Your Gut Controls Your Brain Food Science Secrets to Fix Inflammation & Leaky Gut | Dr. Kyle Landry

Foreign.

Hey, welcome, everybody. Today I have a special guest, Dr. Kyle Landry, who's a. A good friend to the show and a great advocate for helping us with biofilm. He has a PhD in food science from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He was a postdoc at Harvard Medical School of genetics with Dr. David Sinclair. He's the president of biosecurity, Biowarfare and Defense Company contributions. He teaches in the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University. He's a board member of UMass Food Science Department and Framingham State Food Science Department. He's published numerous papers and has patents, as well as speaking internationally and domestically. Kyle, welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Well, I think we've talked offline a lot and certainly in discussions about biofilm. So for everybody listening, we collectively think that the air quality, fluid quality, and food quality that you put into your body is paramount before really anything else. So on my show, I've had experts discuss air quality and fluid quality, but today we have the expert to discuss food quality because he is one of food scientists and an expert in biofilm. So I think for you, Dr. Landry, let's just start at the grocery store. What should we be buying and what should we be looking for?

Yeah. So when it comes to biofilms, I start at the simplest one, which is your gut. So your gut microbiome, believe it or not, is, you know, something most people don't think about until they have to. And unfortunately, by then it's usually too late or it takes a lot of effort to reverse any of the detrimental effects that have already occurred to your gut microbiome. So when you're at the supermarket, you know, it's very tempting to go for the sweet, you know, delicious snack foods, ultra processed foods. But in theory, if you want to look at your foundational health, usually the things that aren't the best tasting, and I put that in air quotes here because I have young kids and, you know, I try to get to eat Brussels sprouts and broccoli and cauliflower, a lot of fibrous foods, things with, you know, sulfur compounds and other things, and they tend to not want to eat that, But I could give them a Pop Tart and they'll eat it any day. Now, unfortunately, with the advertising, you'll see whole grain foods, whole grain pop tarts, all these different things, but nothing really replaces the actual food component. So I would say start with fruits and vegetables and then go to fermented food products. Fermented Food products will give your gut microbiome a great jumpstart to the healthy track. Now, the only caveat I will say with probiotics is that they are transient in nature. So you can't think it's one and done. You can't go get one yogurt and eat it and think you're good for your life. This has to be a lifelong habit and something you intentionally do. But you'll see the benefits in a few weeks. And I'm sure you're not going to go back after that.

Well, let's go back. I mean, because that's a lot to unpack. We roll into this or we're, we're at, you know, Piggly Wiggly or whatever. Right. Publix in Florida or, you know, Hev, Whole Food, whatever. Wherever you get your groceries, there's a lot of signage now about what's organic. We can certainly dive into how that magically, all of a sudden, everything's organic now.

Thank you, the influencers, for pushing those.

And then, you know, as we talk about gut microbiome for, for everybody. So in our intestinal tracts, we have bacteria, fungi, we've got viruses, we have parasites. These work in concert and when that is off. And Dr. Landry has written numerous papers and given numerous talks about the, the gut brain axis. So if our, you know, trillions of bacteria go off in the gut because of overgrowth or imbalance, I always try to say imbalances. It's a little bit easier to understand if we just want balance. And so when we look at our diets and we go to the stores and we're trying to buy some, you know, fruits and vegetables, and we're trying to select the organic, you know, orange over the what's not labeled organic. Like demystify that for us in the audience. And I'm peaked here because I was at the store yesterday trying to do this myself.

Yeah. So we'll, we'll start at the most misunderstood thought about organic food in that it is more nutritious for you. And that is not the case. There is no evidence showing that vitamin C in an organic orange is different than the vitamin C in a non organic orange. Right. So eating organic foods will not necessarily make you get more nutrients or make you feel like you. It's more of a play on the environment. Now there are some changes and some of them are requirements in terms of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. But the second biggest myth is that organic foods are not treated with any of this. And that's Completely false. There's actually a list of. Of approved fungicides, pesticides, herbicides that are used for organic farming, and you still should wash all your produce. And there was just a report that came out about the dirty dozen. Right. And the dirty dozen, usually the berries are loaded with the most herbicides and pesticides, fungicides, and that just has to do with the physical nature of the fruit. Right. They're soft, they're sensitive, they're easily. They're very delicate, and they're easily infected and contaminated by mold. And anyone who's gone and bought a carton of raspberries and next day find them all moldy, know exactly what I'm talking about in terms of how quick they go. So if you really wanted to be conscious about the herbicides and pesticide usage, I would, you know, look at the dirty dozen list. So blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and maybe choose to go organic with those if you have concerns for those chemical treatments. But in the end, you should be washing your fruits and vegetables anyway. And if you use a fruit and vegetable wash or just simple, you know, light soap or even some sprays they sell, you'll remove a significant amount of them anyway. So then it just comes down to ethical impacts and what you think about that.

