Optimizing Your Gut Ecosystem: Butyrate, Enzymes and Betaine HCl

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is Lindsey Parsons, your host, and today I'm talking with Stephen Wright, who is a medical engineer, Kalish Functional Medicine Institute graduate, gut health specialist, and founder of healthygut.com. He spent close to $400,000 overcoming his own health challenges using everything from Western medicine to shamans. But before I get started, if If you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. And if you wanna get transcripts of the podcast, hop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebooklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing, when you sign up. Now onto the show. Welcome to the podcast, Steve.

Thanks so much for having me, Lindsey Parsons.

Yeah, I appreciate you coming on. So you wanna start by just telling us all a bit about your gut health journey and what brought you to found healthygut.com?

Yeah, I would love to. And first I just wanna say that I love the name of your podcast and what you're doing here. I think we need a lot more levity and we need to bring levity and seriousness to this work. So thank you for doing what you're doing here. And I love the name of your podcast.

Yeah.

So I feel like some people identify with me, which is I'm a from birther. I had a birth defect that caused intestinal issues right from the start. And other people are what I would call trigger people, and they, they have some sort of life event. They go to Mexico or something, and then everything changes. And so I, I'm a from birther. And then of course, things just compounded with dermatologists that prescribed 4 years of antibiotics, Animal House college experience, and then a high-stress consulting job at a Big Four accounting firm. And that's kind of when I sort of realized along the way that I wasn't normal. When I talked to other people, I wasn't normal. But at that job, I actually got called to my boss's office and told that I was stinking up the place and that I was probably going to lose my job if I didn't fix my gut. And of course, I knew this. Every meal that I ate, I would bloat up so bad that I would cry softly kind of in my cubicle. And I tried chicken breasts and salad and I tried beer and burgers. Nothing really worked. And so, I saw a bunch of Western medical doctors in Chicago. And basically, they told me that I have a family history of IBS and that I should suck it up, essentially.

Can I ask what the birth defect was that, that gave you gut issues?

So I was born with a hydrocele hernia, which is where the ball sac doesn't necessarily close and you can get a bunch of the abdominal cavity kind of stuck in the layers there. They didn't catch it, and so I was in pain from 0 weeks to 12 weeks, and my mom kept asking for someone to take a look at me, and they just kept telling her that she's a new mommy, she doesn't know what she's doing. And then at 12 weeks, I had only gained 1 pound, and so I was now in the failure to thrive category. And so luckily, finally, someone gave me a manual exam. They found the hydrocele, and they gave me an antispasmodic drug to help me basically keep food down because I was, I was literally spitting up everything. So yeah, it's been a long journey that, you know, I don't wish it on anyone. And I do know that people have had it much worse than me. Basically, when Western medicine said, "There's not much we can do for you. If you're not eating your whole grains, we can't help you," that's when I just got really mad and I thought, "Well, I was given a degree or I earned a degree in problem solving and I earned it in a way that's— Electrical engineering is my college degree and you can't touch electricity. You can't really see it." It's this thing that's in a box and you just have to monitor inputs and outputs. And I was just really angry, up all night having diarrhea, and I was like, the body's no different. I can figure this out. I just have to find mentors and people who have helped problems that I have, and then I'm gonna reverse engineer this. And so that kind of launched me on this different trajectory in my life in which I changed my diet and immediately started seeing improvements and gaining confidence and then writing about it because I was so angry that I wasn't given any other options. You know, this was 2009, so the internet was nothing like it is today. We don't have amazing podcasts like this one. So yeah, that kind of kicked off Healthy Gut. And then as I fixed one thing or got partial benefit, it just kept driving me down the rabbit hole deeper to be like, well, why does my skin still react? Why do I have mental health struggles? Why am I still overweight? And it just kept digging and digging. And that's, that's how you spend $400K in like 12 years.

Yeah. And so I see that you trained under Daniel Kalish. He's one of my mentors as well. So I'm curious how that— how you thought that training was.

I thought it was amazing. I mean, I, I really appreciate Dan's work, Dan's models. I think he produces some of the best clinicians out there when you compare them versus IFM and some of the other functional medicine schools. And I think it's mostly because he's really good at some simple things that I think a lot of other schools get really complex. And so I'm not saying that The Kalish Institute is the place, the thing if you have super complex issues or gene-related things. But from a basic how do you practice and how do you interpret labs and some really solid protocols that work on 90% of people, I think he knocked it out of the park. Yeah, he's got the, you know, 20, 40 years of experience to back that up.

Yeah, yeah. No, I just finished his amino acids and B vitamins course. And we even had a webinar with Richard Lord.

Oh man, he is so smart.

Yeah, I'm still trying to work my way through the text materials for Laboratory Guides to Health for the relevant chapters, and it is definitely more of a reference guide than a novel.

I bet. I bet that guy's IQ is off the charts.

Yeah. Anyway, but at least when I tell people, well, this is the recommendation that Richard Lord, who invented the test and wrote the textbook for it, says, if this is what your test says, I can feel pretty confident that I'm making a good recommendation.

Totally. Yeah.

Okay. So, wow, that must have been a super awkward conversation when your boss had to complain about your gas. Did that— was that a long time coming until like the entire office was about to mutiny?

Yeah. I mean, I guess so. I'm not totally sure. It was super uncomfortable and embarrassing for me. And I have plenty of other embarrassing stories about commuter buses and being locked in certain places where I've had issues. But, you know, I think what's true is that the majority of us who have a chronic health issue who break out of the pharmaceutical model, we have an emotional breakpoint is what I call it, where the pain gets so strong there's an opportunity for a new paradigm to come through. And that was one of the biggest ones in my life. I've had multiple, but that was, that was a big one. And so, yeah, I don't think he enjoyed it. You know, I didn't enjoy being the stinky guy. Like, that's not what I want to be. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and so looking back on it, do you think it was like a hydrogen sulfide SIBO, or what do you, what, what do you say you had?

