's milk. And I generally talk about them a little bit more in layman's terms since I don't bring the science background to our team. But in my layman's terms explanation, human milk oligosaccharide, HMO, it is the third most common solid in breast milk after lactose and after fat. And so it is indigestible. So it's, you know, our supplement is a prebiotic. So it escapes digestion, it reaches the colon, and it feeds beneficial bacteria. So HMOs are believed to be one of the reasons— and this gets a little controversial, but there was a Bloomberg article about HMOs and they said HMOs may explain why breastfed babies tend to fare better than formula-fed. And there's some controversy there. Some people say formula is just as good. What's interesting though is that basically scientists were looking at HMOs for the last century even though many of us have really never heard of them until possibly more recently, they were looking at them and trying to replicate them because they saw these benefits in infants. Basically, the HMOs were credited with sort of coding the infant gut lining and setting up their immunity, things of that nature. But there was no way to provide these for adults or replicate it at scale because it was, it was just in human milk. So That's cor— I can, I can keep going, but that's sort of the—

Yeah, yeah. No, that's great.

Short answer right there.

No, and now it's kind of coming back to me because I had recently heard about them because a client of mine was interested in, in them and was trying one. And it didn't occur to me that I had heard about them because I remember now there were articles that were coming out saying, look at this amazing thing we've discovered. There's something in breast milk that's entirely not to feed us because we can't digest it. It is entirely to feed the microbiome. And that was HMOs.

Yes, exactly. That's exactly right. And so it's, it's quite fascinating actually. And you know, I talked about breast milk versus formula. So there was a breakthrough in the 2000s or the aughts and basically the major corporation Abbott Laboratories, they produce Similac, which is one of the most popular baby formulas. It has the bright colors on the label. It's in every grocery store. Well, Abbott was the first company in the world to add HMO to its infant formula in the Similac brand. And so now they're really touting this. I mean, seriously, next time any of your listeners go to the grocery store, just take a quick jaunt, walk down the formula aisle really quickly, and you'll see on almost all of them now it says HMO. There's a big label, a big ribbon on the label that says that because they're obviously trying to make formula as close to breast milk as possible with all the benefits and advantages. But of course, the problem was this just began in 2016. Here we are 4 years later, almost 5 years later, and wasn't available for adults though.

Yeah, no, I actually was looking for baby formula, a duplicate of the bottle I was given by my brother-in-law. And I was so impressed that there were HMOs in the formula that he got at just the regular grocery store. It wasn't like some fancy health food one. In fact, the fancy health food ones probably don't have them yet because I suspect it's too expensive if Abbott owns the patent or something. Are they, are they patented?

So there's different varieties, there's almost different strains. And so basically there's been over 200 different human milk oligosaccharides identified in human milk or in breast milk. And basically there's about 10 to 12 of them that us humans or, you know, researchers, scientists have been able to isolate, for lack of a better word, and utilize in, in different supplements and things such as formula. And there's really only like 1 or 2 or 3 max that are really coming online right now. The most popular one is 2'-fucosyllactose, which you'll see notated as 2'-F is the notation for that. And so that's the one that you'll find the most often, but there's others as well. And, you know, it gets a little confusing, but Abbott is certainly not the only company at this point that has been able to replicate HMOs. And so, you know, it gets a little confusing. I should probably say this now because Basically, the way it ended up being done was that HMOs are the, the fi— the kind you'll find in baby formula or even in our product. The way it was done is basically just taking lactose, taking bovine milk and taking it through a process of fermentation, a very precise fermentation process, and then a purification process. And they were able to get to something that was basically a 98 to 99% bioidentical match. To the HMOs you would find in human milk. So basically all of the benefits except for maybe 1%, but it's not— even if you're lactose intolerant, you can still have it because it's just trace lactose by the, by the time it goes through the fermentation and purification process.

Got it.

So it's kind of a win-win the way everyone is seeing it right now. But this is like, you know, it's very brand new. It's just, just coming online.