So Dr. Landry's talking about the dirty dozen, and we refer people often to the environmental working group, just the site itself. We'll list these, and that's what he's referring to. And we'll just do one through 12. So everybody's on the same page. So strawberries, spinach. Number three is kale. Call collard and mustard greens. Four is grapes. Five is peaches. Six is pears. Seven. My favorite food of all time. Nectarines, apples, melon, hot peppers, cherries, blueberries, green beans. So just what Dr. Lander was saying. It's like something with a thinner skin easily will absorb something like a glyphosate. So when we test people at my clinic, we find a lot of people have glyphosates that are higher than the 95th percentile, which is obviously not what you want to have in this situation. That means, you know, you're basically spraying yourself with glyphosates instead of having a food that's devoid of it. And that's the problem, obviously, with strawberries, because they can absorb it so easily. Can you compare maybe an organic with, say, I go to the farmer's market and I get some peaches from very famous place here in Texas called Fredericksburg, where they grow Peaches and they don't use anything. But you know, if you don't eat those things almost the day you buy them, yep, they are going to be moldy and or rotten within days.

That's a huge problem. So one thing you have to think about, and this is more a economic, socioeconomical, you know, worldwide problem is we are a growing population that has to serve as many people as possible and the amount of farmable land is decreasing. So it is impossible to support our projected population without the use of these things. Because as you said, imagine going to a farm and only having one day to eat your peach. How is that even possible for the whole world? So the idea that all this is bad depends on your optic. If you look at the overall ability to sustain life and growth and get food to as many people as possible, then these preservatives, these fungicides, these treatments are good for that. But if you're looking at the overall, you know, nitty gritty, biohacking longevity type of space, it may not be as much. So it's a double edged sword. But when you look at organics, from farm fresh to, you know, supermarket, one thing I will say about farmers, and this is true even with eggs, I'll give you an example with eggs. If you go to a roadside farm and you buy eggs from a farmer on the side of the road, you will see them in an egg carton and on that egg carton you'll see grade A eggs, large size eggs, this and that. Right. I can almost guarantee you the farmer did not do any of that. They just bought the cartons and put the eggs in there. And it's the same thing with these very small farms or roadside farms or pick your own. They don't really have to disclose anything because they're not selling at a mass scale. So they may not be advertising organic, but they'll say, you know, locally grown on our own farm, natural. Right. Handpicked. But they're not hitting on the things that, you know, mass market, interstate sale companies like major Apple companies have to deal with where they have to actually disclose that information. So that's the only thing I'm going to say about, you know, going to local farms is you don't really have the optics into what they're actually using on the farm. And they may cover it with some other verbiage that makes it seem different.

Right. It's the age old argument with natural flavors.

They're not even natural, they synthesize in some lab, but they're present in naturally Occurring foods. So therefore they're natural.

I love that. I look at all of those. Everybody listening. Flip any label around. When it says natural flavors, just put it back because it's got a chemical in it. So now we've picked our fruits and veg and we're going to go home and prepare them. We clean them, maybe we get the majority of those things off the glyphosates. What then how, when we intake that? Maybe we don't do a good job. Maybe we do a good job. How does it affect our bacterial, fungal, parasitic viral component in our gut that leads to or potentiates something called leaky gut? Maybe you can touch that. And then how does that ultimately challenge us from a development of the signaling processes in our body neurotransmission? How does it affect our, our brain? Because I think once you start to understand that a little bit better, then like you can understand why just you have little kids, you know, not to give them a whole thing full of Cheerios and a tall glass of orange juice or Big Red before they go school.