Well, I mean, I have positive stool tests for— within a year of that, I had positive stool tests for Candida. I immediately responded to the specific carbohydrate diet. So obviously I was not absorbing or malabsorbing all the carbohydrate groups or, or FODMAP groups or both of them. I had low stomach acid because betaine HCl supplementation just almost immediately changed my life. I had Entamoeba coli.

You just had a whole messed up gut.

Yeah, yeah, I had, I had all kinds of things. I mean, I have like a history of head injuries. I had leaky gut, couldn't eat any dairy. Taking dairy out allowed me to smell again. I just, I just thought you walk through life congested. I didn't know any different. I was in a bad place with a host of things when— well, I didn't see a functional medicine provider until years later. Had I seen someone that graduated from the Kalish Institute or one of these better training programs, and they did organics acid panel and a GI test and, you know, some basic blood chemistry, I think I was a wreck. You know, there would have been 2 hours worth of material there.

How— I'm curious, did you settle then on digestive enzymes and betaine HCl and butyrate as the 3 products to heal a gut?

I don't know that they're the only 3 for sure. I just want to start that off. But I think they're really core to gut healing. I think it started from my experience just On one hand, I think I have this brilliance, but this brilliance comes with a downside, which is I believe every claim. I believe every miracle. You tell me about açaí juice, I'm gonna buy some açaí juice. You tell me about some jungle herb, I'm gonna try it. And so, I have this weird thing that's— I mean, it started when I was buying MLMs with my first $20 at 13. I just believe everything, therefore I fall for everything, but I've done it hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands of times now. And I take recommendations very seriously. Because of how much I've been burned. I've tried all the latest stuff on myself, and then when I recommend it to people that come to me for information— and one of the things I just ended up realizing is that it's this idea that it's just prebiotics or probiotics or things like that. It's not working because you have a certain class of people who react to them right off the bat. They can't even process them. So that kind of just drove me back to my engineering principles. What are the first principles? Well, first principles are things like if you eat it and you cannot absorb it or break it down, it is toxic to you. It doesn't matter how quote unquote good it is. So, it just kept driving me nuts. Why are there so many SIBO recurrences? Why are there so many lifelong gut people? And it kind of drove me back to the naturopathic principles of terrain, but also I guess with this new sort of engineering model of let's build an ecosystem that is super uninhabitable for the things that we don't want? And what are the prerequisites to that ecosystems? And one of the prerequisites is great stomach acid. Another prerequisite is proper enzyme at, at all 3 levels, at the pancreatic brush border and microbiome. And another requisite is short-chain fatty acid production, especially butyrate. And so it seemed like as I looked at the marketplace over the last 10 years that no one was focused on these sort of boring things that have been around for 30, 40 years. They're really focused on the new exciting probiotics and things like that, which I also am excited about. And that kind of drove me back to like, okay, if no one's innovating, I'm gonna go innovate on this such that we can build the best products for creating the great ecosystem you need to have a great gut.

And so you mentioned that you don't think these are the only things. So do you think that most people would need maybe a round of antimicrobials or two if they have SIBO or Candida prior to using the products that you have?

Definitely need them, not prior to. I would say in combination with, right? We want the— in my opinion, we want the body's defense mechanisms up and working when we use antimicrobials of any type, whether it's antibiotics or herbal. I think that's one of Kalish's principles that he actually drove home for me in my class was that if you just keep throwing antimicrobials at the body but the body's defense mechanisms never come online or never support you in that process, why would you be surprised if the infection comes back? No duh, it's gonna come back. And so I think they're in conjunction with a program that needs to happen for that person.

Okay. So are you familiar with Lucy Maling? I interviewed her in episode 25 and she wrote a great article summarizing the whole gut oxygen dysbiosis hypothesis.

Yeah. Yep.

Yeah. Okay. So I, I tend to think of butyrate as a stool hardener and I'm assuming that it's related to making the gut more hypoxic or less hospitable to facultative anaerobes. Like proteobacteria and increasing the anaerobic bacteria as a consequence of, of it becoming more oxygen-free. And those anaerobic bacteria tend to be butyrate producers. So in theory, I think that it should turn things around to take butyrate for a while, and then ultimately you have more of this anaerobic bacteria and then it sort of supports itself. And so in theory, I feel like I should be able to get off butyrate, but each time I go off it, I regret it and I have to go back on it. To keep up with my podcast namesake of The Perfect Stool. And so, I do have a reputation to keep up. I'm just curious, do you find that after being on butyrate for some time that people can wean off it and stay in good health or is it something you're finding that people need to stay on for life at some dose?

Yeah. I mean, number one, I think the oxygen hypothesis is so fascinating. I think it's one of the— there's one study now on mice and butyrate and antibiotics and how Basically all the probiotic studies, taking probiotics with antibiotics to recover from microbiome have failed. And the butyrate, the one butyrate study is so far been a success. So I hope they do more of that because I think the oxygen hypothesis—

Oh, I'm not familiar with that one.

