SBIs: An Amazing and Versatile New Gut Health Tool with Brian Kaufman, RN

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'll be speaking with Brian Kaufman, who is the Vice President of Global Business Development for Proliant Health and Biologicals, an American biopharmaceutical company committed to global health through the production of plasma proteins for use in drug development, diagnostics, and dietary supplements. A decorated Army veteran and GI nurse. Brian has over 15 years of experience in direct patient care and medical sales, where his primary focus has been in digestive health and infectious disease. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. 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 onto the show. Welcome to the podcast, Brian.

Hey, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate the opportunity. This is such a cool, great time.

Yeah, my, my pleasure. I wanted to start by obviously not burying the lead that I have just introduced a new supplement to complement my existing one, Tributrin Max, called Serum Bovine Immunoglobulin or SBI Powder. And I invited Brian on this podcast 'cause he is the SBI expert. So who better to explain what this product does and who it might be good for? So why don't we start with the types of conditions that SBIs have been studied in, just so people know whether they should be interested in listening further, and then we can dig into the details later.

Oh, good stuff. Lindsey, again, thanks for having me on. First off, don't even sweat about jumbling over serum-derived bovine immunoglobulin protein isolate. I mean, it's a mouthful. So you'll hear me, I'm saying, hey, we're the SBI guys. It's SBI for short. Bovine IGs or serum IGs, whatever you wanna call it. But it's absolutely amazing natural product that harnesses— I mean, globulin G, the most abundant, most polyclonal, which means it fights and binds on to the most bacteria antigens possible. We've harnessed that and delivered it to patients to help reduce intestinal inflammation that can be brought on by various antigens or bacteria, fungi, things like that. But as far as what it's been studied in, I mean, that is such a broad question. If I sent you my Dropbox right now, you would literally— first, you'd get super giddy, right? Because you'd be like, oh my God, there's so much here. And then you would get a little bit anxious because you were like, where do I start? Because everything from broad spectrum diarrhea and IBS Part D to Crohn's and ulcerative colitis to cancer patients that are dealing with intestinal inflammation and digestive problems, either resulting from cancer itself or from the chemotherapy treatment that we give them. Malnutrition. We did an amazing study in Guatemala in the early 2000s where we were really just trying to tackle malnutrition. Not only did we help their digestive problems, but we saw major increases in lean body mass and overall sense of well-being and, and the ability to thrive. Pediatric IBS. Not any direct clinical data, but a very growing amount of data in the the dermatology area. We all know that many dermatitis, is— psoas, things like that. It starts with an inflammatory response, most of the time originating in the gut. And if we can just mitigate that inflammation, if we can just get in between that, we can probably mitigate a lot of the downstream effects that we feel, which is that diarrhea, bloating, flatulence, just not holding on to your protein and water. And then of course the mental aspect that comes from dealing with that type of a lifestyle.

Wow.

So it's a pretty wide gamut of things that it's useful for.

Hippocrates said disease begins in the gut. Now, I 100% believe that, but I tell— I like to flip it on its other head. I believe that life begins in the gut. Gut health is mental health. Gut health is vascular health. Gut health is your entire integument. A lot of people forget that your skin is the largest body organ you have, and one of the first signs of digestive problems is skin issues.

I definitely see that in clients, and, and I do find that it's often the trailing indicator of success in healing the gut. Like, everything else starts to get better, and then finally the skin does, right? What got you interested in serum bovine immunoglobulins?

I probably started off as like an overall health nut, so to say, and then kind of morphed into a total human optimization microbiome nerd. I grew up playing football in South Georgia and wrestling and stuff like that, and I wasn't always the biggest and strongest, the fastest, but I had leadership skills and And I love to read and didn't grow up with cable or video game systems. So I read, I read Eat to Win when I was in 5th grade and started making my own versions of Gatorade and cutting grass so I could buy vitamin D and creatine monohydrate and things like that. When I was in middle school, I would do anything naturally to totally optimize my body. And then from there, in the Army, I started to notice that all of my soldiers, whenever we would have issues, whether it was an anxiety thing or just being tired out in the field or whatever it was, a lot of it manifested as digestive health problems. And then moving on from there into being a nurse, that is the common denominator for everything. And so whenever I met practitioners that really, really focused on nutrition and balancing the microbiome in accordance with the other care plans, I saw people get better way faster. And so I said, you know what, this is the key. You know, let food be thy medicine, right? It's all of these universal old-school truths are still truths today. So that's kind of how I got here. I am just infatuated with the human body and total human optimization and just living your best life.

So how long has Immunolin been around as a product? Immunolin being the, the ingredient in serum bovine immunoglobulins, the patented ingredient.

