Keystone Probiotics: Cutting Edge Supplements for Gut Dysbiosis, the Brain, Immune System, Metabolism and Hormones with Dr. Shayne Morris

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'll be speaking with Dr. Shane Morris, PhD, CNS, MBA, a trailblazer in the world of natural health and microbiome research. As the CEO of Systemic Formulas and Elementum Labs, The sponsors of this podcast and founded in the 1980s, Dr. Morris has dedicated his life to uncovering the incredible potential of the microbiome in transforming health. His cutting-edge supplements are recognized as industry leaders, blending the latest scientific advancements with ancient wisdom to create powerful, effective solutions. Passionate about advancing microbiome science, Dr. Morris has pioneered innovative methods for cultivating beneficial microbes and developing high-quality, life-changing products. Today we're going to be talking about keystone probiotics, which are the species that are really important in your microbiome and which I recently learned are sold in probiotics uniquely available through Elementum Labs. Species like Fecalibacterium prausnitzii, Akkermansia muciniphila, and Roseburia hominis, some of which I didn't even realize were available commercially until I started talking with Dr. Morris, and many of which are depleted in my clients' stool and negatively impacting their health. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. And if you want to get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebook, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing, when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool test would help you get to your root cause, you can find a link in the show notes and take that. Now on to the show. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Morris.

Welcome. How are you?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm doing well. I'm glad to be here.

Yeah, glad to have you.

So before you reached out to me about the podcast, I had not really heard of Systemic Formulas and Elementum Labs. So can you just give a very brief background about those two entities and how and by whom your products are developed?

Yeah, the Systemic Formulas product have been around since we started in 1984. And this gave us, of course, a really early entrance into the direct-to-clinician model or the niche. And it was started by my grandfather. He in fact started it back in the '70s. And of course it evolved and it ultimately landed on Systemic Formulas. And clearly there was a need for some clinician-trained use for what we call dietary supplements. Or nutritional components, as well as herbal mixtures, you know, therapeutic herbs. And then ultimately that led to, of course, the science of it all. You know, my dad, my grandfather started in what we call ethnobotanical medicine, where he was traveling the globe, learning about how these various herbs and/or other natural products were being used medicinally from mainly native people of South America, the Polynesian Islands, Asia. And brought all that back. And really what was exciting for us was that it was early. We say it was early, but it was only early for us. These things have been around for millennia and yet they really had lost favor and being replaced by other more modern approaches, but they were so powerful and that's kind of what led me into it. So I started as a young child working with my grandfather, but I went back to school and really pursued the sciences, you know, the hard sciences of natural products, you know, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, and of course microbiology, which is now the microbiome, because each and every one of these products, as they benefit us, they benefit through processes that are designed within us. And these herbs that have a particular medicinal benefit, it's because of the way our body interacts with them.. And for anybody that doesn't really gather that concept, you simply have to look at psychedelics, right? Natural product psychedelics. Clearly they have an impact on our physiology. I mean, they, you know, some psychedelics can create hallucinations in our brain. So there's this really intimate relationship between us and microbes and plants and fungi. So that's what led me into this path as well. And Alimenta became a brand within the Systemic Formula family that focuses on human genetics, the impact of nutrition on our genetics, on our cells. So we call that the cell-based nutrition as well as the microbiome. And the microbiome covers things like prebiotics, probiotics, and many of these really important nutrients that our microorganisms need in order to maintain our health, protect us, manage our systems. You know, we have all these axes we refer to: gut-brain, gut-lung, gut-heart. All these axes have to be well maintained, and that's really where Alimentum was born about 12 years ago.

And are you the one that develops the products then?

I do a lot of it. Yes. We have a number of really amazing people here. We also have a research branch. So there's the family of Alimentum Systemic that is in the education product and sales side, which would be our sales team, marketing team, manufacturing team, and education. And there's a number of people that are incredibly brilliant in that area. But we also have a research branch and a testing branch in a laboratory that's a, it's a separate entity. It runs a lot of QC testing, a lot of R&D testing, and there's, there's scientists over there that help me develop a lot of these things.

Okay, cool. So today we're gonna be talking a lot about these keystone probiotics. So can you talk about what keystone probiotics are and how they differ from traditional probiotic strains that are found in typical supplements?

