Support The Right Bacteria to Restore Your Gut Health, with Dr. Oscar Coetzee@designsforhealth3090

Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubow. Ed Levitan's here with us today, and today we have Dr. Oscar Kutsy. And I practiced that before we started. He has over 25 years of experience in psychology and nutrition and currently serves as the VP of Clinical Education and Practice Practitioner support at Designs for Health, which is a company we love. He has held faculty positions at various universities, and he holds multiple degrees, including a PhD in holistic nutrition and holds a Doctorate of Clinical Nutrition. So, Oscar, welcome.

Well, thanks for having me, Wendy and Anne. It's great to be here.

Our pleasure. How'd you get into this?

Yeah, I'm sorry, say again?

How'd you get into this field? Like, what was the moment where you said, oh, I got to do this kind of Yeah, it's a good question.

I, I started out in the field of psychology and working at Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, as a matter of fact, and doing, you know, an internship there. And there was a, there was a psychiatrist there by the name of Dr. Mark Gold who was kind of my boss. And he at that point made mention to me that, you know, there's, there's an area of mental health that nobody is focusing on, like this nutritional psychiatric overlap. And this was way back in like 1992 or 1993. And at that point, I'm like, yeah, right. I still want to pursue my PhD in psychology at that point because I just finished my master's. And it turns out at that point, my mom got ill, went back to South Africa where I'm from originally, and discovered that part of her demise was associated to lifestyle and issues with Western medicine approaches to treating certain issues. And kind of the shift happened, you know, so I came back to the US after a short stint in South Africa and, you know, went back to school, did my master's in nutrition, still practiced psychology, and then started to have a little bit of an overlap between the psychology and nutritional component. And, you know, just kind of put the pedal to the metal and, you know, went down the nutrition route and psychology became the secondary aspect of the intervention.

Yeah. So how do you— I know you work a lot with the gut and the microbiome. So how are you connecting the gut with psychology and people and thinking and thoughts?

Oh, it's such an obvious direct connection. It's almost scary, right? So if you look at some of the bacteria in our gut, they have this very unique pathway in their bodies or their systems called shikimate pathway. And this is a little biochemical pathway that only bacteria have, and very unique strains of bacteria. And what they do is they produce these aromatic amino acids. Now, the listeners will be familiar with tryptophan and tyrosine. So that's the aromatic amino acids that are produced by these microbes in our gut.

So now— We gotta pause for a minute. Wait, I'm sorry, Oscar, but we have to pause because when I first looked at that word, I read it shikamate. And you called it— I think you called it properly. But for the listeners, it's S-H-I-K-A-M-A-T-E. A-T-E. And, this is the pathway that glyphosate messes with. Yes. So, you are now my favorite person because I love talking about glyphosate. So anyway, I'm going to let you keep going. I'm going to leave.

I'm going to let you guys talk because I'll come back in an hour.

No, that's a really key component that you're bringing up there. Okay. So, the reason that the world out there looks at glyphosate as this innocuous little thing is because humans don't have a shikimate pathway. Right, bacteria do. So they claim, well, you don't have a shikimate pathway. How can this affect you? Because plants have, and you know, all these kind of weeds in in the ground, they have the shikimate pathways because those aromatic amino acids help them survive, right, and interact with each other. So what happens is that glyphosate is actually a chelating agent. So what it does, it pulls metals out of out of things. So there's manganese in the shikimate pathway. So it pulls manganese out of the shikimate pathway, and then it collapses the entire. Now, let's take a step back. If you're eating a processed diet or things with a lot of glyphosate on it, which 95% to 99% of us do, whether we want to or not, we're literally destroying the shikimate pathways in our body. Now, we're basically destroying the thing that makes tryptophan and tyrosine. Now, here's where it gets complicated. Let's say hypothetically speaking, you have a good shikimate pathway and you're not exposed to glyphosate, and your body is producing natural amounts of tryptophan and tyrosine. For the listeners, just understand that tyrosine converts to dopamine and tryptophan converts to serotonin, right? So those are 2 neurotransmitters that everybody is familiar with. But if you don't have proper blood sugar regulation and insulin response, those amino acids cannot be carried through the blood-brain barrier. So what I'm saying is people that have pre-diabetic state, insulin resistance— so insulin is basically the caravan or the cab that takes the aromatic amino acid and crosses it into the blood-brain barrier. So, this is why—

That's really cool, actually. Yeah.