So the ingredient has actually been around for a long time. It started off with another part of the business that I'm involved in where we fractionate plasma protein and use it for diagnostic kits, like various ELISA tests, pregnancy tests, COVID-19 tests, things like that. It's used as a blocker. And so kind of a commodity for those types of devices. But a byproduct of that is a concentrated IgG. And some really, really smart agricultural scientists here in Iowa decided, hey, if we can lyophilize that, turn it into a powder, we can introduce it into animal feed to reduce mortality. At the time in the '80s, the mortality for piglets was about 50%. So if a sow had a litter, they were going to lose 50% of that litter automatically. And if you're trying to obviously meet the high demands of the American food population, you want to reduce mortality. And so they started introducing this super IgG-rich powder into the food of these animals and reduced mortality by 90%. 90%. So a very small group of scientists and people within the LGI family started kind of just taking this product just themselves. And eventually, 10 years later, some more scientists got involved, said, we can make this into a product. And they actually turned into a prescription medical food product indicated for IBSD and Crohn's ulcerative colitis called EnteroGam.

EnteroGam.

EnteroGam.

Gam. Okay.

Yep. EnteroGam is available through gastroenterologists. And that was my first introduction to the product. I was working at the Medical College of Georgia in an interesting position where I was running the GI Motility Center a little bit and also selling broad-spectrum antibiotics. And I saw this experimental immunoglobulin being introduced to a patient population, I was like, man, what do you— sleazy drug rep talked you into this? What is this? I got a quick rundown from the attendings and stuff, and it just sounded so interesting and such a natural way to fight the inflammatory response, which is just to supplement the body with an IgG source that has the acquired immunity to bind and remove many of the antigens that set off the inflammatory response. And I, I use this analogy a ton. I get some, some funny looks all the time. I go, if you had a rock in your shoe, how much Percocet would you take to make the pain go away? And right, I have all these like third and fourth year med students with their short coats looking at me just like I just said something crazy, right? Of, of course you wouldn't take Percocet. You, you'd take your shoe off and remove the rock, right? Well, modern medicine has taught us to treat the symptoms when we can just go to the underlying cause and remove that rock, which is that antigen. That bacteria, that fungi, that mold that sets off that inflammatory response and breaks down that gut barrier lining, which is the true culprit to a lot of our digestive problems, that which lead into other things like autoimmunity and Crohn's disease and malnutrition and things like that.

So maybe we should just back up a little bit and talk about what an antibody is, what IgG is, what the other antibody types are.

There are lots of different antibody types. IgA is one of the most important ones created in your salivary glands and kind of begins your intrinsic immune response to things, right? The one that we concentrate on is actually IgG. And the reason why we, we concentrated on IgG is because it's the most abundant one, easiest one to fractionate, easiest one to concentrate. And also from a broad spectrum pers— you know, perspective, it's also the most polyclonal, which means it's tagged and taught through acquired immunity to bind on to the most bacteria, right? So, you kind of get your most bang for your most buck, so to say, in the IgG antibody game. And, antibodies reach out and they seek out and they bind on to various antigens and remove them from the GI tract before they can set off that inflammatory response. Now, unfortunately, the more insults you have, the more IgG you got to have. And if you've got an issue on one side of your body and you're introduced to something else or you're immunosuppressed, you're essentially the palace guards, right? That's your, your antibodies that fight bacteria and stuff. These guys are down, but you can supplement them and see major benefit. That's what you have here with SBI.

So what specific types of pathogens is SBI powder active against?

So that we know of right now, there's about 25, 30+ pathogens that we know of right now. We're always testing them. That's why we, we try to keep our thumb on the pulse of our practitioners and say, hey, tons of great diagnostics tests out there right now. If you come across something that you're not sure about, let us know. We'll try to test it here in our labs. But the most common one is going to be LPS, lipopolysaccharide. It actually makes up about 60% of the inflammatory antigens in your microbiome. So when you start supplementing with a serum bovine IgG product, you're already going to be harnessing and removing 60% of the bad guys. But again, that's just the beginning.

And wait, before you go on, that LPS is part of the wall, cell wall of the gram-negative bacteria and also produced by them, right?

Absolutely. So the way that that antibody essentially clings on, it's not just clinging on to, you know, obviously whole bacteria, but also pieces of bacteria and also the very flagella and the thing that actually move them through the microbiome. I always use this example when I'm counseling young patients. I'm like, hey, you ever watch one of those crime movies where you see the bad guy running away, the police officer, he's trying to shoot the bad guy, and you always say, oh, shoot the tire. Well, you get to shoot the tire with an SBI product. It's going to bind on to that flagella and the very things that move it through. So various gram-negative ROGs. The one that kind of was my aha moment was C. diff particles A and B. If you're not familiar, C. diff is just a debilitating— people don't like to say the word superbug, but overexposure to broad-spectrum antibiotics has definitely allowed allowed this bacteria to flourish and wreak havoc on hospitals. But it's a really, really nasty bug you see most often in immunopressed populations, especially in the hospital, especially post-infectious, so after the use of antibiotics. It's so debilitating, it's, it's so expensive to treat. The biggest thing is a mental factor. People can't come in and visit, they're on contact precautions. You gotta put a NASA suit on to walk in the room to treat them. Seeing, uh, you know, on average can cost about $10,000-$12,000 a day to manage a C. diff patient in inpatient in the hospital. So any anything that we can do to give some quality of life back, reduce hospital stay days, and get those patients out of the hospital was, was music to my ears. So that was, that, that was probably my biggest aha moment with what this product binds on to. But also various things like E. coli, flagella, Staphylococcus aureus, all types of gram-negative rods, all types of things that just cause that inflammatory response and really put patients in this hamster wheel of low-grade inflammation. And You put someone— I'm sure you've dealt with this— where someone says, oh, you know what, I'm here to— for you to manage this, but no, my gut health is pretty good. And of course you make it a part of your care plan, they go, man, I've never felt better. And what you actually did was heal their leaky gut.