Right. So tell me about when an adult might want to take an HMO prebiotic.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I saw that you've done one of your episodes prior to this about kind of whether prebiotics are worth it or not, and it sort of depends on the person really. And again, I should clarify that I am not a scientist or a doctor. I'm part of a team of our founders. The other two founders are scientists and I'm the spokesperson for the company, but it does depend on the person and essentially What we tell people is that if you are having issues with gut health, if you're having stomach problems, this is something you should consider. If you're not, then we generally tell people not to, not to take it, that you don't need to. And that's sort of a little bit overly simplistic, but there are a trio of benefits that according to the research, HMOs can provide in infants, and there's a gigantic amount of research that says that, that states that, or proves that. Now, in terms of for adults, it's a smaller catalog of research that's much more recent. But again, those trio— the trio of benefits are for the gut, and there's the most evidence there. But there's also evidence for bolstering the immune system and a benefit of cognitive benefit for brain development, brain health. So yeah, I mean, that's the best I can say. Honestly, it's very similar. I would liken it to the decision of whether to take probiotics or not. Who needs probiotics and who does not need probiotics? I mean, we all need to have some level of good gut bacteria, and it's possible that you even know more about this than I do since, again, I'm not the, the scientist in our organization. But, but again, not every single person in the world needs to supplement with extra probiotics, right? Or external or, you know, not just from food sources. So it really just depends on the person. It's something that people should talk to their doctor about, or whether they see a traditional doctor or functional physician or whatnot. But we try to stay away from telling people specifically who needs to take it and who doesn't. But, you know, if you're having problems with your gut health, we think it's worth giving it a shot.

And when you say problems, are we talking— or, you know, are there studies that specifically speak to the types of problems like diarrhea or SIBO or IBS or constipation or, you know what I mean?

Yeah, absolutely. And I can— I should send you some of these too for show notes if you do anything like that.

Just—

yeah, I can put those in, back up the claims here that I'm making because sometimes people make claims that are, that are not true. But yeah, so to answer your question specifically, we're talking about people who are dealing with leaky gut, leaky intestinal barrier. IBS, and I'm not sure about SIBO. That's probably something I should know.

Well, it's pretty similar to— similar to IBS, basically. It may be the same thing.

Yeah, that's kind of a blind, blind spot in my knowledge of gut health issues. But— and of course I hear SIBO every day. But yes, I mean, basically we're talking about IBS, leaky gut.

Okay. So obviously the natural situation in which a baby would have these, you know, would be in their initial gut when they're being nursed, or in this case, in these fancy new baby foods. And at that time, I know their microbiome is primarily colonized by Bifidobacterium longum infantis, or B. infantis. So I'm curious whether— I know you have a product that combines both the prebiotic and probiotics. Is that strain in your probiotic?

And I'm— I, I would probably butcher the pronunciations of them. But so in our— yeah, so just to be clear, we do have another product called— that also has HMOs, but it's a prebiotic and probiotic combination. And that's like, that's brand new. So is that the one you're referring to?

Yeah, yeah, I saw that. I saw that you had both the straight prebiotic and then you had the mixed prebiotic probiotic.

Okay, got it, got it. Yeah, yeah. So that's the new product which is available for preorder. That's brand new for us. And so that has the Bifidum, the Lactis, the Longum, Acidophilus. I don't think it has the— no, it does not have the Infantis. Is that how you said it? Infantis? Yeah.

Honestly, I don't know. It might be Infantis, might be Infantis.

But in any case, yeah, it does not have that to my knowledge. It does have—

but it has Longum. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

And I stopped There's about, let's see, there's, there's, I mean, and honestly I'm on our website right now. It's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, there's about 9 strains.

So I noticed that in that prebiotic probiotic there's 1,000 milligrams of HMOs. So I was gonna ask, I mean, the answer may be obvious, but what is an effective dose of a prebiotic of this type?

That would probably be something that I would refer to one of our scientists. And I, I sound like a, a spokesperson here for like a politician or something. Like, I'm going to refer that to somebody else, but I don't know the answer to that personally. I mean, the dosage that we have in our Pure HMO, the capsules, is 1,300 milligrams. So, I mean, those are, you know, you're seeing 1,000 in our probiotic-prebiotic combination and 1,300 in the capsules. So, it's around that area. Is, is what you're looking at. There's a couple other companies that also do HMOs for adults now, and they're in the similar dosage range.

Yeah. So I, I'm looking now at the strains, and I do see Bifidobacterium lactis. Oh no, I thought I was asking about Infantis, wasn't I?

Yeah.