So, this is why we now realize that people with diabetes and prediabetes are more predisposed to have major depressive disorder, anxiety, and depression. So, there's that connection.

Oh, I learned something new.

Yeah.

So, let's say hypothetically speaking, those babies are in the brain. So, you have good insulin, you don't have a glyphosate issue, Now you still require iron, the metal, manganese, B6 before that converts to serotonin and to melatonin. And there's your complete tie-in from the gut to your metabolism to micronutrients before you can be in a happy state. So there's many factors that need to be looked at before you can really determine if that person is metabolically or nutritionally in a good place to convert those. So this is where my life has become a major thing. I look at mental health as a 3-pronged bar stool. Number 1, psychiatry. Yeah, there is a place for psychiatric meds, maybe not to the level that we're doing it, but there is. Number 2, psychotherapy, social work, psychology. Therapeutic discussions with somebody is helpful, you know, for certain conditions. But the one part that nobody looks at is everything that I've just discussed. So, if you have compromise in those areas, It's very difficult that these other 2 would work.

So can we back up?

But we're missing a whole bunch of, like, trauma and psychedelics and all sorts of prongs that, that help, that work with mental health.

He works in a barstool. You might work in a table with 10 legs. So, so to each their own. Just to recap, so the bacteria in our gut Are the ones producing the raw materials that we then— they're producing it, but if their shikimate pathway is disrupted, they are not producing it. And then we don't have the raw materials in order to get to serotonin and dopamine.

Correct. But you still have the extraction of those raw materials to a certain extent from the foods that you eat, right? So there will still be some tryptophan coming in through the food sources, but not to the level that the microbes can produce it because it is a symbiotic cohesive relationship between us. And remember, tryptophan and tyrosine is not just used for mental health stuff, right? It's used to build a tremendous amount of other systems and cellular evolvements in the human body. It's a very common amino acid on amino acid chains when we're building certain immune cells or skin cells or whatever else other cells our bodies need to do.

And, we can't make those, right? I'm not remembering which ones are essential versus non-essential.

Yeah, no, it's an essential amino acid. So, we need to extract it from food sources or alternatively, the microbes in our guts make it for us, which is again one of the most overlooked areas of precursor or substrate extraction probably in human biology.

And, not to get too crazy about glyphosate because this isn't about that today, we have other shows on glyphosate where I lose my cookies, But I think it's really important to highlight that even when you eat all organic food, you're still getting glyphosate exposures. And that even organics, especially organic beans, are rife with glyphosate. So you can eat a beautifully organic diet and still get pretty good exposures to glyphosate.

It's very hard to get away from it. It's a water-soluble molecule. It gets in everywhere. It's in the rainwater. It's in your shower water. It's literally been patented as a descaling agent, which means that it ripens foods quickly. It's been patented in certain ways as an antibiotic. I mean, it's just not something that you can get away from. So, we kind of have to just agree and admit to the fact that it's in our presence. And, what can we do to minimize the exposure to it, right? What can we do to at least somewhat overcome it? Now, eating an organic diet, maybe drives a little bit more polyphenols and fiber that maybe makes your human gut a little bit more diverse. And then you can get a little bit better in your tight junction regulation or your permeability, your leaky gut as people call it. But it's a consistent battle. And that is, by the way, the main reason that we are so low as humans nowadays in very important keystone commensal strains that we can talk about because they also have an interaction with mental health and overall health.

Can you talk about that?

Yeah, so the one that most listeners would be very familiar with would be Akkermansia, right? Akkermansia muciniphila. And that is a strain of bacteria that literally regulates endogenous production of GLP-1. So that means that we literally have bacteria in our gut that can help us make GLP-1s, like to help us regulate weight in weight loss. And there's several areas in the gut that can actually do that. The other one would be Roseburia. So Roseburia is another microbe that isn't super abundant in volume, but extremely important because that microbe drives a lot of the hypoxia in the gut, which means the anaerobic state where there is no oxygen so the other guys can live together. And probably the one most connected with mental health, we're just kind of talking about that, would be Faecalibacterium Faustneria or F. prau. So those 3 keystone bacteria we see commonly low in people today. And when you go back to what drives the numbers being so low in human guts, glyphosate comes up, antibiotics come up, proton pump inhibitors come up, the use of artificial sweeteners come up, lack of fiber comes up, macro-isolated diets. I know everybody wants to do a keto diet or a carnivore diet or a FODMAP diet. Because it improves their symptoms. But actually, those diets are so diminished in diversity that it drives lower commensal species in the gut, which is kind of strange because most people in your audience that go to a doctor and she has bloating and distension and gut irritation, they're going to throw her on a FODMAPs diet and she's immediately going to feel better. Now, that is symptom regulation. That's not fixing anything, right? And my theory has always been, you know, your gut is working well When you can eat anything without bloating, distension, or a side effect.