And what about Candida?

Oh, absolutely. So this is actually some new data specific to fungal components and mold and mycotoxins that we've done over the last 18 months. We know that Candida is a big, big problem and it's growing. No pun intended there. But we've found that SVI specifically targets, binds, and removes Candida from microbiome to allow that gut lining to heal and those tight junction proteins to express and come back together so that you can absorb all your water and your protein and your nutrients and reduce that bloating.

And what about like parasites?

So parasites are something that is growing right now. Obviously harnessing parasites, bringing them into your specific lab with animal products and things like that, we're a little hesitant on, but we are looking at some specific protozoa and other parasites, especially as we've seen anecdotal evidence from physicians internationally, but also most recently at the border where we have, uh, you know, lots of people coming over the Rio Grande and things like that. And, you know, obviously they want to give care, digestive problems being the, you know, the number one sign and symptom and utilizing Imbutergam there or one of our SBI products.

And if someone has an overgrowth of commensal bacteria like Streptococcus or Staphylococcus, do you think IgG would be useful against those overgrowths?

Absolutely. Those are two other ones I want to definitely— like I said, there's over 26 various pathogens that we bind onto. Check out immunolin.com and you'll be able to kind of get a breakdown of every single one of those. I'll also make sure I furnish one of those cards to you, Lindsey, so that you can kind of put that up on your website and stuff like that. So, you know, exactly every single one of the pathogens, especially as I know you're a big fan of all the microbiome testing right now. That's actually one of the things that I wanted to ask you about while I was on here. There's been so many breakthroughs in microbiome testing lately in accordance with your SBI product. Like, how are you— what's your care plan? Are there certain diagnostic tests that you're doing first or last? Like, when do you start SBI therapy for your patients?

I start most people out by doing testing on their microbiome, usually using either GI Map. I've started using a new test called the US Biotech Advanced GI or GI Advanced Profile, and I will see on there whether they have elevated levels, uh, well, sort of elevated on fire secretory IgA or deficient secretory IgA, in both cases, then I will educate them about SBIs and suggest that that may be something they wanna try. The retesting is more spotty in terms of these tests are expensive and paying for services like mine that's not covered by insurance is expensive. So I don't always get to retest people, but some people, of course, you do get to retest. And honestly, SBIs have come more into my practice, phew, I would say over the last 4 or 5 months maybe, where before I was thinking more about herbal antimicrobials, and especially I'm thinking about them when I see someone who has low commensal bacteria, low levels of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes, low levels of all the commensals. And I think the last thing I wanna do, and sometimes non-existent levels of things like Akkermansia or Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, last thing I wanna do is give that person any more antimicrobials, you know, unless they have something that really looks like, gosh, that needs killing. So I, I think about SBI! like this is a way to preserve the microbiome because, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not going to attack beneficial bacteria.

Absolutely. It's specifically coded with the acquired immunity from the bovine source to only bind and remove the specific bacteria, fungi, and mold that it's synced up to grab and bind onto. You're not gonna have to worry about any commensal bacteria or probiotics or anything like that. And that's, that's what One of the, one of the great parts about it, that it's all reward and no risk unless you have a beef allergy, which is less than a tenth of 1% of the American population. They're out there. As a practitioner, I never ran into any of them. You might. That's also one of the great parts about utilizing this is there's no drug or food interactions. You don't have to worry about any kind of polypharmacy or worry about how they're going to interact with the other standard of care that you've already deployed. It's the easy button, right? It's, it's got one job: go in there, grab the bad guys, get them out. And like you said, clean up the microbiome, allow that gut to heal. What people don't realize is that it's like having a cut on your arm, right? It's never going to heal if it's consistently being inflamed. And you've got to utilize changes in your diet and your stress, but also adding in something like a Cerebrovitaminin Collagen to grab onto that bacteria, allow that gut to heal.

Hey, this is Lindsey here, just letting you know that if you're tired of dealing with digestive issues like bloating, indigestion, soft stool, diarrhea, constipation, reflux, IBS, IBD, or the numerous health conditions that come about when your gut is off, like brain fog, weight gain, UTIs, fatigue, mental health issues, or complex conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS, that's my specialty. With my 3 or 5 session gut health coaching packages, We'll discuss different stool and functional medicine tests to find out the root cause of your symptoms. I'll interpret the results and provide clear explanations, empowering you to make informed choices for your gut and overall health. And together we'll develop a customized action plan based on your test results so you can find relief and regain your health and vitality. I come from a functional medicine perspective, trying to incorporate the latest peer-reviewed research and educating you on protocols used by functional medicine practitioners, but devoting lots of time and support to my clients the way a doctor simply can't. If you're interested in a 3 or 5 session coaching package, you can sign up for complimentary 30-minute breakthrough session. Or if you can only afford one appointment at a time, you can book an initial 60-minute consultation. Links for those are in the show notes. Now back to the show.