It's really cool. I think the oxygen hypothesis that you and Lucy talked about is really, really fascinating and I cannot wait for more work on that. And I do think it's going to end up holding out because again, it's setting up the conditions for a healthy microbiome. That's what we want. Now, personally, I don't know if these are quote-unquote lifelong supplements. I highly doubt it. And I'm gonna be working over the next 5 to 10 years to make sure that we have a roadmap for someone like yourself who wants to bridge off of a butyrate product or a tributyrin product onto maybe just fruits and vegetables, or maybe prebiotics, probiotics, fruits and vegetables, whatever your belief is or what you need for the perfect stool. I do think it comes from a few— there's a few things that could be holding people on a butyrate supplement, One is, is the microbiome actually recovering? And for instance, yourself, when you're on the supportive crutch of a butyrate supplement, can you introduce higher and higher loads of specialty prebiotics that are known to increase butyrate producers? And then maybe after 3 months of that, could you bridge off of it slowly with that higher prebiotic load? That would be one possibility. And also coupling that with probiotics. So that's the hypothesis I have on how to get people from a tributarin or butyrate product bridged off onto something else. And I think the other thing that's fascinating that it kind of works counterintuitive to that, or maybe not counterintuitive to that, but butyrate is a lot like magnesium in that basically wherever researchers look, they find butyrate acting systemically. And so if we've been depleted for a long time due to dysbiosis, or like myself, maybe my whole life I've had messed up short-chain fatty acid production, there might be a nutrient deficiency that has to be filled systemically before it's time to get off. And again, total hypothesis, but these are the things that I think about, you know, late at night when I can't sleep.

Yeah. And do you know of special prebiotics for butyrate producers?

Yeah, yeah. So there's several studies out there. Again, research is, is kind of new, but They're typically really, really brightly colored fruits. So, certain types of grapes, I believe Concord grape skin, pomegranates, cranberries, green kiwi fruit. I feel like I'm missing another one or two, but in general, they're really brightly colored fruits seem to be preferential. And then also Lacto-Rhamnosus GG, LGG, it's one of the most popular longstanding probiotics. There is one or two studies on that increasing the butyrate producers as well.

You know what, I had that in my— I'm always on so many different things because people are sending me free products to try and I've got new theories I wanna try out myself. And so I have that on my list of things to try next when I'm done with the current thing, because you can only take so many pills in a day, you know? So.

Totally.

Yeah. So that's good to know though. I mean, at least I can certainly think about including more of those foods in my diet. So on another podcast, I heard you talking about butyrate for constipated people, not just people with soft stool or diarrhea. And I found that surprising, as I was saying, because when I tend to ramp up the butyrate, I'll get to the point where maybe I start getting like rabbit pellets and then I'll sort of back off. And that usually does the trick of getting back to more of a perfect stool. So I'm, I'm curious about using it in, in the dosing and the mechanism of action that you're using it when somebody's constipated.

Yeah. So this is also something that is gonna take me another 6 to 12 months to really wrap my head around. But at this point in time, there's been few human studies showing that in constipated people, you have low butyrate production. And then, there's been one intervention trial, I believe it was sodium butyrate 300 milligrams once or twice per day. I can't remember off the top of my head, but I believe it— I would assume it's once per day. So, in that trial, only a certain percentage of those people got help, but in general, their pain and bloating went down. And so, what I've seen in practice with our Tributarin, which is a totally different compound and we can get into the specifics of that later, is that I believe there's something around constipated people in this sort of oxygen microbiome hypothesis. And I don't know what exactly would be happening over 8 to 12 weeks, but what we've been seeing is that people who have been extremely dependent on laxatives of all types, if we can get them to take the Tributerin-X once every 3 days for about a month and then they go to every other day, somewhere between 8 and 12 weeks, a seismic shift tends to happen inside of their GI environment such that they are tolerating new foods, they're going every day. It's really weird. There's like an unlocking that happens. And I'm assuming or hypothesizing that it has to do with somehow it's creating a shift in the GI tract, probably in the, in the microbiome such that it maybe gets that oxygen balance right finally. But you have to go so slow, like you said, because the number one side effect, or really the only side effect of butyrate supplementation, is you can slow the motility down too much.

Okay. So I think of butyrate as an intervention for the large intestine because it feeds the cells lining the large intestine. So I'm curious about why you don't have a product with L-glutamine to feed and heal the small intestine.

Well, I mean, I'm, I'm not against L-glutamine at all. In fact, I wrote a really long blog post on it many years ago. It's been helpful for myself and for many others. I think I think unfortunately too many people out there are underdosing it. You know, most of the studies suggest 30 to 80 grams is what you really need to be at to see some benefit. So I'm not— yeah. Oh yeah, 100%.

30 to 80 grams a day?

Yes.

Wow, that's pretty hefty.

Yeah, I mean, it is from the functional medicine perspective, but not if you look at it from a bodybuilding or a burn unit perspective. So, if you want to be on L-glutamine the rest of your life, then you can take it at 3 grams a day or 2 grams a day. But, if you want to have a quick intervention for someone who has small intestine issues or leaky gut issues and they don't convert it, the other thing with L-glutamine is that some percentage of people, I don't know if it's 10% or 20% or seems like it's going to follow the 80/20 principle over the last— that's my— been in my observation. But, some people preferentially convert it right to glutamate and it causes all kinds of neurological issues. I don't know how to screen for those people based on a test or symptoms at this point in time. Maybe you do. But because of that, I don't like it when you get people in that state of mind where they're ready to invest as much money as it takes and emotionally change their life and then you give them something and they have a big adverse reaction from just one scoop. And so, I'm not against L-glutamine in any capacity, it's just that butyrate to me seems better tolerated and has just as profound of impact. Okay, used in combo, they could be amazing. I, I haven't even done it yet.