It's a really phenomenal topic because whenever we learn about the microbiome, it can be thought of in two ways. We've all heard that it's a collection of microorganisms that colonize us on every surface, sometimes even systemically, where we've got these, these really amazing communities, these ecosystems that help us remain healthy, to help our immune system function. They help manage our mucosal systems. They impact our neurological, meaning they work through hormones. They work through sensors in the cells. There's just this overwhelming amount of information. And it's so overwhelming that then the other alternative is to really simplify it down to eat properly or take probiotics, eat fermented foods, which are all great things. But they don't always necessarily tackle the issues of what is the difference between a healthy microbiome, an average microbiome, and a, and a very unhealthy, or a microbiome that's in dysbiosis. And that can be anywhere on the body or in the body. So keystone species are defined as, and they've only been identified by the way, since we've been able to really dig deep into the microbiome using what we call next generation tools, tools that look at not only the genetics of the microbes, but also the metabolites. So the metabolomics of the whole thing, what they produce, what they're doing there, and how they benefit us. And keystone species tend to be characterized by— they're not very popular, meaning that they don't inhabit large numbers. They don't— they're not in a high population component. They're usually a small part of the population of our microbiome. But they regulate the entire community structure. So they're essential or they're key to the structure of a microbiome. They're not only necessary to be there at that level, but they also produce compounds that are functionally really important to not only the microbiota, but also to the, the human host. And then of course they have a disproportionate impact. So when we lose a keystone species, we oftentimes can see a collapse of a lot of organisms around those species. And my best example of that is if we take a coral reef, for example, when you introduce a new species of animal or, yeah, of an animal into a coral reef that doesn't belong there and it's very invasive, it can actually go in and start to destroy coral, push fish out. If the fish are gone, then the predators leave, ultimately leading to essentially the coral reef collapse. And it only took 1 or 2 species to do that. If you bring that species back, likewise, you know, the, the opposite reaction is having these keystone species on a coral reef bring back coral, bring back the invertebrates, which brings back the coral reef fish, and then that brings back the whole entire food chain. So these are really critical species. And over the last century, essentially, we've spent a lot of effort trying to reduce our exposure to pathogens, but in the process have essentially eradicated many of these keystone species or driven them down to the point that our ecosystems are suffering as a consequence. And we want to bring back keystone species, which then help us bring back more diversity and more stable ecosystems ultimately.

Yeah. In my, in my experience looking at people's stool tests, I see often A couple of the species that tend to disappear after people have had a lot of rounds of either antibiotics or strong herbal antimicrobials are the Akkermansia muciniphila and the Faecalibacterium prausnitzii. And I was blown away to see that you have F. prausnitzii in one of your probiotics. I didn't even know this was sold commercially at all. I don't know how long you've had it, but I'm dying to hear more about that and, and other keystone species that you've gotten your probiotics.

Yeah, we have a number of really, it's taken us Well, really since about 2009. So when we got heavily involved in the microbiome projects, we knew academically about some of these, but we didn't know what was the future of probiotics. I mean, probiotics, as you probably know, have been around for decades. We've all used some form of a lactobacillus, a bifidobacterium, you know, we've got the streptococcus, we've got some yeast, Candida, and so on. Saccharomyces. These are probiotics that have been around a while and they mainly came from the food industry, whether it be cheese or dairy, other fermented foods, for example. So we always embraced this idea that living microbes could be beneficial and not only that they themselves, but also the metabolites they produce. And as the microbiota or microbiome world evolved and so much research was being poured into this. In fact, it's probably one of the most prevalent global natural products, or even beyond that, science that's going on now. We went from very few publications over a decade ago to somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 a year. So the interest has just exploded. And while that was going on, we decided to start to understand these keystone species as well as How do we go from looking at them in stool or in saliva or in the urogenital tract to growing them in conditions that they're stable and you can get enough of them? And that was really what we endeavored from around 2009 till— would've been somewhere in 2018, 2017, '18, where we started to, to really make some significant impacts in that regard. And it was really exciting, but it was also very painful. And two things were born out of this. One, the technologies that you need to grow them, because they do not want to live outside of the human body.

They just, because they're all anaerobic strictly.

Yeah. They really are super sensitive to oxygen, even more than water. And so that, that technology took us a bit, but the, one of the more amazing bits that came along is as people were studying the microbiome, and the impact of, let's say, probiotics, even existing ones, as well as these keystone species, we started to ask the question about what feeds them, what actually keeps them alive, or what makes them want to stay in the ecosystem, right? Not just transiently, you know, you swallow one or you're exposed to one through some other contact. What makes them want to take up residency and really establish benefit inside that ecosystem. We therefore started experimenting with various prebiotics. We used a lot of what we call plant compounds. So these would be things like your, you know, well-known flavonoids, polyphenolics. And as we were going through this, we discovered too that they actually also need a lot of basic nutrients. There are certain B vitamins that stimulated their growth. Glutathione has some impact on their growth. A little bit of carbon, just straight carbon. These are all these little nuances that we learned along the way. So we quickly realized that not only do we really want to embrace these keystone species, we want to really remind people and educate people on the necessary feature of what we call a prebiotic. And I expand that right now. The definition is a fiber or a microbial-accessible carbohydrate, but truly the greater breadth of a prebiotic can run into, like I like I said, the polyflavonoids, some alkaloids, the cyanidins, and you, you've probably heard the story of ellagitannins or ellagic acid that gets converted into urolithin A. And these are phenomenal reactions that the microbes take, of course can perform. And that would be a keystone species where you want to produce these really interesting molecules in your gut that then have some performance inside us physiologically, a benefit, a really amazing thing. And so simultaneously to the probiotic journey we were on, we also took the prebiotic journey and incorporated many useful and interesting compounds into that process that weren't normally thought of as a prebiotic, I guess I should say. And some of these are even human-based like mucin, glucose aminoglycans, and, and, and the like.

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So let's get into some of the specifics of these species that you've got in your probiotics. Yeah.