Yeah, and I think that really points to the question of, of leaky gut where it's been, you know, you look at social media, they make it out as if leaky gut is a thing in and of itself that has no causative factors. It's just you've got leaky gut or you don't have leaky gut. And it's like, of course there's something causing the leaky gut. You have some kind of a gut infection. Infection. And so that's, I assume, the mechanism of action that this, this addresses leaky gut by healing whatever that problem is in the gut that you may or may not know the cause of.

Absolutely. And again, binds on to tons of different antigens, bacteria, fungi, mycotoxins. We know that mold is a big problem right now, so that's why we're doing some extended research there. But at the end of the day, you can't live your best life if you're running on that hamster wheel of low-grade inflammation. Reduce your antigen uptake. Allow the gut barrier to heal, allow your body to absorb all the water, protein, and nutrients. And, like I said, life begins in the gut, like Hippocrates says. You'll see the benefit cognitively in your physical performance. I mentor bodybuilders and athletes of all kinds. And, step 1 is let's figure your gut out because it doesn't matter how much water and protein that you take in, it matters how much you can absorb. And a leaky inflamed gut will not absorb that water and protein. It will just be shotgunned out the other end. And we don't like that, right?

Yeah.

So it would make a lot of sense for someone who's had some weight loss along with gut health issues.

Oh, absolutely. My immunosuppressed population, my elderly population, especially my elderly female population, where there's a lot of issues with malnourishment and especially calcium wasting and bone density problems and things like that. The first thing that I want to do is short their gut, get them to start absorbing more protein and water and start adding in more nutrient-dense foods, even adding in creatine monohydrate. Tons of new data out there on the mental health benefits of creatine monohydrate, along with bone density and water absorption and muscle mass and all that stuff.

But on my list of supplements to start taking for so long, and I just haven't gotten around to it because, well, for one thing, I have to figure out how to get another powder into myself, and I don't eat smoothies or have the sort of obvious things to But beyond that, I just keep thinking, well, when I get off of one of these 10,000 other things I'm taking, I'll try that one.

No, ma'am. You general creatine monohydrate. There's about 4 different esters and fun marketing scientific names out there. Just get creatine monohydrate, 5 grams a day. You can do less, but if you want to hit 5 grams a day is a great target for most clinical efficacy. And just— it's flavorless. Add it in, add it into your SDI. Here's what we— here's what we do with my dad. My dad takes SBI and creatine monohydrate every morning and he mixes it in with unflavored Greek yogurt.

Oh yeah, yeah, that would be easy if I ate yogurt. That would be easy. Tell me what the dosing and duration is recommended for SBIs.

So the great thing about SBI is there's no non-benefit to having even a little bit, whether it's 5 milligrams or 5 grams. There's a benefit that will be sought. Now, the dosing depends a lot of times on the bacterial load. So essentially, how inflamed you believe your gut is or how much contact you're coming in with various inflammatory antigens and also your health history. If you are— you regularly never have any GI issues, maybe you travel down south like I do and have some, have some Nana's country fried steak and, you know, don't sleep real well and things like that. You can take this acutely at around 2 grams a day for 10 days and you'll be perfectly fine. But if this is a lifestyle for you, you've had diarrhea every day, 5, 6 times a day. If that's your norm, or if you're a binge purger where you go a day or two constipation, day or two diarrhea, that's 100% a gut barrier dysfunction problem brought on by bacterial antigens that cause inflammation. And what we first need to do is we need to do a total gut reset, and in which case I recommend 5 grams a day for the first 2 weeks, and then we jump down to, to 2 grams a day after that. Take that out to 6 to 8 weeks. The reason why we want to take it out so long is depending on how your gut is, it may take longer to restore that gut barrier lining, and we need to use higher doses of SBI to shield it from the bacteria so we can allow it to heal. Initial onset of action is usually around the 3-week mark, and the reason by that is it takes at least 21 to 26 days for there to be turnover of new tissue in the gut lining. Right. So I always say commit 8 weeks to this or don't do it. Right. If you think you're going to take a pill and be fine the next day, that's not— Rome was not built in a day and neither was your microbiome. Onset of action is usually around 3 to 4 weeks. Keep that out to 8 weeks and then reassess. Now, what will happen is most people will go, wow, this changed my life. I can't believe that I lived that way before. And they'll be just fine. They'll come off the product after about 8, 10 weeks, they'll be completely fine. Now, there will be a population that after a week their symptoms come back, and what's happening there is essentially your body doesn't make antibodies to fight whatever bacteria or antigen that you're coming in contact with, in which case you will see people take this product as sort of a lifestyle. I managed a Crohn's patient in the hospital on this product back in 2014 before I came on with the company. I actually had this patient on 15 to 20 grams a day. Of this product for the first 2 or 3 weeks. But she's a great lady. I was admitting her to the ER probably twice a year with flares. She was one of my frequent flyers. She is still on the product 10 years later. Now, obviously she's not taking 15, 20 grams a day anymore. In fact, we only did that for about 2 weeks, got that total gut reset going, and then we're able to slowly wean her down. But she was one of those patients that it's a lifestyle for.