And then Longum. So it's, it's some of the, the named strains. They have all strain numbers, and it looks like they're— yeah, you said 1, 2, 3, 4. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. And what I found interesting though is that, that you've got 100 billion CFUs per capsule, plus you've got, is it a gram then of the prebiotic along with it? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So, and, and, and they're $30 a bottle, which is actually quite reasonable for 100 billion CFUs, to be, to be honest. Mm-hmm. That's a very reasonable price. Do you often see 100 billion priced more around $60? So that's nice to see that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, and this is something— this is one of our— it's basically a product that's not even for sale yet. It's on preorder right now. We want to make these our products available. And, you know, a lot of companies might say this, but there really is a mission here to make products that actually work. They're backed by science and make them widely available and share this wealth of things that are going to actually help people. And it's exciting to get the reviews that we get on Amazon and on our website. Most of our business is running through Amazon right now, but we do get some reviews on our website and it's fun. You know, it's kind of exciting when you get one where people are saying, wow, this really helped me within just a couple of weeks. And it's one of those things where you don't want to get people's hopes up because, you know, it might not work for everybody. It really might not. And it doesn't work for everybody. But for a lot of people, it is. They are seeing very positive effects and benefits. And so that is something that's exciting for us. And regarding the price, yeah, I mean, thanks for that compliment. I mean, you know, we try to make these affordable, like I said, and it's great working with 2 scientists. That's our company, 2 scientists who met in a laboratory at Cornell and talked about some of the health issues they had and some of the ideas they had and decided to make a difference and make it happen. And that was about 3 and a half years ago. So, cool.

Just stopping for a sec to thank my regular listeners and subscribers for making the show such a success. And if it's been helpful in educating you or entertaining you or in solving your gut health problems, I was hoping you might be able to make a donation in support of my work so that I can keep bringing you quality content. I just established the capability for one-time donations on PayPal, so there's a link for that in the show notes. A $15 donation covers one month of hosting the podcast with my podcast host, Libsyn, or a $25 donation covers the cost of professional podcast editing for an hour. A typical podcast takes about 6 hours to edit. And just so you know, I edit my podcasts a lot so that they're smoother, shorter, and aren't full of ums, you knows, and likes. Or if you wanna support the podcast on a regular basis, I have a Patreon account and you can also find a link in the show notes to sign up for recurring donations. Thank you so much for your generosity. And so I, I'm just looking now at, at the benefits that are listed, or it says it's designed to restore the gut and immune system, relieve IBS and constipation, achieve healthy weight loss, and improve mental and overall health. So I'm just curious if you, you know, of those things, have you had testimonies specifically related to the immune system or autoimmunity, for example, or weight loss?

Actually, we haven't. We have had testimonials regarding gut health improvement, people saying that they deal with leaky gut and they felt better, that sort of thing. And so, what was really interesting is we actually sent a bottle of the capsules, the prebiotic, Pure HMO prebiotic capsules to a guy with a pretty popular health website who tests a lot of different things and recommends products. It was kind of a test in a way because I assumed that he would have a pretty high level of scrutiny with this sort of thing considering that he already recommends other brands and things on his website of prebiotics and even of HMOs. So, it was kind of almost a risk or something to send this to him, but he reported within days noticing a difference. And again, maybe it's a placebo effect, who knows, but we don't think it is, but I'm sure someone could argue that. So that was at least a good, a good testimonial that we received from him, good feedback that he immediately, almost immediately noticed a difference in taking the capsules.

Yeah, no, I do find that there is a certain audience that's— that this kind of product, not to say that it's not appropriate for practitioners, but, but there's an audience for people who have sort of beginning-level gut issues, right? So, so one of my mentors, Daniel Kalish, He talks about stage 1 and stage 2 and stage 3, and at sort of stage 1, you're just, you have some disruptions to the microbiome, but you're not like, your digestive organs have not started misfunctioning, like you don't have low stomach acid or insufficient pancreatic enzymes or bile. You're just sort of at the beginning levels of problems. This is probably something that many people have just because of poor diet or because they've gone through some antibiotics plus poor diet. And I think there's a real audience right there for the people who just have those beginning level problems. A product like this might set them back to where they were versus having to undergo— you know, the kind of people I work with have much more advanced problems. They've been having IBS for, for years and years, and their problems are, are much deeper than one product is going to solve, perhaps.

Yeah, you would probably be able to speak to that as you just did far better than I would, and as not coming from that standpoint. But yeah, I mean, from what we've seen, I don't know the level that people, you know, who've written testimonials on our Amazon page. I don't know what level they were at, whether it was 1, 2, or 3, but I would certainly imagine that at least level 1 would have an impact. I mean, one interesting thing was that there's this bodybuilder who's certainly not our target market necessarily, but his name is Mark Bell. And I heard about him through the author Joel Greene who wrote this book called "The Immunity Code." And apparently, Joel Greene recommend it. You know, Mark Bell, this bodybuilder, was dealing with— I think it was, was it leaky gut? No, no, it was lactose intolerance. And Joel Greene told Mark Bell to take HMOs, and this was several years ago when they were pretty much only available in baby formula. And so Mark Bell starts chugging baby formula with his protein shakes, and who knows if it was because of that or something else, but he, he says he completely got over the lactose intolerance, which That's quite an extreme claim.