Yeah. So I'll start, let me go back one more thing. You said you get home, you wash it. I will say do not wash your fruits and vegetables until you're ready to use them. And some people wash them right away when they get home. But then they go bad because it actually promotes fungal bacterial growth. It actually promotes breakdown. So always wait and actually take advantage of your fruit and vegetable drawers in your fridge. Most people don't even know that they, that they do anything. But they do control humidity, which will either accelerate or decelerate mold growth on your fruits and vegetables. So believe it or not, make sure that's true. Because mold can produce mycotoxins. And them, mycotoxins are very bad for you. I mean, they're acute liver toxins, they're carcinogens and mutagens. So you want to minimize any of that because even if you don't see it, there could be some growing there and you get chronic low dose exposure. But when you eat them, say you eat your fruits and vegetables. Why fruits and vegetables are so important is because they're actually prebiotics. So there's a big push now in the supplement world for prebiotics. And I always laugh about it because it's just like pulverized kale. Anything that is high fiber by the soluble and non soluble fiber is technically a prebiotic. It's basically food that your gut can use to grow specifically the beneficial bacteria. Which is why I said, you know, you Want high fiber foods to promote that. And if you don't have high fiber foods or products that, or food that promotes beneficial gut microbiome, you'll start having the bad bacteria. And I put bad in air quotes here, but the, the non beneficial bacteria start to outgrow and they tend to grow faster because they use the simple sugars. The, the ultra processed foods, even a lot of the red meat components will start promoting these negative bacteria and they shift your gut microbiome in a way that can actually enhance inflammation. Right. It produces a lot of antagonistic compounds that lead to pathways down the line that lead to systemic inflammation. And I will throw this out here for people like, oh, there's no way my gut changes this and that. Whatever. Okay, so if you've been eating meat your whole life, right, and all of a sudden you decide to become a vegetarian, the first two and a half weeks of your life of being a vegetarian are going to be full of gas because you have to shift your gut microbiome from those organisms that were processing, you know, refined grains and meats now to all the starch and carbohydrates and fibers, and you're shifting your gut. And then after two and a half weeks, you don't have any more of these problems because you're starting to rotate your gut into the direction of the foods. Now this is true. If you're a vegetarian and then all of a sudden you go and eat a McDonald's burger, what happens? You have the other effect because now your gut is like, whoa, I'm not used to all this oil, I'm not used to all this, this processed stuff. And then you have those issues. So eating the foods that are whole foods, and I say whole foods not as whole food market, I'm saying whole foods as whole strawberries, you know, whole grapes, pieces of lettuce, right. Trying to minimize any processing, high temperature processing in particular, because those will degrade a lot of the nutrients, a lot of the vitamins, break down a lot of the phytochemicals. So these non nutritive compounds, but are very beneficial for your body start to break down. And then you can also have negative reactions that happen that produce nitrosamines or carcinogens and mutagens that occur at high temperature cooking. So yeah, eat the whole foods, go that and, and, and basically, you know, look at, and you'll feel it, you'll feel it after a few weeks. And this is why, if you ever look at yogurts, right, there was a brand called Activia and they said you have to. If you look at the claims, you had to eat your yogurt, that yogurt for two to three weeks before you saw any of the effects that they claimed. But that was true for any fermented food. Anything that is a probiotic, you'll get those effects.

So that's a good point. So when we, I mean, we're not going to talk about pectin and psyllium, but so he's, you know, Dr. Lander's talking about fiber and using it appropriately is the gut has to work a very specific way if you're going to get the most out of the absorption process in your gut. And so we've, you know, in our case, we've got the fruit and vegetables. We've, we're not going to wash them right away. We're going to wait when we're ready to have them, you know, depending on how we're doing our diet. And, you know, as a clinician, my patients who are most difficult to take care of are vegan or vegetarian because they have a difficult time getting enough protein in. So we use a protein source that's just basically pea protein or something like that. So you can't have a, you know, philosophical problem with it because it's vegan. If we have somebody who's more of an omnivore or somebody who's pescatarian or carnivore, I don't, it doesn't even matter to me. We bring those things into the gut. You know, we have these trillions of bacteria, fungi, parasites, viruses, and now we'll say our microbiome, that whole group is happy. Then we have normal absorption, creation of neurotransmitters, signaling in the brain is, is good. So let's go the other direction. And when we have chronic inflammation and develop something, you know, you can maybe explain leaky gut in a way that makes sense. We have difficulty with absorption. The microbiome is not delivering what we need out of it. And then the, the function in the brain, our mood, our sleep can all be affected.