She takes 2 grams every other day And when you say 2 grams, are you saying 2 grams resulting of the IgG or 2 grams of the total weight product?

Yeah, the total weight product, the composition of which is about 92% protein. So it is an isolate. So you will be adding a little bit of protein on there. It's also got all of the— it's a complete protein. So all of the BCAAs as well as the EAAs. So you will see a protein benefit as well and also shows the cleanness of the protein being that it's an isolate.

Okay, so, so before— people might not know those abbreviations. Branched-chain amino acids and essential amino acids, I assume, were the BCAAs and the EAAs.

Yes, that's correct. Yeah, branched-chain amino acids and essential amino acids changes the way that the protein is absorbed and taken into the body. It's a complete protein, so that's what you want. The overall concentration of IgG is over 50%, and then you have 1% IgA and then 5% IgM. And then you have another really interesting protein in there known as bovine serum albumin. Now, a lot of the health practitioners that are listening will understand how crucial and abundant albumin protein is in the body and how much we need it. It's used to pull fluid and water into specific spaces in the body and things like that. But what it also does in this instance, it also has an affinity to bind on to heavy metals. Which as we know are a real issue in our diets right now and overall daily living. So not only are we learning now the benefits of the IgG in Immunolin as far as the binding and removing of inflammatory bacteria, but also the bovine serum albumin has the ability to remove heavy metals. So you see a benefit there.

Is there any other product on the market like Immunolin, or is this the only one?

There are others. For instance, one that many are probably familiar with is colostrum.

Oh, well, sure, sure. But that's not straight IgG.

No, it's not straight IgG. It's a little— it's much different. It's about 20% IgG, so less than half of the IgG concentration. It's also coming from the first milking of the cow. And the other problem— so first, let's say the benefits, some really good benefits of colostrum, because it can be a really good valuable tool in your gut health toolbox. Is it's very high in IgA. So there are absolutely benefits there. Unfortunately, many of your patient population that has issues with dairy and lactose won't be able to take that product. Also, there are some issues with the quality and consistency of that product. It is— colostrum is one of those products that is consistently kind of dinged in the market as what's on the label isn't necessarily on the bottle. Yeah, but it can be beneficial if you find a really high-quality source. It's not going to be as beneficial as taking a serum-based IgG like Immunolin, like what you have in your product base, being that it's half the IgG concentration, half the protein, and of course all the dairy and the lactose. Now there is one other option, and I would say that Immunolin is number one. That's going to be your best source, your highest quality. Then you're going to have colostrum right there in the middle, and then kind of at the bottom you're going to have a product called IgY. Which is a hyper-immunized egg immunoglobulin. Again, it's an immunoglobulin source, it can have some benefit, but it's going to be again less than half the protein concentration, less than half the IgG concentration. And then also with IGY, you actually get like 40% of your daily value of cholesterol in one serving. So that can be worrisome for some practitioners recommending this part of your protocol.

Yeah, no, I seriously considered whether I should formulated product with IgY, and I decided against it simply because there was so much research already on IgG and SPIs, and I just thought I'd much rather go with a product that people knew about, understood, there was already the research there, than something that's a little bit still unknown and unproven. So.

And what's interesting is actually Imulin is the newest of those 3 products. Yeah. Imulin has over 45 human clinical trials. Previously only available by prescription. And we did something different because this has only been available in dietary supplements since 2018, is that while many companies will lead with the marketing and have 1 or 2 clinical trials to back them, we led with the science first. We're a biotech company. Our brand partners are Merck and Janssen and stuff like that. And we have to lead with science first before marketing. And so that's the approach we took. And I think that's why we've seen a big part of why we've seen such success with this product. On top of the fact that it absolutely works. Go to the underlying cause, reduce intestinal inflammation, and watch people get better in front of you.

Yeah. Oh, you know what I meant to ask when we were back talking about the dosing and the duration. So I did see that the study, I think there was a study specifically on IBS-D where it was looking at, I guess the dosing was 5 and 10 grams. And they compared it. And the conclusions were that at the 10-gram dose, the bloating was reduced after 6 weeks, but not at the 5-gram dose, which is why I've been recommending 10 grams a day for people who have extreme bloating, which describes most of the people I'm dealing with.