Quite a claim, yeah.

But Joel Greene is not advertising any kind of HMOs. He doesn't sell them. He doesn't profit from them.

Right.

Neither does Mark Bell to my knowledge at all. So, it was interesting that— And you never know. I mean, I think we try to be upfront about that, that with some of these things, could that be from another thing he changed in his diet? Sure. Could it be a placebo effect? Absolutely. But all we know is that there is scientific research. It's the type of thing where even myself, I mean, I'm someone who takes different supplements and I am very skeptical when people make claims. And, you know, once you are around long enough, you can quickly sift through what's legitimate and what's not, at least on the surface level. And then I call it the PubMed test. If you can look at the active ingredients and go on PubMed and look up and see if there's a wealth of research on something, that's at least one of the first level tests that I to run things through. And at least I know our products pass that test, right?

And I'm assuming you're relying primarily on other people's research. You haven't done actual studies with your prebiotic, or have you?

Yeah, no, that is correct. Yeah, we are— we're at the financial standpoint where, yeah, we're relying on basically published research. Yeah, published research, university research. Now, we have actually run a clinical trial on one of our other products at NC State University. But yeah, on HMOs, we're we are relying on prior research of the active ingredient of the HMOs. And it's pretty specific. They'll list which strains or which types of HMOs, you know, if it's the 2-FL or one of the other types of HMOs that they're specifically researching. So it's very specific. But yeah, we're, we're relying on the other research.

And yours is the 2-FL?

Yes.

Okay. And so how much research, how many different papers are there published on that one? Do you know?

On 2-FL specifically, I don't know offhand. And most of the studies involved 2'-FL.

Okay.

But one of the biggest studies was done— sounds coincidental, but was actually done at UNC Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina. And yeah, so for example, like, they recruited subjects from 17 sites across the US. They took 5 grams— they took actually a bigger dose, 5 grams of 2'-fucosyl lactose. And then they also took one of the other HMOs, which is called LNNP. T. And so they took this for 12 weeks and they were looking at their bowel habits, IBS symptoms, quality of life, things of that nature. And so this was a study done. This is in the AJG, the American Journal of Gastroenterology. So that's just one example. So in that example though, you see that they actually were testing, like I said, for not only 2-FL but also the LN and T as well.

Okay. So do you— this is probably a question you'll refer to your scientists, but I'm just curious about whether there's any comparison of these to the other existing oligosaccharides like FOS or fructooligosaccharides or GOS galactooligosaccharides or XOS xylooligosaccharides.

Comparison in the sense of, you mean like, are they similar?

Are they, is there something unique about HMOs?

Yeah, we blogged about this on the blog section of our website and I, it's now it's coming back to me that specifically that topic Okay, well, we can link to that blog. Sure.

Okay. Is there anything that you would've liked me to ask that I haven't asked about your product?

No, I don't think so. I think that was pretty thorough.

Okay, well, great. I thank you so much for sharing about HMOs with us. I'm excited to try it. I, I hear I've got one coming my way, so hopefully I can report back and tell you if it had any good effect on my digestion, cuz I've had a little bout of not such not such good digestion of late, so I'm always game to try something new.

Great. Yeah, absolutely. Hope that it's effective and thank you so much for giving us the chance to discuss human milk oligosaccharides today.

Yeah, it's my pleasure. So if you're thinking of checking these out, Layer Origin is offering a discount code for 15% off for my listeners, and the code is 15HEALING in all caps, and you can use that either on Amazon or on the Layer Origin website. So I'll include that code and a link to both of those in the show notes. And you can use that code for all 3 HMO products, which are the prebiotic capsules, the prebiotic in powder form, and the prebiotic probiotic capsules. And if you're struggling with your gut health and you've maxed out your efforts on self-hacking and trying individual supplements and you're ready to do some more advanced gut testing and figure out what the heck's going on inside your gut and fix it for good, that's the kind of work I do with my clients.. So please feel free to set up a free 30-minute gut healing breakthrough session with me, and I'll link to that in the show notes. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, don't forget to do so. You can also join my gut healing Facebook group to ask questions or send me an email with a question to read on the air at Lindsey— that's L-I-N-D-S-E-Y— @highdeserthealthcoaching.com. I'd love to hear from my listeners, and no doubt your question could benefit someone else too, so don't hesitate to write. And then at the risk of being not timely for later listeners, I'm still going to go ahead and wish you all happy holidays. I'll be taking a little break until the new year on publishing episodes and seeing clients, and I hope you all will get to have a little break too. That's all for today, and here's wishing you all the perfect stool.