Yeah. So the leaky gut syndrome is actually tied to a whole host of different things. So what is a leaky gut? Well, in a normal gut that is healthy, the space between your epithelial cells is tight and you have normal tight junctions. So nothing can really go in and out. But in a leaky gut, there's actually a space between those cells. And you say, well, what's that space going to allow? You know, isn't it a dynamic system? Yeah, it is, but, but now all of a sudden you have food allergens that can come in, you have pathogens that can come in. And these things will trigger other cascades of events because they end up going directly into the blood system. And you know, the vagus nerve is very important because your gut impacts the vagus nerve, which basically controls your whole GI system. And then that moves forward and controls, you know, things like dysbiosis of your gut. So imbalance, it controls depression, it controls hormone releases. Right. So a leaky gut may seem like it's insignificant. Oh, okay. Additional things come through, but those things have the capability of triggering things down the road that you will not relate to an irritated gut. And there's no, you know, coincidence that people with IBS or Crohn's disease or all these other gastroenteritis, these, these inflammatory things have other conditions that are linked to this. And some people think they're not connected, but there's a lot of data coming out now showing that they are. And having an underlying, you know, strong foundation of the gut, controlling these inflammatory complex entering the cell will help you off down the road. It's a very fascinating thing. And even, I'll say, even things like Alzheimer's, you know, bacteria have amyloid themselves. And there's been a lot of studies now that show bacterial amyloid that gets in through a leaky gut into the bloodstream can actually pass through the blood brain barrier, accumulate and actually seed our beta amyloid in the brain and allow a point for them to adhere and start inflammation. Now, I'm not saying, you know, leaky gut leads to Alzheimer's disease, but there's a lot of connections showing that it doesn't help. In fact, it exacerbates the disease.

So what Dr. Landry has said is, I mean, he has really taken decades of his life's work and synthesized it down into very small bites for you. But that is basically the lining of the GI tract. If you think of it as a tube. If somehow that tube has a, you know, it's lined with your floor tiles and those floor tiles are all squares. If those tiles are not sealed with correctly with the grout, they're going to leak and then things are going to build up. So we used to a general surgery call this translocation. So the bacteria from the bowel or the, the, you know, imbalance, which is, it could be a number of things. We'll say lps, which is something that comes from gram negative bacteria, can get into your bloodstream and contaminate you and make you feel, you know, worse or cause another reaction. So it's not kind of. This is not a new theory. We were feeding critically ill patients, and people ask me all the time why I know anything about nutrition. So just for everybody listening, so, you know, I trained in traditional general surgery. The people who trained me are the people who actually were either training at the time IV nutrition was developed or they were trained by the people who developed it. So it was very critical in my training program, in my maturation process as a surgeon to understand nutrition. I used to get quizzed on it, like, literally daily, if not weekly. You know, how much potassium is it going to take to correct Mrs. Smith's potassium level if you give it orally or IV and how long is it going to take? And should we put it in this bag and should we give it? Never ended. So fast forward. As a plastic surgeon, we took care of all the burn patients for the state of Indiana. We did. We didn't have hospitalists, we didn't have intensivists. It was the plastic surgeon. And obviously we have a lot of support through other folks. We did and measured indirect calorimetry. So we understood, you know, production of CO2 and how much, you know, we would alter their fat, carbohydrate and protein. But if you did not put a tube to feed the gut, we all knew that they were going to get sicker sooner and you could feed their gut the better they would do. So, of course, we had all sorts of ways to get this sorted, but it was very much the lesson in what you're describing, which is how to take care of the gut and eventually promote healing and get someone into a very androgenic, and I won't overstate, a parasympathetic state instead of a sympathetic state in terms of healing and recovery. And that was, you know, such a large part of my training background. And it was great. Like, people ask all the time. I worked really hard in training because training was just very rigorous, you know, when we were going through it. But you look back on it and most of my mentors have passed away now. I recently went back to the funeral of one of them. Who was that one in particular? Dr. Madura. He would just quiz you and quiz you about what should go in tpn, which is IV nutrition that you would give. And that's what saved little kids with gastrointestinal problems, malabsorptive issues. That's what kept them alive. I mean, they changed the whole mortality rate, basically, of a group of patients. And then now it's like we haven't learned many of those lessons and we kind of repeating and doing things that we should definitely understand and know better. So we'll say, now we've gotten a case where we are experiencing leaky gut, we're promoting inflammation, we're not quite understanding what we're eating. And now we have and develop mood instability. We're promoting environment for enhancement of things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And maybe we haven't paid attention to the fact we don't methylate well. And now we have hypertension, which is, you know, obviously a issue with the kidneys. And maybe we have sleep apnea, which a lot of people have and don't pay attention to. But we can talk about how lack of oxygen, brain's important. But so now like there's all these downstream consequences of just shopping in the middle of the store versus the perimeter of the store, which is, you know, obviously where we want people to spend their time. So maybe the, let's talk about, you know, the brain game in this equation and how we can protect the most important thing we have, which is our brains.