Forgive this brief interruption, but I just wanted to let you know that if you're struggling with a gut health issue like IBD, IBS, SIBO, Candida, gastritis, or GERD, or you don't have an official diagnosis but are dealing with chronic diarrhea, constipation, acid reflux, nausea, bloating, gas, or other GI symptoms, my specialty is helping clients with those issues. Together we discuss different testing options and the information that you'd get from them Then I show you how to order tests yourself and educate you on what the results mean and the protocols that practitioners use to resolve those issues. If you want to share what you've been going through and see if a 5-appointment gut health coaching program is for you, you can set up a free 30-minute breakthrough session by going to the link in the show notes. Or if you can just afford one appointment at a time, or you think your issue may be resolved with one appointment, you can set up a 1-hour consultation, and that's also linked in the show notes. Okay, so why do you think that so many people need supplemental stomach acid? Shouldn't we as a species have what we need to digest our food if we're in good health and we're eating a healthy diet?

Yeah, I mean, that's if we don't take into effect aging. The thing that people are often overlooking is that, for instance, ovaries and testes are literally going to organ failure, and potentially the stomach is too. So there's been a really cool paper that came out showing that in 90% of people who age over 60 they don't necessarily lose their ability to produce stomach acid when they test it without any food or in a fasted state, but they seem to really lose their ability to regulate and produce stomach acid after the introduction of food or some sort of nutrient. That sort of ability to acidify and then re-acidify the stomach tends to really drop as we age. I think between that and our— I don't know if you're stressed, but I, I'm very stressed. I struggle to make sense of the world today. There's a lot going on, and when we're in sympathetic, we can't make as stomach acid because we need to be in the parasympathetic state to actually produce that stomach acid. So I think between the increased use of technology and stress and then just the general aging, I think we're often overlooking those two really important principles.

Mm-hmm. And, and so with your Betaine HCL product, I noticed that it had an intrinsic factor in it, which is what we need to digest vitamin B12. And I was intrigued because I had at one point gotten the diagnosis of pernicious anemia and which means I had some autoimmunity against the cells in the stomach that produce intrinsic factor, although my latest test was actually negative. So at the time, I couldn't digest B12 and I had to either get injections or take sublingual pills. And so when I saw the intrinsic factor in there, I thought, that's genius, because by doing that, you're basically saving someone one more pill to take, or at least covering your bases for the digestion of B12 just in case somebody has undiagnosed antibodies. So I'm, I'm curious how you came to decide to put that in there and what kind of customer feedback you've gotten.

Well, it basically just came from exactly what you said. Honestly, I didn't really want to start a supplement company. I mean, I love supplements. I told you earlier, I buy every miracle pill out there, but I thought the world needed something different from me. There's already thousands of supplement companies out there, but I had been wanting an Intrinsic Factor HCL product for like 6 or 7 years now, and just no— none of the big-name practitioner-grade supplement companies would would ever build it. And I would tell them at conferences like, hey, what do you think about adding intrinsic factor? And just, I guess it's just not a product that people wanted to innovate on. And so that's part of what I wanted to do at Healthy Gut was, was take some things that just biologically make sense. We know that it's likely that intrinsic factor may be low if we have to replace stomach acid, kind of like including pepsin in there. And so that, that was just what I thought is supposed to happen biologically. And then there appears to be a difference. I would say that the The number one thing that practitioners report to me about HClGuard is that it, it's working better than anything they've ever tried, any other HCl. And they're not sure exactly why, but in general, people report using 2 to 3 less capsules than whatever other brand they're using, and they actually get the results when you support the stomach acid that you'd hope, such as regulated motility, less burping, less gas, less heartburn, different symptoms like that that would suggest that your stomach acid is regulated.

And do you recommend people take it in the same way that a typical HCl challenge would, would go?

Yep, yep, same way, same ramp-up dosage, starting with 1 pill. And one other big misconception is that everyone's always trying to find burning or, or some sort of uncomfortableness. And I've observed that 20 to 30% of people just never— they never really feel that. But what they do feel is loose stools or some sort of speed up. In their symptoms. I would encourage people to try to find their dose, whether they use a different product or our product. It should work either way. I used other products for 6 years of my life, but you do need to find that ideal dosage because one pill too much or one pill too little from any brand, and you're really not getting the, the perfect change in your ecosystem that you're hoping to.

Okay, what's the dosage in one pill of yours, of the betaine HCL?

We have 550 milligrams of betaine HCL in our pills. 30 milligrams, I believe, of pepsin, 15 milligrams of intrinsic factor, and then we have the organic ginger at 100 milligrams and DGL at 50 milligrams.

Oh, okay. So it's got a couple more things. Why, why the ginger?

Well, the other thing that really kind of annoyed me is that one of the biggest drivers of peristalsis is your stomach acid, the pH of the food as it moves through the body. That's a huge signal. And so It seems like in today's world that prokinetic usage and prokinetic support has just gone through the roof. And I was trying to think about that and I think it's both related to the stomach acid issue, but I also bet that the cells are kind of getting a little weaker in there and maybe even forgetting how hard to contract or there could be so many factors. I mean, who knows, it could just be low thyroid. There's a lot of variables that could be at play there. But with the upregulation of prokinetic use, it just seemed natural to me to use a strong prokinetic like organic ginger in the formulation to help people get their GI tract regulated. Also, ginger has a long history of use for anti-inflammatory possibilities, healing the gut lining, and all those types of things. So to me, it was just a natural herb to add in there, especially there was a study done with ginger extract for producing a, a peristaltic wave. So it is backed up by studies in humans, which is the other thing that I really try to do.

So speaking of prokinetics, that's my current fascination since I have now had a positive IBS-Smart test for the antivinculin antibodies. And so I'm, I'm on a mission to discover the best prokinetics. Do you have any experience with those?

I've never tried any of the prescription prokinetics. I've tried many of the, the supplemental forms. You'll probably be more up on it than me, but I— Ivergast and some of the bitters never really helped me. Trying to think, like 5-HTP and sort of the amino acids can be really, really helpful for brain-related things and mood-related things, but I've never really seen them do much for prokinetic-related issues. But I'd be curious to hear from you what, what you're excited about.