How we've tried to coordinate the breadth of these kinds of keystone species is we've identified various systems that they tend to be more impactful in. For example, we have something called Terra Terrain, and that's really, although they're not thought of as strictly keystone species, they encompass the greater need for soil-based organisms. And many of those are spore-forming. And not just simply the, there's, there's about 5 common commercial versions of those, but there are more. And you look more deeply into Europe, into Africa and Asia, there's others that have really gained in their probiotic benefits, even though they weren't really acknowledged here. But if you sequence people, healthy people that are eating directly out of their gardens or they're using whole foods from farmers markets, you'll find these other versions. And I'll just list a few for you. You know, you, there's one called Bacillus licheniformis. There's Amyloliquefaciens, which is another Bacillus species. There's Maggatarium mucilaginous indicus, which is now more commercially recognized. Lattersporus polymyxia. These are all unique SBOs that we now have. And we've also partnered with some people that use the kefir grains and the kombucha scobies from various places. And we use the live organisms from the scoby and the kefir grains to then round out these more transient organisms. So that's one unique way that we, we approach the fermented food world. But then we get into the actual keystone species. I'm gonna list some of these off for you, but their, their names are crazy. I have to say that microbiologists are not the greatest at naming things. But we have things like Micrococcus luteus, Staphylococcus epidermidis. Now luteus is, it's an internal, it's a, it's a gut-based keystone species, but it seems to have a benefit to our skin. It produces certain carotenoid pigments that do enter the bloodstream and end up in the skin creating a UV protection, not unlike just recommending, you know, the carotenoids from beta-carotene to gamma, alpha, delta, or you may have heard of, you know, other types of blueberry compounds or blackberry compounds that are protective in the skin. Well, we have microorganisms that produce similar compounds, and then you have things like Staphylococcus epidermidis, which is a commensal on the skin. And it's brilliant because it outcompetes Staphylococcus aureus. Now aureus is the problem child. And Its main enemy, believe it or not, is Staph epi. Epidermidis is what we call it. And the competition between those two is significant. Epidermidis creates what we call bacteriocins that only reduce the aureus population, has no other impact on other organisms, just aureus. So when you see people that are suffering from Staphylococcus aureus issues, they likely lack Epidermidis on their skin. And that's a really—

when you take those from the— that's, that's, those are all in the Derma Eubiotic.

Derma Eubiotic and the Derma Serum. The Epidermis would be in the serum at the top.

Oh, okay. I was gonna ask. So the, so the, so you have a topical for that? Wow. That's awesome.

Yeah, it's a plant-based oil where we've tried to mimic a lot of the oils we secrete from the sebum. And then we've lyophilized the Epidermis and the Zylosis. There's a, there's also a Staphylococcus Zylosis. That is a commensal. These are found on the skin in various regions, and they are protective against other— well, they're protective in the fact that your, your immune system needs to know they're there. It educates them, but they're also protective against invading organisms.

And what does a, a skin infection with Staph aureus look like?

So the one that we are in— we're probably the most familiar with is atopic dermatitis, especially in children. And I forget her name. There's a brilliant scientist out of, I think it's UC Davis and it might even be Stanford. She studies skin and many of these conditions, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, and so on. And in pediatrics as well. And she's published a number of amazing studies showing that most atopic dermatitis on children is essentially an overgrowth of Staphylococcus aureus. And one of the unique features that kind of differentiates aureus is when you have a rash that feels and looks like atopic dermatitis and it itches, the itch is somewhat indicative of Staph aureus because they actually, that organism actually sends a signal to create itching into our skin.

Cool.

Yeah, it's cool, but it's also a little bit devious, isn't it? That little— I mean, cool that you have the—

cool that you have the serum that fights it. Yeah.

Cool that it knows how to make us itch. We spend a lot of time. Yeah. And for really recalcitrant versions, we actually tell people to open up capsules and make a paste of like the Derma and the Immune and lather it on top of the issue-prone area. To really try to get these colonies to push back against the non-desirable.

I can already think of a client who needs this, who's had an ongoing atopic dermatitis issue.

And it's incredible that, I mean, for me, it's always incredible journey to not only keep up with the ever-increasing and ever-amazing world of the microbiome and these organisms, but also the clinical applications that are that really range from our metabolism to our neurological health, to our lungs and our kidneys and liver, et cetera. Right. Some of these are really amazing at destroying metabolites. I mean, helping us metabolize xenotoxins, for example. It's going to be an area that is ever-growing and ever-improving. And this is where, you know, we're kind of at the tip of the iceberg, but we're excited to be here because it's taken us a while to get here. But let's jump to, let's say on the immune front. So we know that microbiome is incredibly powerful when it comes to our immune education, our immune evolution, and just navigating new threats all the time. And, you know, our keystone species in that regard are some interesting names. Again, we have some Bacteroidetes species. One of them's Ovaetus. We have Uniformis, also Bacteroidetes. We have Roseberry Hominis. Which is pretty fun one. That's a, that's a new one.

Yeah. I again was very impressed to see that in there. 'Cause that's another one that often is depleted in people's microbiomes.