Right. Well, I mean, let's double-click on that for a second, because the point of like a FODMAP diet is to do that temporarily, to re-regulate the gut microbiome so that they then they can eat whatever they want to eat.

So correct.

But in terms of keto or carnivore, yes, it's a very limited—

It's meant to be done. You know, you're meant to flex keto and you're meant to flex carnivore. You're not meant to go on and stay on forever. Agreed.

Agreed. And I think that's, you know, look, there's a lot of literature that supports keto diets with glioblastoma for cancer research, for epileptic seizures. You know, there's certainly the argument to be made, but I think it needs to be looked at as a medicinal intervention, not a permanent solution, you know, unless that person, you know, needs to stay on that because of epileptic seizures. But then you need to do some other things to at least give your gut a little bit more diversity.

Like what? I guess that's the question, you know, because— so I only see women, and I have a lot of people with PCOS and insulin resistance, and they're winding up on what I would call keto light. not necessarily full-on keto, but kind of just before full keto because it's not sustainable for a lot of these women to be on full keto. But what are they doing? What can they do in terms of supplementation to balance out? And is the supplementation even actually effective if we're looking to help put in diversity?

Yes, that's a great question, Wendie. Yes and no, right? It's early-stage indicators for us. So as a company, we're doing quite a bit of research currently on looking at polyphenols and fibers and which specific ones actually play a role with these very keystone anaerobic strains of bacteria. And we're stumbling upon some very interesting things. Clearly, if a person is on a ketogenic diet and they're on that for a reason, for weight plateau or, you know, some other metabolic reason, clearly it's going to help. The problem though is if you don't have the diversity, then the microbiome is not going to ever be able to produce endogenous GLP-1 to the level that it should, that is going to help you maintain that weight loss. So we've looked at our fibers, we've looked at our Essential greens and reds, you know, and our polyphenols. And it turns out that the non-flavored essential greens and reds in a dried form— so you're literally just taking vegetables and greens and purples and yellows and just drying them out, and you're chucking them into the gut— that apparently excites these people tremendously. And it kind of makes sense, you know, to a certain extent, because it's just real food, right? So you don't have anything to Flavor it or sweeten it, and this is why I sometimes say to people, "Hey, look, not everything you eat has to taste good, right? It just has to do good." And that is probably the only way that you can, unless you're taking these anaerobic strains of probiotics nowadays, you you you cannot really replenish it normally. And the problem with these bacteria that we're talking about, those three Roseburia, Akkermansia, and Faecalibacterium prausnitzii. Is that it's always been pretty impossible to get them in a supplement 'cause they're anaerobic. So it's very difficult to encapsulate them. Now that technology has evolved to the point where that is now available, right? You can actually now take that supplement. And I always tell people that is like an ancestral seed. So our bodies internally completely know these strains of bacteria because they've been a part of us for millions of years, right? And when you put it back into the gut, They want to live there and they want to work together as a community to do that, but you need to help them, right? You can't be on a standard American diet and thinking that you're going to help them. So better colors, eating more seasonally, eating more diverse will kind of put that seed in the ground and then fertilize it, and then it can start to engraft. And what we started to see with some of the clinical trials that we're looking at, the engraftment or the growth of these bacteria back in your gut actually can happen as early as 2 weeks, between 2 weeks and 12 weeks, but it's not going to stay there unless you support it. It's just like a flower garden, you know, if you put flowers in soil and you fertilize it and you water it, comes beautiful flowers, and then you leave it alone for a week, they're going to wilt, right? You need to give it consistent support. But the beauty about this is the first time we've ever seen that these anaerobic strains are growing. And just before I have handed back over to you guys. I want to explain the importance of anaerobic strains, right? So when we have bacteria in our gut in the form of a probiotic and a lactobacillus or a bifidobacterium or whatever, there's tons of research that shows that it works, right? But only if you take the product. When you stop taking the product, there isn't a long-term period after that that they hang around because they're transient. They do not come from human donors, right? They are made from fermentation or fruits or veggies or dairy or whatever. So they really serve a purpose as you're using them. The analogy that I have for that is it's a bouquet of flowers. We all love flowers. We want flowers in our house. We buy a bouquet. It's looking beautiful. Every day we've got to go buy a new bouquet, or every 3 days or every week. We need to keep having that. The idea behind these commensals, these keystones, is to plant your own flower garden so that they can grow. Now, the most important thing about these anaerobic strains of bacteria is that they don't act like bacteria. They literally act like an accessory organ system. So they really work like a kidney or a lung or something like that. For instance, Akkermansia helps you make goblet cells. So the bacteria in your gut is literally providing things to your body to build new cells. So that's totally different from a traditional probiotic right now. In addition to that, if you have these strains present in your body, the other bacteria hang around longer. So the other probiotics that you take work better because those probiotics have certain things that they produce that the other ones eat, and then that community becomes Very, very cohesive. Yes.