So we're in. Unfortunately, our society has evolved faster than we have. You know, we used to be hunters and gatherers and our body loves fat and high calorie things and things that are easily digested and absorbed because thousands of years ago we didn't know when we would eat. So we were, we evolved to eat the things that had the highest caloric density so that we could pack on as much weight. So when we went, you know, a few days or a week without eating, we wouldn't die, Right? Unfortunately, it takes hundreds of thousands of years to evolve, but it only has taken 200 years to make food that we have evolved to want to eat. So the food system, we create food based on what people like, right? There's a lot of focus groups, focus panels, you know, double stuff. Oreos don't exist because the food company wanted to put more cream in there. They did a focus panel and people said, I want more cream. And then they said, okay, let's make double stuffed Oreos, right? So we're unfortunately our own worst enemy when it comes to food. Now the other thing that happens with food is convenience. Again, we're our own worst enemy. We're so busy hectic lifestyles now that it's easier to eat a can of soup than to make soup yourself.

Right?

We just do not have the time that we used to have. And the third thing that really Impacts us is what we're doing now sitting at a desk. You know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, we were doing a lot of physical manual labor and then we would eat. And during that time, we were not eating the portion sizes or the types of food that we have available now. But now we have a lot of sedentary jobs, sedentary lifestyle, with high calorie processed foods that we have evolved to want to eat. And of course those are cheaper because we can make them at faster scale and larger quantities than growing peaches, right? So it's like this perfect storm. So ultimately it's up to the person to want to make that decision. I want to make this lifestyle change and choice and not blame, you know, the industry. It's always easier to blame someone else and to look at yourself and say, okay, I want to make these intentional choices. But if you have and you want to start this path, it may seem very daunting, right? You think about it, it's like, well, I got to exercise four times a day. I have to do calorie restriction. I have to get eight hours of sleep. I can't eat this. I can't. If you look at it as the whole picture, you're going to fail. It's going to be impossible to change your whole lifestyle so drastically and be able to sustain it. So what you should do is take little changes over time. And I have a saying, I always say it. I learned this from my mentor in the early 2000s when I was developing a nonstick spray for brownie trays, believe it or not, and it was inch by inch. Life's a cinch. Yard by yard. Life is hard. You put that mentality towards your diet and exercise and it makes perfect sense. It's easier to have two salads a week than change your whole diet to be how the ideal diet is. So making these small little changes, having one yogurt a week, having two salads a week, and then trying that for a few weeks until that gets ingrained and then moving forward with another change will make it more sustainable. And these impacts on the gut and the brain are compounding effect. One thing that people don't like, and I know a lot of people, you know, going to the bathroom is a problem, for some reason they don't like it. And not that you like it, but it's a challenge. Like, oh, I need to drink more coffee to go. No, you don't need stimulants. You know, your stimulants shouldn't be the main thing. It should Be what you're eating. It should be more fiber, whole fiber, soluble fiber, you know, oatmeal, stuff like this. And that's like the prebiotic, probiotic mentality where you start doing that and even the simplest, most rudimentary thing like going to the bathroom becomes easier. Therefore you feel better, you feel lighter, you know, it's one less thing that's daunting. And then this just compounds with sleep. It compounds with everything else. Not eating a few hours before you go to bed may seem, you know, everyone likes to eat chips or eat snack before go to bed. Well, dialing that back will help you sleep longer. Then you start intermittent fasting because now you haven't eaten for maybe 10, 12 hours. Right. If you factor that in with eight hours of sleep, then that will start building and compounding. So starting small things, yogurt, kombucha, sauerkraut, kefir, fruits and vegetables. And then going into the lifestyle choices of, you know, more sleep, trying to get an exercise, a 20 minute walk once a week or something like that. And then you'll just build on it.