Right. And then we have another one called Collinsella aerofaciens. And again, a very unique keystone that has this incredible ability to help educate not only the area of the gut, which, you know, can be inflamed. It's the, our gut is of course overwhelmed by things like invading organisms, invading food, you know, invading toxins, et cetera. So it helps manage a lot of that immune slash epithelial tissue regulation to keep things as managed as possible and healthy, you know, lowers inflammation, for example. And then from the hormone front, we were able to get Bacteroides uniformis. We have Lactobacillus crispatus, a version of that, that's ours. That one I believe is now commercially available, one strain. And then we have Lactobacillus vaginalis, which is also a really important urogenital organism. And I oftentimes get the question, okay, these are, we call it hormone balance in the microbiome. So we call it hormone biomic and hormone superfood. Although there is a number of organisms that benefit women, no doubt, but men also. And in women, oftentimes people don't realize that the Organisms that colonize the urogenital tract are also found or can transit from the gut into the urogenital tract, likely because of the close proximity. And when you study, let's say, the consumption of pre and probiotics that you want to help improve the urogenital tract in women, taking them orally works. You can also use these in a suppository way. Which is completely normal and healthy and fine, but you can also just rely on the oral ingestion and they will colonize when that is their place. The body has this beautiful ability, this innate ability to help traffic these organisms to where they need to be. It's quite a unique process when they're available and you're feeding them properly. The body will do the rest in many cases, but for people that are struggling we oftentimes recommend oral as well as suppository urogenital support.

And have you seen that using these species in the hormone urobiomic has some impact on hormones?

Yeah, right now, you know, we're conducting some what we call observational preclinical work. So everything I have on the hormone and women, especially in childbearing years, as opposed to premenopause or menopausal, it's anecdotal. So we're getting some really good anecdotal data, very positive, improving urogenital health in regards to like, say, you know, recurrent UTIs, just overall health of the urogenital tract as well as the gut simultaneously. And now we're moving into some of these where we're sequencing samples and trying to follow these more specifically. And of course there is a lot of really good data just surrounding the crispatus and the vaginalis that help us follow the academic work with these. So we're kind of in the same— we're on a parallel path with academia as well regarding these. And you've probably heard that female urogenital tracts, they've been classified into about 5 different classifications. The first 4 are essentially lactobacillus-dominant ecosystems, and the 5th one is pretty much lacking lactobacilli. It's not as common, especially in industrialized countries, but it is just every bit as healthy. It just has a whole separate ecosystem or communities that we look at. So in that case, you would support the gut and then that unique person would have to feed and really encourage the growth of these other unique keystone organisms outside of the lactobacilli that we can actually provide directly that are also in that Hormone Ubiomic. Yeah.

And what's the, what's the predominant species in that fifth type?

Oh, the fifth type, those we don't have, those are unique. And so far the work that's been done and the work that we're following is they're not organisms that we've been able to culture. And of course, you know, run the safety studies, et cetera, and get them to, to bring to commercial. But we have, by employing the probiotics that are keystone and especially the prebiotic world. So a lot of these superfood prebiotics, you can actually encourage the reconstitution of those particular urogenital, that class of urogenital through what we call nutritional intervention from food and prebiotic intervention. It helps bring essentially all of the external factors that drive dysbiosis in the urogenital of women. You bring that back, right? So you make sure you understand whether or not they're using cleansing products or if their partner is healthy at the moment, you know, and avoiding a lot of the disruptive things as well as reintroducing these healthy pre and pro that help the GI then manage the, the UTI. Cause it is a connection. And of course the, the piece that I can't speak to at length today, cause it's a whole different topic. But you also have to monitor hormones. The hormone variations can absolutely disrupt the female urogenital microbiome. They're intimately connected. If a woman is highly estrogenic, carrying way too much estrogen, we want to look at first their GI microbiome, because if they have the enzymes, and you've probably heard of these, these glucuronidases and galacturonidases, they will re— cycle estrogen that's being excreted, and that increases the estrogen load in their bloodstream, which does in fact impact the epithelial lining of the female urogenital, and it can disrupt the microbiome. Now, conversely, if there's not enough estrogen, it will also impact the urogenital microbiome. That's an area that needs to be looked into when there's a recurrent urogenital problem. In women. You gotta also gotta look at the hormones for sure.

And how about the metabolic eubiotic?