Can you give this— turn that last 5 minutes into a top 3 to 5? Like, here's what that looks like in real life for our listeners. When you say plant the garden, water the garden, maintain the garden, what does the planting, the watering, and the maintaining look like when you track it?

So in my opinion, if you run a stool test, a functional stool test, and you're low in these anaerobes, generally speaking, you're going to have a chronic condition, right? Because with these anaerobes being low, you're going to have prediabetes, metabolic syndrome, GI, IBS, something is going to be off when you have one of these out of whack. So the approach would be to put a person like that on these strains for 8 to 12 weeks, right? And in that period, obviously try and educate them as much as you can as a counselor or a doc to improve their lifestyle with more fibers and prebiotics and things like that. And then kind of try and maintain it. So I find that to be differentiated between my patients. I have patients that are fully committed, and after three months I can give this product to them four times a year. You know what I mean? Like every quarter, and that should be good because they're eating healthy enough. And other people just don't want to stop drinking alcohol or eating more processed foods, and you know they might need a little bit more of it. But effectively, the way the seed works is the probiotic. The way that the feeding and the watering works is how many colors are you eating? How much seasonal are you eating? You can't completely void natural sugars because these guys like sugars. And there's just a study published today about low sugar diet and complete eradication of sugars. I'm talking about fruit sugars and natural fructose, how that affects the microbiome. So, you know, you need that, that level of diversity to keep it. Once you do that, they'll, they'll stay around. So just for your information, we've paired up with a laboratory that does a lot of functional testing. So we looked at 17,000 stool tests, and out of the 17,000 stool tests, 65% of them showed indication of low anaerobes. So that kind of ties in with where we are in chronic disease, right? So it's kind of a very, very, very similar number.

Let's back up for a second because We're making an assumption that our audience knows what anaerobic and aerobic is. So, can you— do you mind just backing up and let's do a high level and why do we care? Yeah.

Okay.

So, aerobic bacteria or bacteria that live in an aerobic environment, meaning that they can live in oxygen, right? So, they can live at different areas of the gut because some areas of the gut are more exposed to oxygen than others. Generally speaking, the bacteria that fall into that category can also be things that called opportunistic or pathogenic. So some of the bad guys are very happy in oxygen. Okay, so the whole idea behind the gut— and an unhealthy gut is generally a very oxygenated gut. A healthy gut is very much a deoxygenated gut, so that they don't have a lot of oxygen floating around. So how you do that is you compete, right? So you bring in a team of players that produce no oxygen, and the no oxygen tends to crowd out the oxygen group. Right? So, basically, from the anaerobic standpoint, think of, again, all the bacteria that have been in our world, in our bodies for hundreds and thousands of years that want to live there. They know how to cohesively work with us. They have a cellular and an immunological connection with our bodies. So, they are, let's call them highly intellectual bacteria that want to work with humans. Okay, those are your anaerobic bacteria. And then the other bacteria is more, hey, I'm around, I can give you a little bit of food, but I'm not going to make new cells for you, or I'm not going to express your immune system. I'm just kind of here to, to feed these guys, these anaerobes, to do their job a little bit better. Does that make more sense?