Well, I'm trying a biogas right now, and it's hard to say if it's going well. You know, it's one of these things, as you probably realize, you have these issues that they kind of come and go. I think those of us who have these kind of either inborn errors or, or acquired problems, in my case food poisoning, that we may likely always be kind of off and that it's always going to be sort of an ongoing battle. But I haven't tried any of the prescription ones, so I'm working to try and find a gastroenterologist who will actually listen to me and not blow me off and try and get me to do a colonoscopy like my last one.

Okay, got it.

Yeah. Anyway, the digestive enzymes that you produce Is the theory behind that that you're gonna— if you're digesting more while everything's in the stomach and small intestine with the help of those enzymes, even if they aren't deficient, that the less you'll send on to bacteria that will then overgrow in your gut and ferment the food?

Yeah, that's one of the big issues, is that— correct, like, if you want to have a healthy microbiome, we have to send it the right types of food particles in the right sizes for it to ferment. And then the other thing is we don't want the wrong size food particles or food in general sitting around in the small intestine, which I think is driving a lot of the SIBO, Candida, SIFO, all these different sort of overgrowth in the small intestine, however you want to call them. I think one of them is just malabsorbing food due to poor enzyme production or release or activation. Could be all those things. So Holozymes is, is my answer to all these carbohydrate malabsorption issues with FODMAPs and all these different things, as well as just the generalized issue that people have with stomach acid. And I think potentially if you have any inflammation from the SIBO, SIFO, etc., you're in this loop where you have inflammation probably shutting off your brush border enzyme release at some level or inhibiting it at some level. And so how do you dig yourself out of that spiral where it just gets worse and worse? And so I think holozymes can be a solid intervention for that type of situation.

Can you just elaborate a little bit on the different types of enzymes? I think that might be helpful to people.

Going from top to bottom, I think, is the best way to visualize it. But there's a little amylase in your saliva. There's pepsin in your stomach, super important proteolytic enzyme. Then the 3 most important enzymes for digestion, in my opinion, are the pancreatic enzymes, which are protease, lipase, and amylase. Protease is protein, lipase is fats, amylase is carbohydrates. That's coming in at the top of your small intestine from your pancreas. Then, you have at the brush border, the villi and the crypts area, they're releasing brush border enzymes. These are typically things like lactase for lactose absorption. A lot of people "lose their lactase" over time. Who knows if it's inflammation at the brush border or if it's actually happening. You have other ones there like sucrase and maltase. These break down the last sort of bonds of disaccharides down to monosaccharides. And then, in the microbiome, you have all these crazy cool enzymes. And I bet we'll learn about hundreds more in the next decade. But specific ones that people have probably heard about are things like cellulase, which breaks down the cell wall components of your vegetable matter and your fruit matter, things like alpha-galactidase, which break down raffinose. It's an oligosaccharide or part of the FODMAP fructan group that often is found in cruciferous vegetables, beans, beans, lentils, those sort of quote-unquote traditional gassy foods if you will. And so, if you have dysbiosis, if we start going back up the chain, if you have dysbiosis, you might not have the right bacteria classes or the right enzyme production from those bacteria to break down the last part of your food, which would be the vegetable matter, the fibrous stuff, the prebiotics. In the small intestine, if you don't have your brush border, that's where you're going to be really feeding SIBO, SIFO. Like, you're not going to be able to break down, for instance, sucrose, which is two molecules of monosaccharides combined. You won't be able to break that down, and then that's going to cause an easy meal for some bacteria. And then the pancreatic enzymes are the heavy lifters at the top, so they really need to be happening to begin the unfolding of the big complex molecules that we eat.

And is there any situation in which digestive enzymes might be contraindicated? Like,— you know, if you keep on taking them past the point when you really need to, are you in danger of eating up your own stomach wall or—?

If you have active gastritis or if you have active ulcers and you take any enzyme product, ours or anyone's, and you have pain, then it's contraindicated. You know, work with your provider to do something to heal your mucous linings and your— whatever's happening with your gastritis. Beyond that, I don't believe so. And I've looked for this. I've bought like every book that's ever made, like ones that are out of print. I've tried— I found every paper I can on this, and I have yet to find anybody with a theory even on what a negative feedback loop would be for taking— basically, that would turn off our internal production of enzymes if you take them exogenously. So, everyone's pretty familiar that if, for instance, if males take testosterone replacement, it shuts off any internal production of testosterone in a sort of ratio based on how much they're taking. That sort of feedback loop I have not yet found and I haven't found anybody even with a theory on it. How about for HCL? HCL, I haven't found that either. In fact, Dr. Jonathan—

Isn't it that you take it for a bit and eventually your, your production comes back on?

Right, right. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. In fact, I, I've experienced that personally. I've seen that in our community quite a bit. And I— people like Dr. Jonathan Wright and a few others, Dr. Steven Stamberg, say similar things, that you can typically bridge off of your HCL usage at some point.

Yeah, that's what happened for me. I was at first, when I started taking it, I seemed to need it. And then after a while, I started getting that burning sensation. And now at this point, if I try even one, I pretty much get that sensation. I keep thinking I need it. I kept— well, until I got my negative intrinsic factor and parietal cell antibody test, I was— I had kept thinking maybe I need it, but now I know I don't. Well, that's great.

That's, that's awesome healing. Yeah.

What, what are the indications that people might see that indicate that they're not digesting their food well, that they might need digestive enzymes? Yeah, sure.