Right. And so here's some history for you. So when we did that, one of our first IBSD trials that we did, we concentrated on not just an acute reduction in symptoms like bloating, flatulence, diarrhea, abdominal pain, stuff like that. The total number of days that were reduced, and we saw a reduction by 40 to 60%. I mean, that's— gosh, if you could get 6 months of your life back, would you do it? I mean, of course you would, right? And so when we did that study, SIBO was still kind of— well, first, IBS-C being an umbrella of diagnoses, right? The idea of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth was something that was still being kicked around. It wasn't— it was legitimized yet. And what, what I believe from my experience is I believe that that group of bloaters actually had SIBO, and that by introducing a slightly higher amount of IgG, we were able to harness up all that yeast-loving bacteria that was migrating up large intestine into the small intestine to feast on sugar. Because I mean, that's where SIBO comes from. And that by using a slightly higher dose, we can actually corral that group in. Of course, I didn't come to this conclusion until years later when we did a SIBO trial. And I saw some really, really good success there. I was like, wow, I bet the arm of people in the original IBSD study that we had were actually— they actually had SIBO.

So tell me about the SIBO study.

Okay, so awesome gastroenterologist and professor out of St. Louis University, big on infliximab— or not infliximab, excuse me, but rifaximin, Xifaxan, which is this broad-spectrum antibiotic that was launched specifically for SIBO. The problem is, is that it's hard to get it covered, A, so there's a commercial issue, but more importantly, the number one side effect of the medication was diarrhea. You're trying to fix diarrhea, but you're giving diarrhea. And also, it's an antibiotic, right? Antibiotics are amazing. They've allowed medicine to transcend leaps and bounds over the last century or two. But while you're killing the bad guys, you're also killing the good guys. And when you kill your commensal bacteria, you're just opening up the gates for bacteria to just ravage you. Essentially, this doctor who was not a believer in serum bovine immunoglobulin, he had— he had an issue. He had 50% of the patients that he was giving this product to, it wasn't working.. And then another large population, he couldn't even get it to. I said, Dr. Weinstock, give me a chance. Give me your 3 toughest patients, your train wrecks, the ones that you look on the schedule and you're like, God, I don't— there's nothing I can do for this person. There's— I'm at my wit's end. Give me that one. If I fix 'em, you gotta try this more. And guess what? We fixed. And then you know what? He gave me 3 more and we fixed them. And then he gave me 3 more and we fixed them. And finally we did a study. And so we set it up that we— so the way we started it first is everyone got Lachlan's breath test. Diagnostic criteria for SIBO. If they were positive, they got standard of care, which is the Faximen 550, 3 times a day. When they failed, they went straight to EnteraGam, or serum B vitamin and glutamine, at 10 grams a day for 2 weeks, then dropped down to 5. If they were negative on lactose breath test, they got standard of care. When they failed— 50% of them did— they went straight into the arm with the 10 grams of SBI for 2 weeks, then dropped down to 5.

For what length of time?

6 weeks total. Total 6 weeks of therapy. We saw a 60 to 80% reduction in the bloating and abdominal pain and all the classical symptoms of SIBO.

And were these only hydrogen positive or was this also methane?

These were both, these were hydrogen and methane positive SIBO testing and it was a game changer for him and he was one of those, Obviously, he's got to be a prudent professor and gastroenterologist. And but when he saw the results, he's like, I'll never start anyone on a broad-spectrum antibiotic before I can use something that has no side effect profile and hurts no one.

Wow.

At the end of the day, if the antibody is not activated on bacteria, it's just broken down into amino acids and absorbed as protein.

Yeah. So there's no, no harm.

No, you can't. You can't take too much of it. I know, I tried. I took 100 grams of it one time. I won't lie, I had some interesting blackouts, but other than that, no issues.

Okay. And what about trials in Crohn's or ulcerative colitis?

Yes, absolutely. Once we started cracking the IBS nut, so to say, we started having those same practitioners go, well, well, hey, if this works in the GI tract only, could it help help with my Crohn's and my ulcerative colitis patients? Half the gastroenterologists was like, no, that doesn't make sense. It's not going to block the TNF-alpha inflammatory response systemically. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what if we use biologics to reduce the inflammatory response in a systemic space, and then we use the bovine IgG to reduce the inflammatory response inside the microbiome, allowing that gut layer to heal what we saw was a drastic reduction in recovery time, the concentration of the biologic drugs that we had to give, reduction in hospital stay days, and more people staying in remission longer. So what that means is you throw a flare and they start you on a biologic drug, you start on serum bovine immunoglobulin at the same time, you're going to reduce your time to recovery by 4 to 6 weeks.

And are you doing the same sort of dosing, that 10 grams a day for 2 weeks, then 5? Okay. Or do you just continue on at that 5-gram dose if the person is still showing symptoms?