Yeah. So we have, of course, the, our two, the, the last two, and we're coming out with more by the way. So this won't be the end of the story. This will be, we're about 70% through the metabolic eubiotic and superfood. We tried to take what was known as well as our own research and say, okay, metabolically, there's a number of impactful things. We know that the microbiome has the ability to metabolize our food, whether it's processed food or whether it's whole food. There's a certain metabolic function that our microbiome has. And if that's disrupted, one, by diet and two, by the population or the ecosystem, it's extremely impactful detrimental on the, essentially our, our metabolic uptake, the way we store lipids, the way we metabolize and, and sense sugar and other areas of hormone production. And these neuropod cells that communicate directly to the brain through the vagal nerve and maybe even through the central nervous system. This is a very, very enormous part of the microbiome's job. And perhaps one of the more significant after the immune system, where when you have a dysbiotic gut, you find that everything else, the number of hormones that you're signaling, the number of neurotransmitters you're making, the number of systems that are connecting through the vagal nerve and managing all of our endocrine system, our neuroendocrine system, as well as our detox systems. These are all starting to fail us. And this is why, you know, we have epidemics that we do, these chronic epidemics. It's one of the main features. So as we were developing this, we decided to take and pivot. We knew the keystone organisms we wanted. And of course, foremost has been the Akkermansia. And we have two different strains of Akkermansia and they both, you know, we won't get into strains too deeply, but they both impact they have separate— when you think of, you know, even you and I, if we think of you and I's genetic potential, there's going to be different things that you and I do genetically, even though we might be 99.9% identical genetically. We have these little nuances, these things that you and I can do differently or better or worse. And each species of organism has the same potential. So you might have acromancy and mucinophilia two of them, but they both maybe perform something a little bit differently. That's the ongoing knowledge that we're getting from these strains. So we have two Akkermansia muciniphila. We have a Butyrococcus pullacheratum, and that's a really complicated name again. And just from the name, you can tell that it's very much involved in maintaining small-chain fatty acids from a number of food sources. So it's Butyrococcus because it produces right? Butyrate. And it produces butyrate that we really need to manage a lot of our epithelial metabolism in the gut. And then of course that becomes a systemic benefit as well. And in maintaining that, it creates an integrity in our gut lining that of course not only impacts the inflammatory process, but it helps us then manage our metabolic switches, whether we're letting a lot of glucose in or we're keeping it out, we're triggering the L cells to produce more GLP-1 along with the acromantia, or do we want to produce PYY or CCK? And these are all what we call satiety hormones. These help us manage our metabolic uptake and the way we store it. And it's critical. And of course, now that's blown up with this new generation of GLP-1 agonists. We can now have that conversation more I guess, candidly, because the candor around GLP-1 is it's out there and, and there are more than just GLP-1. Like I say, there's a number of, you know, the ghrelin, the leptin, the, the PYY and the CCK. These are all hormones that our body has used intimately related to our microbiota and our diet to manage a healthy metabolic process. And we've disrupted all of those. So bringing back some of these organisms that help us do that is critical and it's, it's been phenomenal science. So we're excited about that.

Yeah.

I'm curious because I had only previously been familiar with the Pendulum products that had Akromancia in them. And I know from their original experiments that after supplementing, I think their, their study maybe was 2 or 3 months after supplementing it, it didn't implant. And so I know they have a protocol that's a bit longer now. So I'm curious, have you looked at implantation of Akromancia and like how long it takes and what you need to do to make that actually happen?

Yeah, we have. In fact, we're in the process of doing that right now as we speak. We've done it a few times. The work we've done so far has shown that pretty much every one of these has implanted and lasted over 60 days. Now, beyond that, we didn't run those further out, which we are doing now. We've only done it against one of the Akkermansia strains. So we only have data on one of the strains. The other strain, we have not looked at its not only implantation, but we call it taking up residency.

And how long did they supplement for before you ran the 60 days?

We ran stool at— so we supplemented for 30 days and then we ran it again at 60 and then at 90. And then we followed that washout period for another 60 days. We were seeing the organisms after 30 days. We were seeing them regularly in the stool sample.

At the dose that's in your product. At the recommended dosage.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, exactly. And what we found just as fascinating as that, because that's something we were looking for, right? That's an experiment where you're looking for something you're doing. One of the surprising outcomes with these, and keep in mind, we were also giving them the prebiotic, the superfood, at the same time. That was a requirement. We didn't just do probiotic. We did a pre and a pro together. And my hypothesis is that's an important feature. We kind of underappreciated that if you just supplement a probiotic and then follow it, if you're not giving it the nutrients that it requires, it will not really engraft and become a resident because there's no priority for it to, if it's not getting its food, it's going to leave, it's going to bail. So we've always run our studies with the pre and pro together. And what we found is not only were we seeing really healthy outcomes with the keystones, we started seeing the emergence of a lot of other keystone species that we don't have, that no one has, but they were growing as a consequence of the pre and the pro journey. And we don't know if they were just caught in there and they were just surviving at some low level. Or if they were being introduced through contact with humans and food. We don't know. We just know that in our data set, we not only saw the organism we were looking for, but we start seeing a lot of new organisms show up that were beneficial organisms. And we saw the reduction of the non-beneficial organisms, or essentially the pathobiomes or pathogens would decrease. And that's because the whole ecosystem is becoming more competitive. And we weren't feeding those, right? We were not feeding organisms that don't belong there. We were feeding the ones that do. It was quite exciting. And so we're repeating some of those just to see, you know, how far we can take this. And when we did that, we only had probably about a dozen of the keystone and we now have more. So as we do this in the future, we can start adding more of these to see how we're doing and more of the pre and probiotics, like the Superfood for the Metabo. Not only has plant-based compounds, it has a number of what we call human oligosaccharides or human polysaccharides that our body produces to maintain our own microbiome. And, you know, that's important. It's an important feature of our uniqueness, not just from a diet perspective, but from your own body's ability to regulate the microbiome through the production of food for these guys.