And I do want to touch on my last point on enzyme usage. I, coming from the functional medicine world, thought that, oh, I should probably only take 2 or 3 or 4. That's kind of a lot if you take 4 enzymes. And then my fiancée was diagnosed with breast cancer. So we've been on a journey, a couple-year journey. She's no evidence of disease at the moment. She's recovering very well, but the fight's not done. And so in our journey through the cancer underworld of medicine, there's a whole class of cancer people, cancer doctors who have successfully used high-dose systemic enzyme therapy for this, and they take like 130 to 160 capsules a day. And so, when I realized that people were dosing enzymes systemically at 100x what functional medicine people were doing, I was like, "Oh, I think we've fallen for a few myths here." And so, I really started to experiment with that, checking with other doctors and practitioners. And it does seem like as the integrative and functional medicine community has been trained that we might be underdosing. It doesn't matter the brand you're using, could be Holozymes or it could be Pure or somebody else. If people are not responding and they're still continuing to have the symptoms from the question you just asked, which is things like undigested food in your toilet or in the stool, oily toilet, you're having food sensitivities to like certain classes of foods like I mentioned earlier, like the FODMAPs or beans, lentils, things like that, dairy, all these things suggest a lack of ability to break down the food. Gas and bloating is one of the top ones other than the pieces of food and food sensitivity. So that's— and I kind of covered those, but that's, that's kind of like the main drivers of your inability to break down your food is, is real and it's live and it's happening. Now, of course, you can run tests like fecal elastase and things like that, but as far as I know, there's no real test for microbiome enzymes or brush border enzymes. And so that makes it more, I think, symptom-driven, at least at this point in our understanding of testing in the body. And so if people are, are having those issues, I don't care what brand you have, double, triple the dose. The, the safety profile enzymes in humans seems to be extremely robust.

Yeah, and speaking of that, using enzymes like on an empty stomach systemically, I, I've done that with the proteolytic enzymes for Hashimoto's because there was a study around that. Did it help? I assume so because my Hashimoto's is completely reversed. Antibodies are negative or normal. That's amazing. Yeah, it all works.

Yeah, we've seen a lot of— so, with the Holozymes, there's been 6 pilot trials on our product and the patent behind it. And, they were looking at both systemic and digestive use. So the dosage was 2 per meal and then 2 before bed. And we routinely get comments around improvements after exercise. Some people can only exercise maybe like once a week or twice a week and they get really, really fatigued, right, because they're trying to come back from all these issues. Immediately their exercise tolerance doubles or triples and they can work out every other day. We have people who have joint stiffness and achiness, could be related to things like RA or just arthritis or getting old and they're moving, they're walking 4 or 5 miles again. Also things related to gout pain and high uric acid pain. So, lots of anecdotes. Again, nothing— this is not treating any of these diseases, but this is just anecdotally when you use the Holozyme systemically and digestively, I'm just a huge fan whether you're using ours or somebody else's for systemic enzyme use.

That's interesting about the gout because my husband has gout and, well, He sort of refuses to take anything or do anything other than— if he has a flare, he takes the prescription stuff you're supposed to take.

But, I should try and get him on that. Yeah. And, this is just anecdotal usage. This is non-indicative. Our product does not treat gout, any of these things. I understand. But, I developed high uric acid at 32 after about 6 or 7 years on a paleo gluten-free style diet. That was 5 years ago, and I was just mortified, right? I'm supposed to try to be this healthy guy and I'm trying to set the bar and here I am hobbling around the house and I tried to suck it up. I tried all kinds of cherry this, cherry that. I tried other stone breaker thingies, anything related to uric acid I could find out there and I got nothing and nowhere. And, I almost had to give up working out and being out in the mountains because it would hurt so bad when it was "flaring." Very painful. And then, I met the PhD behind Holozymes that I partnered with on this formula. And, he was telling me, "Oh, yeah, we did these 6 pilot trials." And, I was like, "Okay. Well, tell me about the pilot trial." Well, 2 of the pilot trials were on high uric acid and gout patients. And, I was like, "Okay, give me your miracle pills, buddy." That's what I say to everybody. I'm like, "All right, I'll pay for the miracle pills. Let's try them." And basically, about 14 days of higher dosing, I did a loading dose and I have not suffered the big toe issues that I did since, and it's been over 3 years now.

And so are you talking about taking them on an empty stomach or both with meals and then on an empty stomach as well?

With meals and on empty stomach. So I can't decouple those things. That's how I used them. So I did a loading dose of 6 per meal and 6 before bed for 14 days, and then I cut back. And, uh, on average now I use 3 to 4 per meal depending on the meal, and I use 3 to 4 depending on the day before bed.

And do you find now that you kind of have these few products that are helpful that you can limit yourself to those? Yes and no.

I mean, I still believe that one of the most important things for aging and for our longevity and for our immune system health is microbiome health. And so I am regularly testing probiotic brands, probiotic strains. I take prebiotics on a regular basis. I kind of cycle through all different kinds. I don't just limit it. Every once in a while, I throw some immunoglobulins in there, especially in today's world. We don't want to catch anything. So, I'm hypervigilant on taking my products and testing out new things. To me, the product lineup at Healthy Gut right now, which is just the HCL Guard, the Holozymes, and the Tributerin X are the basics. That's mechanically, does the gut have what it needs to do its job? And then, everything else beyond that is the really fun fancy stuff, very exciting stuff. I want both worlds, basically. Yeah.

I really like the Tributurin-X because, well, it's a small, easily swallowable pill, and with 3 of them, you're getting 1,500. I mean, I like probuterate too, but it's only, I think, 300, is it, or 400 per pill. So then, you know, you take 3, you're getting 1,200. So that's one reason I really like yours and chose to get those, just to take fewer pills at the end of the day and get a higher dose.