Yeah, no, it's awesome. And just come from, you know, continue to back up. So for our audience, We have more microbiomes, bacteria in our gut, than we have cells in our body.

Right.

So this is something that's super, super important to our health. They make not only the tryptophan amino acids, they make a lot of vitamins, minerals, break down, help digestion, help mood, help insulin resistance, everything you name it. Microbiome has been implicated in just about everything.

And that's why your health starts in your gut. That's why we say that for the listeners. But what's really interesting, Oscar, that you just brought up is this sort of brings it full circle as we were talking about glyphosate. Because from what I understood, the beneficial bacteria that we rely on in our gut do have the shikimate pathway, and the nastier, less needed bacteria that are not pro-beneficial for us don't have the shikimate pathway. So when we eat the glyphosate, we're selecting out for bacteria that aren't good for us and getting rid of the good bacteria, the beneficial and the mood stabilizing, the insulin regulating. Like, we're self-selecting.

And that's why my wife yells at me if I ever buy non-organic blueberries.

Still salty about that.

Yeah, I just say, let me sketch the That's the landscape for the listeners. Let's talk about the gut as a landscape, and let's not just blame glyphosate because it is a major issue, but this problem started way before glyphosate was even around. Okay, so, so hear me out. So let's go 500, 600 years ago. We don't even have to go 1,000 years ago. Let's just go 500, 600 years ago before we were a very sterilized community and washing our hands and antibacterial this and antibacterial that. In our guts, we actually have things called protists, and we also have things called helminths. So those are kind of like wormy-like things and other forms of bacteria that when we look at them under a microscope, it's like, oh, get this stuff out of here, it's horrible-looking parasitical little thing. And it turns out that the people that still have protists and helminths in their body have no autoimmune disease, And they have no skin issues, so no eczema, no psoriasis. It doesn't exist. Now you got to think, why is that? Well, maybe because these wormies or these other protists like bacteria created a state of competition, right? So you your guys had to work a little harder to stay around, and they kept these guys in check. So then we decide four five hundred years ago, oh my God, we're gonna get rid of everything. that looks like a worm or a parasite, and we're going to sterilize every single component of your body. So now we go in and we kill all those things, okay? Antibiotics and the technology of modern medicine and being clean, and there's benefits to that, but you know what I'm saying, right? So what did we create now? Now we created this niche space. So now this is open area. So you had all these apartment buildings, you had not the greatest personalities, but they still contributed to the community living in apartment A, and then on the other side you had the really good guys, but they all drove on the same roads, they served the same communities, and they all worked together, right? Even though they didn't really like each other, didn't matter, you know, they just worked very well together. But now you have a completely empty amount of apartments, and all of a sudden the fungi decides, hmm, I can go live for free in that apartment. And the other opportunistic— and that's why they're called opportunistic bacteria— decided Why are we living here? Why don't we go live in those apartments? So all of a sudden you have fungus and opportunistic bacteria starting to fill in this other niche space. This is where the modern IBS comes from, right? So we have this open area, we have these microbes in our gut, they feed off the things that we eat. If you eat a processed diet with a lot of sugars, the fungi is going to grow, not your anaerobes. So they're going to move into the niche space. So this is why when we look at these, these, these stool tests, we find that the opportunistic bacteria, the fungi, the pathogens are living in the area where those worms used to live. Now, I'm not saying bring the worms back, okay? Even though there are therapies out there—

I was gonna say, how much—

Wait, I know people who walk around with worms.

Yeah, exactly. They've used helminth therapy, right? And they've used fecal transplantation for good benefit. But the best way to get that apartment building back to rent-paying members would be to bring the anaerobes in, because they're very powerful. They are very tough. And they regulate the community from what gets built and what doesn't get built, because they're such an integral part of our system that if you put them back in place, they take care of Of pretty much everything else. And that's kind of the origin of that. Now we threw glyphosate in there, stomach acid medications, antibiotics on top of all of the cleansing. No wonder we're dealing with what we're dealing with.

A hot freaking mess.

So where does the spore-based probiotics, the bacillus species, fall into this?