We want to constantly wean people down because we also want to see where people's antigen load is and where their healing process is. The beauty of it is, is if you wean someone down to a gram a day and they start to go, well, you know, I had diarrhea once over the last 72 hours or twice over the last 72 hours. Maybe we go back up to 2 grams and you see what's best for that patient. We also did a socioeconomic study. We also wanted to see, because we know that obviously hospital stay days are expensive, right? Hospitals are the last place, you know, it's the place you want to be if you're really, really sick or really, really hurt, but it's also the last place you want to be if you're recovering from being sick or really, really hurt. And because we cordoned all the sick people into one place, right? So when you can reduce hospital stay days, you're helping everyone. One. We actually saw a— the socioeconomic study that we did, we saw a reduction in hospital stay days that accumulated to a cost savings, uh, between $3,000 and $9,000 per patient.

Wow.

So saving money, reducing your time in the hospital, just by adding this on.

To be clear, what is in my SBI powder and what is in EnteroGam is identical?

Absolutely. Serum Bovitamin and Glutamine.

Yep. Absolutely.

Being—

Interagam being the prescription medical food that people are getting in hospitals.

So actually, you know, I'll explain the difference. There is no difference. It's a dosing difference. So think of it like Motrin 800, right? 800 milligram ibuprofen by prescription behind the counter. Or you can walk down the aisle and go pick up the 200 milligram capsules.

Same thing.

You could go to your gastroenterologist and get a prescription or an order for Interagam or you could just follow the link from your website and buy your product.

Yeah.

If, and if your gastroenterologist hasn't heard of EnteraGam and doesn't ever use it, then you'll, good luck getting it from them.

Right?

Right.

Yeah. So obviously there's a lot of other gut health products on the market, like probiotics and prebiotics and herbal antimicrobials. So how does Immunolin relate to those other products?

Oh, they're all best friends. They're all best friends. But here's the thing, the best thing about friends in a story is the story's got to happen the right way. And if you're familiar with the 5 Rs of gut health, the first R is remove. And that's why SBI should be initiated first. We want to remove the bad guys, increase the microbial diversity so that the gut can heal and your commensal bacteria can actually function correctly. Where a lot of people go wrong on their gut health journeys, they go, oh, Good Morning America said I need to take probiotic. So they go out and they buy probiotic with 30 billion CFUs, right? And they go, ah, I took it for a month, it didn't really help me. Well, that's because you just added more good guys to the fight, you didn't remove any of the bad guys. That's why Immunoglobulins are different. That's why we're the only manufacturer of this product in the world, and in a very, very short time has become the most sought-after gut health tool that you can bring into your practice because it's the only thing that's going to go to the underlying cause and remove that bad bacteria. Now, once we remove the bad guys, let's see the garden. Now let's add in your probiotics right now. Let's add in your NAC and things like that. Some other things that I'm also a big fan of are glutamine.

Mm-hmm.

Big fan of glutamine as far as nourishing the microbiome layer. I like Epicor, which is a postbiotic. The FDA and the International Probiotics Association still hasn't quite figured out how what the mechanism of action is for postbiotics or really kind of where they fit in. But we know that there's a benefit to the microbial diversity, and I've had a lot of success using Epicor, also SunFiber. As far as probiotics go, this is also an area I still— we're still trying to get it right. Everyone's gut health journey is different. I love spore-based probiotics, but I also know that they don't work for everyone. I'm also a big fan of N-acetylglucosamine. N-acetylglucosamine interacts with the goblet cells in the epithelial lining of the gut and helps produce a little layer of mucus, right? So almost kind of like you get a cut on your arm, you know, you want to maybe put a Band-Aid on it, you know, if you're going to be out in the elements or something like that. That mucosal layer that's produced by the goblet cells that were fed by the NAG can help with that a little bit, kind of get you into healing a little bit faster. Big fan of type 2 collagen. Its benefits transcend more to the skin than the joints and things like that, but they first have to be absorbed. By the gut lining. And I've had a lot of success with those as well.

When you take herbal antimicrobials or antibiotics, you can have die-off or Herxheimer reactions. Does this happen with SBI powder?

No, it doesn't. It actually kind of helps with die-off. We've figured this out by a lot of patients that said, well, I'm, I'm taking probiotics and it's not helping, but I'm, I'm going to keep taking them. Well, hey, well, don't stop taking them. Let's add SBI And the abdominal pain and some of the bloating they were experiencing was because of die-off, because there was no microbial diversity. You were just adding more good guys. When we added in the SBI, controlled that microbial diversity, we saw some major benefits there.

So when I started researching what to put on my website about this product, I discovered that these benefits that I wasn't familiar with about the leaky gut and then the uptake of nutrients and the preservation of lean body mass. So you mentioned that study in in Guatemala, was that the primary one that showed you that, or was there another one?

Uh, so that was what started it. We also have done various studies in geriatrics and immunosuppressed populations to include HIV. And what we found, we were able to heal their gut and increase their protein utilization and uptake. They flourish, they put on lean body mass faster. In fact, no different than what I was telling you about the FIBO trial. I told Dr. Weintock at St. Louis University, I said, give me your train wreck, man. Give me the toughest one, right? And who's more immunosuppressed than an HIV patient? And we were able to not only reduce their digestive problems and allow them to, to thrive and enjoy some quality of life, but they started to put on body weight. And then they also started to increase CD4 lymphocyte count and T-cell count and things like that that really, really show that the body is responding to the standard of care that's being given to them. But a big kickstarter for that was shoring up the gut, reducing that intestinal inflammation, allowing you to absorb the water and the protein and the nutrients that you bring in. And in today's society where our food is not as nutrient dense as it once was, we need all the, all the vitamins and protein we can get.