Okay. And I think we still have one left. The neuro, is it?

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Yeah, the neuro— the neuro one is a really exciting one. This one was In fact, a version of this was launched first. So back in 2018, we did a beta of the Neuro. Now we've added since then, but key players in that were the, of course, the Faecalibacterium, and we had Parabacteroides, but we've added to this one since. And the early launch, we had the Neuro and the first version of the Neuro Superfood, and we called it Neurobiome, but both of those together. Again, we got really great anecdotal feedback. We got some good stool feedback and because we knew it was early on, we went through the beta, collected all the data on, I think I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 data points from practitioners using it in their clinics on the beta test. And then we went and reset it. We actually reformulated it. In 2021 to get a better result than we got the first time. But we'd also learn more from academia. I mean, there's these two researchers in Ireland, the Dinan and Cryan, who are phenomenal. They coined the term psychobiotics. So we follow their work and helped us, you know, guide this in the new direction. But in that product, of course, we now have Parabacteroides diastonus, Agathobaculum, Butyric acid producers. And again, that's a butyrate producer, but it's a unique keystone. You probably haven't heard of that name. It's a unique name, Agathobacterium. That's pretty cool. Baculum, sorry. We have Vaccae and Bacchiae, and of course we have a Farsiminus. So there's, there's a number of unique ones there as well, and more to come. And really what we're looking for there, we have a GABA producer in there. It is a Lactobacilli. But it produces GABA. We know that, you know, looking at the studies and that's actually from work with a supplier, a group that creates probiotics. And then a number of these organisms are known to produce what we call neurotransmitters or neurochemicals. They don't all cross the blood-brain barrier, but they still do what they need to do systemically. Your serotonin producers, your dopamine producers. The L-dopa process, as well as the GABA and glutamine and glutamate. So there's, there's some pretty amazing organisms that we've now utilized in this approach to the neurological microbiome with, you know, the neurobiome or the psychobiome.

Well, there's a lot of exciting stuff there, and I'm really honestly quite excited to know about these products and to think about who I'm already working with who probably could use some of these. So I'm curious about the specific foods and the kinds of things. I mean, we did talk about polyphenols and cyan— whatever they're called, cyan— something or others. Anthocyanins. Anthocyanins. And yeah, but like when people are actually eating food, what kind of foods are gonna most help nourish and support these keystone strains?

Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, to be honest with you, I love whole foods, but you're right, there's gonna be Depending on where these people start. So if you take a relatively healthy 20-something, 30-something who have been already on a wellness journey, they're going to be able to start with some pretty dense, nutrient-dense, fiber-rich foods. These microbial-accessible carbohydrates, it can be from the brassicas, you know, they can start incorporating at a minimum. We all need to get to the point where we're utilizing at least 30 to 60 different vegetables and fruits per week at a minimum per week. That's quite an ask, right? When you think about it. Now, this can include a decent dose of what we call, you know, non-staple foods. So, you know, we all can increase the amount of broccoli and beets and asparagus and radishes and various, let's call them squashes, you know, the gourds, the pumpkin. We can all Increase the leafy greens, the strawberries, the blueberries, the blackberries. We all have that ability. We have access to those and hopefully we have access to good clean version of those. But on top of that, there's these unique ingredients that we get from other plants, plants that we would not normally include into our diet, whether they be herbs and spices, you know, just, we might think of them as we now know some of the common ones, like the turmerics, the gingers. The ginseng, resveratrol from chicory root, you know, these are compounds that we've thought about medicinally, but I want people thinking about these things from a microbiome perspective, because many of the things we've embraced as potentially medicinal herbs, the tubers and things, they actually become really phenomenally important when it comes to the microbiota, the resistant starches. You've probably heard that term you know, we really encourage the inclusion of foods that are resistant starch-based. So if it's just some tuber, whether it be a purple potato or a sweet potato, yam, that you cook them twice or cook and freeze them because the process of doing that twice creates what we call resistant starch. So you drop the glucose impact on the body and you increase the impact on the microbiome. And there's other plants that we use that bring us things like glucomannan, galactooligosaccharides, xyloligosaccharides. We've got polymethoxylated flavones. These are really amazing. We use things like dragon fruit, larch extract with rhamnoglactans, baobab pulp. And then of course we then do the Indian quinoa, the turmeric, the peroria. These are powders that are high in medicinal value. Like the mushrooms, porori is a mushroom, but they also have this amazing composition that allows the microbiome to flourish. And it's things we don't normally think of, but they exist in many of the mushrooms, many of the plants that we use from the ground, tubers especially. These are all very much involved in our, what we call our prebiotic presentation. But beyond that, even things like pectins or cassava, butterfly pea flour, cranberry, certainly for women. These are all what we call plant-based carbohydrates, but it's not the, excuse me, I should rephrase that. It's not the carbohydrate we worry about. It's all of these other phytoconstituents or phytochemicals, like the polyphenolics and the polyglucosinolates and the like. I don't, there's a lot of big terms. I don't want to bore too much of the world of that. So across the breadth of the prebiotics we've created, for me personally, and this was a personal journey as well, it was really hard to get my 50 to 60 vegetables and fruits per week. So I wanted to incorporate all of those into our lineup of prebiotics. Now it doesn't mean you can't— now someone who's really dedicated and really disciplined can source a lot of these as foods, as whole foods from a really great organic especially if you live someplace where they can grow food year round, you don't have harsh winters. You can source many of these in a local farm's market, farmer's market. It's not easy, but it's doable. But you know, we have to source them and of course we dry them and that's where we get them into these prebiotics. If I take 2 or 3 of my prebiotics a week, I'm covering that 30+ plants and vegetables and fruit. Just through doing that. And I feel much better about that and telling people that, right? I have no reservation of saying you can eat it. And I encourage you to go the whole food route. And I encourage you to try pre and probiotics because they can really supplement that need for the microbiome to get these things. And it's really difficult to just jump right into this. I kind of went on a tangent. I apologize, but the, depending on where the person's at. If the person has been really neglectful of their diet, then you have to introduce these prebiotics and these other compounds that we consider a prebiotic slowly. I tell people start with low doses, even when it's a food-based, even if they're eating ginseng or eating the fructooligosaccharide-containing foods, onions, garlics, even if they're introduced them into their diet, broccoli, et cetera, they gotta do it slowly. So that their microbiome can catch up. If you don't introduce these things slowly, then what happens is you start getting a rebound effect. The microbes there aren't happy with it. So they convert them into gases. They might even instigate an inflammatory response from our own body. So you might feel bloated, crampy. You might have gas coming out both directions, could change the bowel movements. You could have diarrhea or constipation. So you have to introduce these things slowly. For many people to allow the microbiome to adapt. You know, the most I've seen someone go is 2 weeks, and by then they're finding that it's really easy. They're feeling great. There's no more pushback from the body or the microbes, and then they can start introducing new versions, you know? So I rotate once a month through different versions of these and different diets. I always tell people to eat for the season, eat for your ancestry, there's a genetic component to this. Obviously eat your ancestry, eat your seasonal, because each of those will kind of help us direct where we're headed.