Very, no, very, very important component to the microbiome, but a supporting actor, not a main actor. The spore biotics, as a general rule, obviously, they sporulate, and they can find themselves in the gut. They produce lactate. They produce propionate. They produce these short-chain fatty acids or foods that these other guys eat. So, the spore-based probiotics are probably the first co-actor in the whole show. But the spore-based probiotics are not the one that is going to Ignite immunological change or long-term, you know, on their own. So again, these probiotics are important, but they're not the solution to permanently change the gut.

So I have a couple of questions about this. So I've seen Akkermansia as a standalone probiotic. So I have 2 questions about that. But I haven't seen the other 2 that you've referenced. So are there products that contain all 3? And for the single strain, how would we even know that it was actually delivering? Are we— can we assume that if they're offering Akkermansia, which is anaerobic, that it's done well and what you're taking is what you're getting?

You cannot believe how good of a question that is. Okay, so yes and no. So there are anecdotal indicators with practitioners having given people live strains and dormant strains of Akkermansia, having a pre- and post-stool test done with Akkermansia and not really moving the needle of the Akkermansia tremendously. I mean, not enough where you can say, hey, this is a substantial movement to optimization. This is why the community thing is so important. And, the delivery of that in a single donor where that microbe community have worked together. Now, I don't want people to think about stool transplants here. I'll explain the differences there. So basically, Imagine in layman's terms that you can take bacteria from a very healthy gut without the yuckiness of the poop thing involved with it, and you can take that and put it in a capsule and use it to transplant them. Let me explain to you why Akkermansia by itself doesn't move the needle, even though theoretically it should, because Akkermansia by itself cannot do all the work together. So the reason that these We have 5 strains now, the product that I'm talking about. In answer to your question, yes, there is a product on the market currently that contains Faecalibacterium prausnitzii and Roseburia. And, it's the first-ever product that has done that. And, it's the only product on the market currently that's doing that. So, that product initiated originally from research that was done for people that had C. diff overgrowth. And I'm sure that most people would know that C. diff is a very nasty bacteria that takes hold of people in, in a very hospital-like cleansed setting, and they cannot get rid of it. So what they did is they took these particular commensal strains and a couple more, and they inserted in these people, and it outperformed fecal microbial transplantation to the C. diff. Okay, so that's kind of at a big medical level. So now when you have the MET-1 and MET-2 studies, which is the C. diff study, they used about 33 strains of commensals. Now if I have to develop a strain like that, Wendy and Ed, it'll cost $1,500 per person per month to do. Nobody is going to do that, right? C. diff needed that level of intervention. So through scientific research and working with several universities, The company that originated that, plus us and the universities of research, pulled five strains out that synergistically work together from a single donor. But if you put it in the body, the one is making it anaerobic. The one is regulating the pH. The one is fermenting food so that these guys stay around and they work together as a community. So the one is a butcher. The one is a as a gardener, the other one was a mechanic, and the other one was a whatever, doctor, whatever. They're all working together as a community. Now, we're very early stage in that. And as a matter of fact, we've done several clinical trials, human clinical trials currently, and the publications are just about ready to be written up. And we have seen substantial movement in those strains of bacteria by moving Akkermansia higher But giving all of these strains together when acromancy is signed. I'm going to give you something else that's very interesting. One of the doctors that was part of this research works with MS patients, multiple sclerosis patients. And I'm not talking about huge studies now. I'm talking about, you know, 4 or 5 people in clinical trials just from a budgetary standpoint that's realistic, you know, to us. This person saw that there is a pattern of elevated Akkermansia in people with multiple sclerosis. Now, generally speaking, I'll explain to the audience, when these microbes go high, it's normally as a compensation because the other ones are low. They don't have enough work, so they, they're trying to do more work because that's what they're naturally inclined to do. So this doc was very concerned that the Akkermansia is one of the ingredients in our strain, and she didn't want to give it to the patients. So we said, listen, we can't tell you what to do, but here's how it works, and here's the theory behind elevated Akkermansia in MS patients. So she was convinced enough to accept her patients to say, hey, are you willing to try this? They went on it, and they lowered Akkermansia that was elevated by taking Akkermansia because the Akkermansia and the other products really work together. Do you follow what I'm saying? So you're bringing in this live strain that comes and says, hey, Akkermansia, I know you're working really hard. We're going to give you roseberry to take a little bit of the load off you. We're going to give you F. prau to bring the pH to where it's supposed to be. And you can take a chill pill and bring it back down. So I think what we're learning, and we're all learning, is that the microbes in the gut, when you see high Clostridia species, which is a bad guy, might not be a bad guy deliberately. It might just try to make something that you don't have, and that's why it's elevated. And the explanation to that is very simple. Think about a field where the soil has been tarnished. What is the first thing that comes up? Weeds. Weeds are no different than opportunistic bacteria. The reason that weeds come up is because they want to kind of refertilize the soil so that the other plants and the earthworms can all come back. So what we're starting to do is, hey, let's stop killing all the weeds. Let's try and understand what the weeds are doing. And what we found is that when we bring these guys in, they crowd out the weeds without having to use antimicrobials and antibiotics. So that's really a completely dimensional shift on the way we've been doing it, you know, up until this point as clinicians, myself included. You know, I've used antimicrobials and I will still use them. You know, in certain cases. But what I'm starting to wonder is, hey, this gut is so intelligent. And like you say, at so many bazillions of of these strains of bacteria we have in our guts, they know what to do if they're given the right environment. Let them just do what they do, and they sort out their own problems by crowding out the opportunists. So we had one case that we published on. that the person had high overgrowth of histamine-producing bacteria. We gave him only the strain of these anaerobes, and it literally crowded out all those opportunists. And I could tell you right now that it would've taken me 3 months of antimicrobials to bring that number down to normalcy. And it was 3 months of just the antimicrobial. Now, this is all early stage, N of 4, N of 9, N of 1 studies, but they're showing really, really positive outcomes currently.