Yeah. So is it best to take this with food, on an empty stomach?

Is it depend on the situation?

There's never a bad time to take it. I usually, I'm all about compliance, right? Whatever's gonna ensure that you stay on therapy. And so what I tell people is take it with breakfast and take it with dinner. You're not going to forget to eat breakfast, you're not going to forget to eat dinner. If you know that, hey, I take my IgG at these times, you won't forget. But there's, there's not a bad time. Anecdotally, I've heard people, practitioners and patients, telling that they like to take it at night before bed because they feel that because it dwells in the GI tract longer overnight, then it's going to bind more efficiently. I don't have any clinical proof of that or anything like that, but But I say whatever works for you.

Yeah, no, my, my, I think I put on my label that take it with food if you're, if you're concerned about the incoming pathogens, take it on an empty stomach if you're just wanting to treat what's already in there.

Oh, good. Good. I was gonna ask you that. What are you telling patients to mix it in?

So I haven't told anybody how to take it. I, I was taking it for a while and then I wanna pay off my investment in the product before I start taking it anymore. So I have stopped taking it, but I was, I found that it was very easy if I threw it on a salad and poured on the dressing and mixed right in and you didn't notice it at all. That was easy. Sometimes I was sprinkling it on my eggs in the morning, but that became a little overwhelming. Like it sort of took over that entire scoop, took over that egg.

So absolutely. It's flavorless. So it means you can mix it in anything, right? You can easily mix it in 4 ounces of water. 20-second stir and take it down. And I will tell you, for anyone that's listening right now that tries this product, when you first mix it up, you're gonna go, ooh, it's not really going into solution immediately. That is by design. This is a hearty, dense, rich immunoglobulin protein. We want it to survive all the way through the GI tract so that it can also bind and neutralize antigens, not just in the gut but also in the large intestine, all the way down through to the colon. So I want to say give it a 20-second stir and then just take it down. You can mix it in any of your flavored beverages that you like of your choice. If you have soft food issues, you can mix it in yogurt and pudding. That's, that's how I get my dad to take it. He mixes it in his pudding.

Applesauce, probably.

Applesauce is great as well. The only thing we tell you not to mix it in is carbonated beverages and alcohol. That's, that's about it.

Or hot things.

Well, as long as it's not over 150 degrees, you're fine. We, we have lots of people that mix it in like a non-dairy almond creamer, and then once their coffee cools down, they pour it in there. But as long as it's not over 150 degrees, you won't denature the proteins.

When I first started to formulate this, I was thinking that this came from colostrum and it was just sort of some subset of colostrum, but now I understand serum-derived means it's coming from plasma.

Absolutely, it's coming directly from plasma. And that's one of the reasons why we have the ability to do something that no one else can, is in a pharmaceutical-grade CGMP facility, extract plasma from the animal, fractionate it down in a closed-loop system so that it is clean and healthy and free of anything that you don't want. While also having a super highly concentrated, dense immunoglobulin.

Right. So that's why you can say this is dairy-free because there is no dairy product in it.

That is correct.

Right.

Okay.

The, the other study you mentioned was about Crohn's, excuse, exclusively. Was there one in ulcerative colitis?

Absolutely. Check out immunolin.com. Like I said, there are over 45 human clinical trials, close to, or if not over now, over 100 manuscripts either in human clinical research, animal research, or benchtop research that shows the safety and efficacy of serum bovine immunoglobulin.

Okay, awesome. Anything else you want to mention before we go?

Before we go? Oh man, is this like my last send-off right here?

This is.

All right, here we go. Number one, if you don't cook it, it's not good for you. Unfortunately. I have a cheat day. I love cheesecake and fried foods being, you know, born and raised in the South. But I know that if, if it's processed, if I didn't cook it, it's not good for me. Concentrate on protein, chew your food, and listen to your gut. And not just from an intuition perspective, but what you put into it. Utilize immunoglobulins to reduce bacteria, then feed that gut garden with probiotics and nutrient-dense foods. Get lots of sunlight and just enjoy life.

Great. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. And have me on anytime.

So if you're interested in trying my new Serum Bovine Immunoglobulin SBI Powder product, there is a link in the show notes to my website, perfectstool.com, where you can find it and where you'll get free shipping for 1 to 3 bottles and very inexpensive shipping thereafter. It should also be available at Amazon by the time I publish this, and I'll include a link for that as well. If you'd like to support the podcast in other ways, you can buy supplements at a discount from my FullScript Dispensary, order tests at a discount from my Rupa Health Labs store, or use my affiliate links to iHerb, Bulk Supplements, or Amazon. If you'd like to connect with me online, you can 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, or Pinterest. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today. And here's wishing you all the perfect stool.