Yeah. So what Dr. Landria is really pointing out is making tiny changes to have really long term, big results. And compounding is those very small changes become habits that then you can adopt and keep. And he's correct in that if we tell you to do all these things at one time, it's pretty challenging. And when patients come to me and they ask me what they can do basically from the time they meet with us and how can they change and help themselves, we just do the simple things like you can have better food quality, you can make these choices. I have people, you know, I need people on a lower inflammatory diet. So we just have them restrict, restrict if not eliminate gluten and dairy products. And obviously we're big proponents of eliminating seed oils because of the inflammatory issues that develop from that. So those are just like basic things. Increase your fruits and vegetables according to what we've already discussed. And then I, because of something you mentioned earlier with mycotoxins and living in Texas and taking care of patients from the coasts and mold is such a underappreciated problem.

And the pictures of fungi behind me here on the wall from the 1800s, mold is my specialty.

We didn't even talk to Dr. Landry about the fact that he discovered a new fungi.

Yeah. A new family. Yeah. A fungus. Yeah.

That is a huge problem. And not appreciating it or acknowledging it. I guess I have a lot of, of clients come to me and, and they're, they're practitioners or people they've been visiting with to help them. Don't feel like it's a real generator or stimulator of inflammation where I feel like it definitely is a co conspirator in the majority of the problems. So cleaning up air quality with better filtration uses. We use a couple different ones. Jasper here and a Swiss company, IQ Air. But then the fluid is a issue. Where I grew up, there was a lot of problems with arsenic in the groundwater. That's the most, you know, common. Probably groundwater contaminants we've all heard of, like Flint and their lead and all these other things. But maybe, and I had the CEO of Echo on recently to discuss the benefits of hydrogen and just reducing oxidative stress. All I would say is obviously that needs to be borne out more with a lot more data, but improving fluid quality and eliminating, you know, contaminants and. Well, what is your opinion on how that will help the gut microbiome?

Yeah, so the problem with all of these things is that it's chronic low dose exposure. So there's, it's very easy to measure the impact of an acute problem. Right. So if you take a high concentration of say aflatoxin, which is present in all peanut butter, present in all corn products, all wheat products, you know, we are constantly being bombarded by chronic low doses of aflatoxin. But if you put pure aflatoxin and give nanograms to milligrams just on your skin, you will go into liver failure.

Right.

Now that is easy to monitor and measure because cause and effect. But accumulating aflatoxin in your body over 20, 30, 40 years is very hard to monitor because you have so many other extrinsic factors. Cigarette, exercising, diet, predisposed conditions. Right. So as you were saying, it's very hard to pin it as, oh, it is these mycotoxins. And most people will say, well, you know, you get small concentrations in your life every day, it's not really doing anything. Yeah, but they build up over time, especially if you eat certain foods. And a great example is peanut butter. I remember why I went into food science. I'll tell you a story. So when I was doing my undergrad, I went around and I met this crazy guy and he's the one who gave me that adage, the inch by inch life's a cinch. And I went in and I was like, hey, I'm interested in being a food scientist. Oh great, let me show you this. And he pulls out these test tubes, and he puts it under a black light or UV lamp, and one is glowing blue, one is glowing green, and one is glowing red. He's like, you know what this is? I said, I have no idea what the hell this is. That's literally what I said. He said, this blue is aflatoxin B that's been extracted from peanut butter. This green is aflatoxin G that's been extracted from soy sauce. And this magenta is aflatoxin N that was extracted from some goat milk down the road. I was like, what? He's like, yeah, these are all things that kill you. He's like, it goes right to your DNA. It breaks it down, it mutates, it kills your liver. This is in our food all the time. And I'm like, why do you have these? He's like, well, I'm just doing it for the food chemistry class. So they're aware that these compounds are present. And what the kicker is, is when our body tries to excrete them, our cytochrome. Right, cytochrome P450, is enzymes in our liver. How do they get rid of these nonpolar compounds? They add oxygens to them, right, to try to make them water soluble. Well, unfortunately, with aflatoxins in particular, when they try to add oxygens or protonate them to make hydroxyl groups, they actually make oxides. And this group form is very. It's like a magnet to DNA. So our body is trying to flush them out, but it's actually making them more carcinogenic and mutagenic than the actual native form. So that's an example of a toxin where we're trying to get rid of it, but it's actually becoming more effective in the body over time.