I'm glad that you're, you're testing it and I hope it's, I mean, are you noticing a difference at all between the two?

The impact is, is roughly the same, but the difference is I can take one fewer pill. Okay. And for me, really the goal for everything, and I think that other people who've been through these sort of high supplement regimes, as many of my clients do, is to get off of as many pills as possible, to get back to just eating food and being able to digest it and live a normal life. But I think for some of us, it's kind of gonna be a lifelong battle where you have to take something to help out. You know, if that something is digestive enzymes, that makes sense because if you're not fully digesting your food because you have a tendency to have SIBO and overgrown bacteria that are gonna steal some of your nutrients, then it makes sense that perhaps digestive enzymes is the thing that helps you to not have to take the other things, the, the vitamins and the minerals and the other supplements because you're actually digesting your food.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. That's my thing that I try to tell people is if you're spending thousands of dollars and many, many hours trying to source organic grass-fed beef and/or wild-caught salmon and organic vegetables from your local farm, and then you can't utilize the nutrients from that food, it's just sad to me. It's really heartbreaking at some level because I've been there trying to optimize every single variable in my diet only to malabsorb it. And so I think enzymes, especially as we age, they have this sort of pancreatic theory of aging or something like that. I can't remember the exact term on it, but it's basically that you have this almost like you have with the testes and ovaries, you only have so much pancreatic enzymes just like you only have so many stem cells. And so, as you age, they're sort of running out. So, I think enzymes as you age should be thought of like magnesium or vitamin D. It's just like what you need to just be healthy in today's world. Yeah, products like butyrates and tributarins, again, if it is a lifelong thing, it's better than losing a colon or ending up with a worse diagnosis, in my opinion.

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, if all you have to do is, you know, some digestive enzymes while you eat, a little butyrate— I mean, I find that I just once a day butyrate pretty much does the job for me, just 3 of them once a day. That's awesome.

That's probably what we want with 90 capsules. I mean, I think that's the other thing at Healthy Gut. I really want to support people in their dosing because I know that a lot of people have dosing challenges, and most supplement companies really don't want to talk about that, but whatever the back of the bottle says may not be true for you. But we do know that based on studies and just talking with clinicians that around 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams a day of tributarin should be where 80% of everybody falls. I personally only need 1 per day. When I started, I needed 3 per day. So, I wouldn't be surprised if over time, Lindsey, you reduce down and need less over time. And we have some people who they haven't had a formed stool in their entire life. They've tried almost everything, 20+ practitioners, and they use, you know, 4 or 3 times per day, and they're finally having regulated, perfect stools. It's very dependent upon the person, the genetics, the epigenetics, the environment, all those things. Yeah.

Are you seeing butyrate useful with people with ulcerative colitis, for example?

Yeah, yeah, we have some amazing testimonials from people with ulcerative colitis who And I think one of our most famous guys was a guy who's a father who during the pandemic, his wife got pregnant. And so, you got a pandemic happening, your wife gets unexpectedly pregnant. That's very surprising and awesome but also very stressful. And then, if you already have IBD and you're just on the verge of staying out of a UC flare, he was super, super concerned. He bought the product and just sent us some amazing like, you know, my prayers have been answered. I'm able to take care of my wife and my child, and I'm not flaring. And that's just, you know, unheard of for him. I think it's super exciting for the IBD crowd, butyrate in general, whether it's our product or anybody else's.

Any, any thoughts about dosing that people should know? Because I mean, I think the dilemma too is that people think, okay, I get this bottle, in theory it should last me at least a month, but the reality is it may not at the beginning, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, for the way you're dosing it, it's going to last you 30 days. There's 90, 90 caps in a day. Some people, like I said, are going through a bottle week, and other people are going through a bottle every 90 days. So I think the one thing that's not being talked about in integrative medicine and functional medicine is that you cannot escape statistics. I don't care how quantum you want to talk, statistically speaking, 34% of the people you see will fall on the long tail of a bell curve. And that means they're either going to need a lot more, like, like deviations, log deviations, more or less of whatever product. I mean, there are studies showing that some people do not respond to vitamin D3 supplementation until you crank it up to like hundreds of thousands of units, which for other people would be potentially a fatal dose if they took it for 6 months or a year. I think that dosing-wise, we actually do a very similar thing for our product as the HCL Challenge, which is start low, start slow, especially if you consider yourself a sensitive person. And then ramp up until you notice things like really good Bristol stool chart poops. You notice your bloating is going down, you notice your reactions. The number one thing that we get is histamine and mast cell and food sensitivities are the biggest thing beyond stool regulation for us that we hear about. And so whenever they stop reacting to perfumes and environmental toxins, dogs, foods, all those types of things, I'm like, okay, you're really close to your dosage. Stay around that dosage because obviously something important is happening.

That's really good to know because, because that is an area where I have felt I needed— I mean, I, I think of Quercetin and I think of, you know, sometimes just, just over-the-counter allergy pills for those type of histamine reactions and of course diet changes. But, but that's good to know that butyrate is useful in that case too.

Well, it's got to be a tributyrin product. Sodium butyrate is absorbed extremely fast, so is calcium and magnesium. Butyrates are absorbed formed extremely fast in the upper GI tract. So, you want to get a tributarin which is more of a delayed release just because of the compound. It needs lipase to begin to break down. And so, any tributarin product from any company, you want to spread it out. Basically, the reason why is you want to spread it out across the mast cells all the way through the GI tract as far as you could go. So, if you slowly coat the GI tract from top of small intestine down, and of course, the farther you can get it, the deeper into the small intestine and potentially even into the large intestine, that's that's your ideal delivery zone. But you want these slowly released ones so that wherever you have mast cells that are overactivated, you're, you're sort of like putting a nice weighted blanket on them or something to kind of, you know, calm them down a little bit and regulate them.