Does that mean because I've got Italian in me, I can eat a lot of pasta?

You can eat good pasta. And really, if you're getting pasta from Italy, those grains are absolutely healthy. I mean, there's a number of studies that have shown how really the ancient grains and especially ancient grains that are grown in areas that are still healthy, right? Lacking the glyphosates and the other high-production treatment of food are phenomenal for the microbiome and especially both your ancestry and your microbiome. They absolutely do. And then you can just infuse that with the Italian plants and you'll find that you're going to feel amazing through that.

Yeah. So what should consumers know about when they're choosing probiotic supplements? Because there's such a variety, there's refrigerated, there's not refrigerated. There's, you know, there's different types? Like, how do you sort it all out?

It's so much. And that is, I'm so glad you asked because that is an area that can be so frustrating. And because of this microbiome revolution, everybody is wanting to understand probiotics and prebiotics and postbiotics, right? A new term coming out or symbiotics. So I, you know, you can keep, it just keeps going. So my take on it is we work through clinicians because Clinicians can be on top of the education, on top of the understanding, even to the extent that it just creates an environment for the patient to get a better result, a better input. When you're looking at probiotics and prebiotics and all of these other versions from a mass market perspective, it takes a bit of work to sort them out because this growing field has created a growing machine of marketing. So I encourage people, even if you don't necessarily want to spend all your time with a clinician, consult with a clinician. Don't simply go after the marketing of it all. The marketing is one thing, but the data is another. And there's a lot of probiotics that are still based on the old school probiotics that are essentially transient. They come from the dairy industry, cheese, the milk, the yogurt, which aren't bad, by the way. These are not bad things. They just aren't going to necessarily generate an outcome that you want. When you think of a probiotic, it can be a very generalized benefit, but it can also be a precision tool, meaning that if you take a probiotic that is general in nature, right, it, it comes from a fermented food source. It's not human-based, then it can have an overall benefit transiently to our gut. It can help rearrange and help bring in new nutrients and and encourage the growth of existing organisms. Great. It's a generic way. Kefir, kombucha, kimchi, sauerkraut, they all can do something very similar. But when you need precision, you need to understand what the probiotics are. Do they contain keystone organisms? Do they contain human-based clinically studied organisms like lactobacillus and bifidobacterium, which exist by the way, all of the probiotics we use in the Alimentum are, if they are lacto and bifido, they're still based on human origins. They're not based on dairy origins. And this helps you do more of a precision if you're working on IBS, IBD. I mean, I don't want to get into those in depth, but if you're trying to improve the gut, improve the liver, improve the gut-brain axis, you want these more known and well-studied organisms. They're not just a general fill well. They're very specific and you have to dig into the label. Talk to your clinician and really understand them well to get that benefit. Because if you don't, that's why we're seeing a lot of people go, well, I took a probiotic for a few weeks. I didn't feel better. So I just gave up, or I took a probiotic or a prebiotic and I actually felt worse and I gave up. That isn't what we want. We want to be able to create the benefit that we know exists.