And then when you say your body can excrete some of that through the GI tract, which is how we eliminate. Right. We sweat, we poop. That's the game. We have a bunch of people with chronic constipation. So obviously, as you already mentioned, that's a problem. You need to go every day, if not twice every day to get things out of your system. So in the event that you can actually get some of the mycotoxins out in a way that's trying to help you. It's our understanding that much of it's bound to the bile salts or gets reclaimed with the bile salt. So it's almost getting recycled back into your body.

It can be. And that's your comment about constipation and bowel movements is very important. So There's a connection between red meat and colon cancer. Right? Now, red meat, when you grill it or you cook it, it goes through something called the Maillard reaction. And this is when proteins interact with sugar. So you need a reducing sugar in a protein. So glucose or anything that is in glycogen, storage, whatever in your muscles, those make carcinogenic compounds. And if you eat a large amount of grilled meat, grilling meat is by far the, the worst for generating these carcinogenic compounds in red meat. Because of the high temperature, because I.

Just grilled a bunch yesterday. All right?

It sits in your colon. So if you have this, if this is a main form of your diet and you eat it every single day, multiple times a day, and you don't have high fiber and your stool and your bolus sits there and your GI tract, you will start absorbing more of these compounds over time, which can lead to colon cancer and other things, which is why there's such a strong correlation with it. But no one puts it together. I mean, the Maillard reaction is why in California, you have Prop 65 on coffee, right? Contains carcinogenic compounds. This is a common chemical reaction that happens in all cooking. So it's an interesting way to connect all these things.

And that's exactly why, like in Africa, there is very low incidence of colon cancer because they eat so much fiber that they just constantly move it out. So of course they're eating meat as. But it's super hard, right? That's. That's a challenge. It's not going to the grocery store and getting it on the package. It's. You got to go chase it and all right. So I gotta, you know, make sure. Increasing my frequency of bowel movements based on my. Not a complete carnivore. I eat a lot of fruits. I love eating fruit. Honestly, I, I have no problem with it. It's just. I feel much better on a higher protein diet than not. I just. It's a total. It's a different game for me whether I'm looking at how long I sleep my hrv.

Well, everyone's different. Like, that's the main thing. It's like there's not one shoe that fits everyone. Everyone's gut's different, everyone body's different. Everyone's gene expression levels are different, right? So you can't assume one thing is going to work for everyone right away. You have to ease in and see if the body adjusts appropriately.

Right?

There's all these different factors that are compound here for this.

So we're going to make some summary comments because I feel we've covered a lot and it was my intention to make sure that we tried to max out this show for you with. I mean, you could probably sit here and talk to me for a few more hours about things, but I mean.

We didn't even cover the oral microbiome and how that impacts the gut microbiome and how your skin microbiome impacts your oral microbiome and how the food microbiome impacts your oral microbiome and everything else. And then how your brain and your tendency to eat certain foods will drive all those things. Right. That's the connection is so big.

And we didn't talk about the mistake the pharmacy industry made. They created a drug that actually has a good benefit. Like, nobody understands how difficult it is to change behavior outside of a practitioner asking Kyle to go exercise like he mentioned, or to change his diet or to get more rest. Are behavior modifications the most difficult thing to change is behavior. Now they created a drug that's, you know, the GLP one. Drugs change behavior.