How is Tributrin different, or are you the only Tributrin product, or there's others?

Nope, nope, there's others. So I think the second best product on the market, and it's just sort of a preference on delivery, is SunButyrate by Pure Encapsulations. It's a liquid, it's like a blueberry lemon flavored tributarin liquid, and it's packaged in a liposomal. All butyrate smell terrible, whether it's tributarin or sodium butyrate, but also you got to protect the tributarins from the stomach acid. So Sun went with a liposomal package that gets about 90% of it through the stomach acid, I think is what their practitioner handouts say. It might be 90 or 92%. And then, ours, what we did is we found an amazing enteric release capsule that's patent pending right now. And, our capsule failure tests are showing zero. Of course, if you left them in acid all day, they would fail at some point. So, it's not that it's perfect. And so, we just put it in a gel cap that is enteric coated rather than gastric, basically gastric resistant. So, there's a lot of other capsules out there like DR Caps and things like that. They're not enteric capsules. They're gastric resistant. And that's kind of the difference between an iPhone 6 and an iPhone 11. You know, like, you drop an iPhone 6 in the water, you got like a few seconds and you got to get that thing out. You can drop iPhone 11 in the water and it's totally chill.

It's not a big deal. I'm surprised there's a liquid— I wasn't aware of the liquid tributyrin product. That's interesting. So you could give that to a child, obviously, then, who can't take pills.

Totally. Yeah, it's a great option. There are powdered tributyrin products as well. I don't know that the ProButyrate is a tributarin product, but there are other— Designs for Health has a powdered tributarin product. Now, the unfortunate thing is that to powder something, you always have to dry it with something. And so, as far as I know, all the powdered tributarins are roughly 30% standardization by weight. And so, that really, if you think about that dosing of getting to 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams a day, now you're talking at 10,000 milligrams of a substance or so to get to or not 10,000, like 5,000 would get you roughly into that payload range of actual tributarin delivered. So, not a huge fan of powdered tributarins at this point in time in their technology.

So, any further thoughts about the products before we just talk about— I know there's some offers that my listeners can get for buying them.

People should be skeptical of everyone that's coming on talking about supplements and somebody who's like, "Oh, yeah, I made things better." Be skeptical. That's why we have a 60-day money-back guarantee. That's why we're growing kind of slow, because people are skeptical. Like, could you really make digestive enzymes better? Could you really make HCl products better? Is Tributerin X really that much better than a sodium butyrate that's been studied in 15+ human studies? And the answer is yes, actually, and the benefits are meaningful. And that's why we have doctors signing up left and right to be wholesalers. That being said, I know without a doubt from being the sick person who's tried a lot of things and with working with a lot of people one-on-one that not everything's right for everybody. And if you don't get that dose right, it's definitely not good for you. You know, we offer that money-back guarantee. We offer free health coaching. If you have a dosing issue, you need to hop on the phone with one of our health coaches and just try to work through it. And we still refund like 3 to 5% of purchases because at the end of the day, You might just not need it. You know, you might not have low stomach acid, you might not have an enzyme issue, or, you know, maybe a different brand is better for you. And I want to respect people's time and money. They gave us a shot and I don't want to slow them down from healing. You can read more about our products online and how we're different, how we've innovated on things. But I think if you feel the difference, that's why people stay with us.

So they can find you and the things that you sell at HealthyGut.com.

Yeah, but they should go to healthygut.com/perfectstool if they want to, number one, support your show, but also to save $15 and get free US shipping. So that's our main site, but we want to make a Perfect Stool community offer, save some money, reduce the risk, and then also get you free US shipping.

My understanding is we've got a code HIGHDESRTHL15 for the tributyrin and PERFECTSTOOL15 for the Holozymes. Perfect. Yeah. So I'll put those all in the show notes so people can find those easily enough.

Again, I tried to do a lot of different things in, in my brief time on the planet here, but for some reason they— I just keep getting directed back to supplements and this interplay between like, I bought my first supplements off the internet at 13 and my mom was like, you just got our credit card hacked and you're gonna die of cancer from that.

I think we have the same mom.

So, I mean, I've been using products from all over Russia, like all the weird stuff, my entire life, and I enjoy it. And so if I can be the guinea pig on myself and then back it up with research and trials and good formulations with, with the smartest PhDs I can find, and then offer the dosing and guarantees that I think a reputable company should offer, then I guess that's what Healthy Gut is. And I'm very excited about the results. I'm most proud about the stories of our users. That's what gets me excited and keeps me going.

Well, thanks so much for sharing all this information with us. I think it's, it's really useful to think on some of the basics of gut health. I focus a lot on the more complex interventions and these are just your basic digestive function interventions and that's, that's important for a lot of people.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I hope I can make that sexy again.

Great. Well, thanks so much for, for being with us. Thanks, Lindsey Parsons. So that was an interesting conversation. I'd love to dig into the research on these things. And Steve seems to have a good handle on that stuff, so that was great. If you are interested in any of the products, again, it was healthygut.com/perfectstool. That will take you to the Holozymes, and then I think you can just navigate from there to the Tributrin. But either way, the discount codes are HIGHDESRTHL15 for the Tributrin and PERFECTSTOOL15 for the Holozymes. And then I think that means that's $15 off plus free shipping. So I have found personally the Tributrin really helpful, and I'm taking the Holozymes too, also helping me. So yeah, I, I tried them before I, before I got them on here and made sure that they were products that I felt good about. So also, if you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page or join my Gut Healing Facebook group or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com. There's links for those in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today. And here's wishing you all the perfect school.