So how long has the product been out at this point?

The product has been out about 2 months, but, you know, we've been working on it for about 3 years, you know, as far as, you know, the research and the evolvement. And the beauty about this is the company that originated this with the original C. diff study, they approached us. It's not like we created this. They literally came to us and said, hey, You know, we're working in this medical pharmaceutical health industry, but we do see the potential of really chronic disease and going from 33 strains to 5 really key strains because of the cost factor, but also what's the best bang for your buck.

So do people see a clinical change when they start taking this? You've been working on for 3 years, so have you seen— not only do you notice restoration of what you would expect in a normal or moving towards normal microbiome. But then do people experience it? Because I'm assuming that this, even though you've minimized the cost, I'm assuming that it's still not like, oh, it's $20. It's not in that realm, right? This is still a commitment for people. So do they notice a clinical improvement that justifies the cost for them?

Definitely. So the numbers move, and when the numbers move, the clinical outcomes would improve. Okay, so here's what we've seen. We're seeing eczema, psoriasis, histamine reactions dissipate. We're seeing symptom improvement in all levels of IBS, whether it was constipation or diarrhea-based IBS. We're seeing improvement in certain cases of people with Crohn's disease as far as some of the symptoms are concerned. Mental health improvements. You know, all the symptoms that that individual— because remember, when Ed comes into my office with low EFPRO and you come into my office with low EFPRO, you might have different symptoms to him. You might have skin conditions and you might have anxiety and depression. So what we're seeing is that when those numbers go up, those immediate symptoms start to improve. The key thing that we see with everybody that is really actually remarkable As you know, that the patients that come to us that are in the office and they can eat only 5 or 6 foods because everything reacts to them, right? And they do food allergy testing and they have 50 foods.

Hypersensitive. They're the hypersensitive patients.

We have people that can eat those foods now without any side effects, even though the IgG testing is still showing a positive reaction. So somehow it's really tightening up those gates. From a permeability standpoint, so I can tell you the symptom improvement is probably more radical than the data points that we're seeing on the testing as such.

So how long of a treatment do you need to see? Is it you were you mentioned eight weeks, but like how long is the treatment course?

Because yeah, we're not a hundred percent sure on that one yet. That's why we've run clinical trials for eight weeks and clinical trials for. 12 weeks, but we've seen substantial improvement in people between 8 and 12 weeks with this.

And then you stop, and then you do another, what, 2-week treatment every quarter when you say you're treating them quarterly?

So that's for the very active patient that is taking care of their lifestyle, right? So let's say for people like us that have awareness and what we eat, and we kind of living the life, but we're still going to have a drink every now and then and eat candy bar or whatever. For me personally, you know, I took it for 3 months and now I take one session of it every quarter.

Okay.