And I mean, there's so many different types and as you say, the different strains that just would be crazy to think, oh, I took this one that I got off the drugstore shelf at CVS versus the ones that you've got, which are just like, you might as well be talking like the difference between, you know, eating an apple and having a bag of chips. Like, I mean, there's just no comparison, right?

Yeah. It's very different. And that's the future of this. We need them to know, we need everybody to know that the benefit is there., but you've got to know how to use it. You can't make it. I mean, I want to make it simple, but it isn't. It's so powerful. We have to know more about it because you're right. If you misuse it or you use it in the wrong context, you don't get the outcome you want. And then you lose faith of the people taking it. And that's not what we want. We want to get the outcome, but we have to use them appropriately to begin with.

So brief segue into another topic I saw on your website. You have a product called Pseudovirum. And I noticed that it's a bacteriophage that specifically targets Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which I know can be a lung pathogen. Cause I had a client with chronic lung infection of this bacterium. I'm wondering if you could just briefly touch on what are bacteriophages and talk a little bit about Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Yeah.

Again, it's such a unique part of our microbiota and What are bacteriophages? And by the way, they are— it is probably the most dominant micro— I'm going to call it a microorganism, even though it's not essentially alive, but it is. It's the virus world. And what a phage is, it's a virus that only targets the, what we call bacteria. And in us and on us, we have bacteria, we have archaeobacteria, we have phage. We have eukaryotic-like fungi, we have some parasites, and we have what we call mammalian viruses. That's what all these invisible organisms can make up. The vast majority are what we call bacteria and bacteriophage. Now, what the phage are is they essentially are a virus against bacterium. They live in us. They move through us. When you drink out of the ocean or you're in a lake, or just in the environment, pulling stuff out of the soil and eating it like a carrot, you're exposed to trillions of phage, especially in the ocean and in lakes, you know, fresh lakes, rivers, and streams. There's trillions per, per essentially what we call milliliter. And they live everywhere and they help manage the population of bacteria. So when a bacterium grows out of control, the phage grow committingly and bring the populations down because we don't want them to grow out of control. Imagine if we didn't have these control mechanisms. In a few days, the bacteria would overcome us. It would overwhelm us, overwhelm any animal or plant for that matter. And these phage, they attach and then destroy bacterium. And you're right, they're very specific. So there's a phage for specific E. coli, there's a phage for Salmonella, there's phage for Pseudomonas, there's a phage for Bacteroides and Lactobacillus. And Bifidobacterium. There's a phage for every bacterium that so far we looked for and we can find. And we use them in the nutritional world as what we call a prebiotic, meaning that we want a healthy ecosystem and phages help you create a healthy ecosystem. So we have phages that really target specific bacterium, but we're doing that to help the ecosystem stay in what we call eubiosis, not dysbiosis. There's been so little research done, however, that we're really carrying off from the early days in the '50s, and especially in the, what we call the Eastern European countries that still use phage today. They generate a lot of that research and we're kind of piggybacking off that. Now it's growing in the United States and in Europe. The phage science is coming back, but it's very limited. So we use phages as a prebiotic. To help maintain and balance our systems, whether it be the gut, the skin, and those areas. We know very little about how they interact with other organs like the lungs or the liver or the kidneys. We just have very little knowledge.

Well, I suggested it to my client, so I'll let you know if he has any positive effects because he cleans his lungs. He's done fantastic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's amazing.

Where can listeners learn more about your work, your research, and the products?

Yes.

So certainly we've got social media. I've got an Instagram account, Dr. Shane Morris. I've got Alimentum and Systemic, and then there's a website, alimentumsystemic.com. And again, all the social media platforms under Alimentum and Systemic. And of course there's one called what we call NB Results, and that's more of the DNA side and will be the future microbiome side. But I would say most of our education is going to be on the alimentumlabs.com. Systemicformulas.com and the Dr. Shane Morris or the Alimentum Systemic social media platforms. And we're creating more all the time. We're just getting to the point where we can do this. You know, we've been buried in the lab and now we're getting out to tell the story. So we've been in the lab for 12 years. We're emerging from the laboratory and all of this so that we can start telling the story.

Well, everybody should check the show notes for all the specific links and such. Okay.

Yes.

Thank you so much for sharing all this information with us.

Yeah. Thank you for having me on. It's such a pleasure.

Don't stop the podcast yet. If you're interested in accessing these probiotics with these unique keystone species, there'll be a link and a referral code in the show notes for registering for an account on Systemic Formulas to access the products. However, I highly recommend you set up a consultation with me first and do a stool test first to determine what species you most need to replenish in your microbiome and whether you need to cull some pathogenic microbes first. You can support the podcast by buying supplements at a discount from my Fullscript dispensary, ordering tests at a discount from my Rupa Health Lab Store, or using my affiliate links to iHerb, which is available worldwide, or Amazon. And just to note that you can use my Amazon link to buy anything, not just supplements, and support the podcast. And I see that more and more of you are doing this, and I really appreciate it. So I'd love it and really appreciate it if you'd bookmark my link and use it for regular Amazon purchases. If you'd like to connect with me online, you can find follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my Gut Healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com, as well as follow me on X, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today. I'm just wishing you all the perfect stool.

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