I think that's very important. I think it's a great tool to teach people how to get in the correct behavior.

Right.

Like it's. Your behavior is the hardest thing to change. So I think it's a great tool to have in. In the toolbox here.

But it's amazing that they now for everybody listening, it's already changed behavior. There's. When you watch the money, which is all you need to understand the money has moved out of Wal from fast food and dialysis because you have less people have diabetes, you're going to have less people get kidney failure. You have less people need dialysis and less people need kidney transplants.

But even the heart, the heart disease. It was just a paper that came out showing that it reduces the incidence of heart disease. There's one that shows that it decreases the incidence of dementia and other things. And this is basically going to highlight that our diet and lifestyle choices drives all these issues. Right.

You're reducing inflammation by stop people from eating. So they're. They're fasting.

Yeah, they're fasting, which is upregulating housekeeping genes like sirtuins and foxos and all these other things that then help repair DNA, improve the efficiency of your metabolism and your gene expression, reverse DNA methylation, improves proofreading and, you know, the epigenetics. So that we didn't even cover epigenetics, but my previous longevity. Epigenetics is what we do every day that drives our gene expression and how we age and how we get diseases. These GLP1 drugs are directly impacting your epigenetic drift and hopefully steering it back so that your body becomes more efficient. Now there may be some downfalls, right? The gut microbiome is a great example. Now you're not having, maybe you're not having as much prebiotics, right? Maybe it's not as frequent. So maybe gut care is going to have to be companion with these type of products, right? Because you're not, you don't know what's going on in the gut. We're hoping that it's shifting correctly, but it may be such a shock that it causes issues, right?

We don't know yet. Yeah, there's so much delayed gastric emptying and you never know who's got really poor function to begin with. And when I say function, I mean how you empty your stomach. So obviously before these drugs existed, there were problems with people who had delayed gastric emptying or emptying of the stomach. This definitely promotes delayed gastric empty acid.

And a lot of acid. So you have heartburn or gerds. Now you have these other things that are being exacerbated because your body's trying, you know, it thinks it ate, right? So it's trying to produce as much stomach acid as possible. Now you got leakage, right, that can cause, you know, heartburn.

To me, it's an interesting, very interesting phenomenon that I think it's one of those things where it's a super beneficial side effect modification. I don't really feel like they knew that was the, you know, oh, this is gonna happen. Like if you knew that. I don't think this comes to market.

No, in drug development. So previously I worked for, to develop a diabetic foot ulcer drug. And when you work to develop drugs, you have a very clear method of action and a very clear outcome. And you're looking at usually one or maybe two pathways. You are not thinking about three, four, five degrees of separation. Especially like the socioeconomical impact. You're not thinking about that at all.

This is just like, like I sat back one day and I was like, oh my God. A drug that changes behavior but in the correct way, as far as I'm concerned, has never been brought to market with this kind of clear side effect.

I mean this obesity is like the world epidemic, right? Almost everyone, you know, someone has it. It's not like it's a rare disease or something that is temporary, right? This is something that builds over a lifetime. And your behavioral choices, you get stuck, you don't want to change it. So what you had, you know, bad habits continue to build. So now we have such a large population size of people using it who have similar tendencies and habits. Now you're going to start seeing both the positives and negatives.

Yeah. It's just amazing to sit back as a, you know, you look at it like, wow, that's going to have a lot. I mean, it's probably in 10 years we have a little show and say what had the most impact. You're gonna, you know, these GLB1 agonists, like they changed everything.

The only thing I will say that may, that we talked about in the beginning, a lot of signage, a lot of hype, a lot of influencers. Right. Now that people are aware and try to go towards these products, you may see an increase in the gray and increase in understanding what these things actually mean. If all these people are shifting their mindset. Right. So the consumer perception, the consumers may be more confused now on what is real and what is not because the market for these are exploding.

Yeah. And there's, to Dr. Landry's point, there is going to be a host of products now that are oral liquid based that are all going to be, you know, have to be vetted for the legitimacy, but they're all going to be doing and leveraging the same types of things because ultimately when you change behavior, you change the outcome.

Yeah.

On that note, thank you for coming on the show, Dr. Landry. It's been a pleasure having you.

No problem. Anytime.