But I have patients that refuse to stop drinking and I'm not, you know, their, their coach to the point where I'm going to be involved with their lives and be, you know, you cannot do that. A person that's eating 40% processed food, drinking a little bit of alcohol, they might need to take this thing after the initial phase. One week on, one week off. Some people, one month on, one month off. You're always going to need a little bit of it because glyphosate knocks it out, right? Antibiotics knocks it out. So, the maintenance phase is going to be dependent on the person's commitment. And, you know what, maybe as a population, we need to say, you know, it's worth running a stool test once a year as part of my functional makeup to see if I'm healthy. And look at where you are once a year. You know, if those things start to drop, then take more. If it's good, you can take a little bit less. But the consistency of application is you're going to have to take it if you're living on planet Earth, right?

And are there any downsides, Oscar? So are the hypersensitive patients people who need to somehow take less, or is this generally well tolerated?

Generally well tolerated. Every now and then you're going to have a patient that you start with and, you know, hypersensitive individuals can say, hey, I'm very bloated for the first 2 or 3 days, then you back off the dosing instead of once a day because you're only taking 1 cap once a day. 1 a day, you're going to go maybe once every second day. You accommodate the patient from that standpoint. But overall, I would say probably 90% patients have had literally no side effects whatsoever because It's a microbe that's supposed to be there. It's almost like I'm coming to you and say, hey, here's a new kidney. Your kidney is like a little shot. I'm giving you a new one. You know, and let's say the kidney can completely adapt theoretically in your body. Your body's like, great, I can use the new kidney because the old one's a little beaten up. This is literally what you're giving the body. You're literally giving the body pieces of a Lego piece that fits perfectly, and they want to finish the puzzle.

Right.

So, it's not like I'm bringing in something to stabilize anything. I'm literally bringing in something that the body is, where's this been? I need Akkermansia. I need Akkermansia to make GLP-1. I need Akkermansia to stimulate my immune cells. I need Akkermansia to make new dendritic cells. That's all the things that they do. So, you literally— and here's one other important component for you, and this is going to excite you, Wendie. Faecalibacterium prausnitzii actually makes shikimic acid that stimulates the shikimate pathway. So the F. prau brings a substrate in there to make the other shikimate pathway saying, woohoo, where, where have you been? Thank you for bringing the food that makes tryptophan and tyrosine.

Sweet.

This is amazing.

This is huge.

So how do people find out more? Where can they be in touch? Give us some information and we'll put this all in the show notes.

Absolutely. So for people, the general audience, clearly this is sold through practitioners and coaches and medical people. But if you go online to designsforhealth.com and you just go put in the little search section, complete commensal. There will be a patient sheet that you can download and read in layman's terms, kind of what this is all about. You could also on the website track down a practitioner that you could get this from. It's not hard to do. And I know there's a bias clearly because I come onto a show and I talk about something. I've been, like you said, Wendy, in clinical practice for 25 years. Yeah. I'm a pretty educated individual. I don't get super stoked up and charged up by a new supplement every now and then because, you know, it just does something unique. I have literally spent the last 2 and a half years researching every one of these strains to the point of I couldn't believe what they do, right? Like, literally, I could not fathom how much these particular strains can do in the body. So if there is one thing that I can tell people If you use this as base for your family, whether you want to use it for 12 weeks, even if you don't have any signs or symptoms of being sick, I literally think this is one of the best preventative things that you can do, you know, from from a standpoint for your gut and something that's really going to engraft. Now we are about a month away from doing a couple of publications on our findings, so I'd be happy in the next month or two months if you want me to. Once we've done that, I will come back and actually share with you. This is what happened to CD. Of patients. This is what happened to Crohn's patients. This is what happened to anxiety and depressed patients, food allergy patients. And I'll be able to come back and share a little bit of the data points for you, you know, on the outcomes of those studies. But it's literally a simple way without having to change your life and eat only carrots and vegetable juices for 16 months and only be on a keto diet. You know, you know how it Works right. It's literally something that gives everybody the opportunity to have a little bit better gut. Amazing.

All right. So thank you because this has been a lot to chew on.

I learned a lot.

I learned a lot to chew on.

I can't say that for a lot of times. So this is awesome. Thank you.

I love talking about shikimate pathway.

So I'm glad I brought it up.

Yeah, me too. So Oscar, thank you for joining us for this episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. This has been awesome. And for the listeners, check it out. Thank you.