If your gut isn't dialed in, then nothing else works the way that it should. Your immune system, your energy, your performance, your mental health— all of it starts in the gut. Did you know that 99.9% of probiotics are dead before they ever reach your gut? That's That's why I want to tell you about Just Thrive probiotic. The simple truth: most probiotics on the market are dead before they ever reach your gut, and you're wasting your money. But Just Thrive is completely different. It contains 4 clinically studied spore-based strains that actually survive the journey and make it to your gut intact. Enhance nutrient absorption, reduce bloating, and a seriously fortified immune system. And remember, 80% of your immunity is rooted in your gut. I have a special offer for all of my listeners from Just Thrive today. When you start a 90-day probiotic subscription, you'll get a free 90-day supply of their new digestive bitters. Digestive bitters support natural GLP-1 production, helping you manage your appetite and cravings. So visit justthrivehealth.com/dylan and get your free digestive bitters with your first 90-day probiotic subscription today. Hey everyone, I wanted to make an intro before the intro to explain what was happening here.
So my guest today Karan Krishnan is far beyond an expert. He is unlike any that I have ever spoken with. And midway through the podcast, I quickly realized that it was going to take a lot of time to go over all of the aspects of the gut that we need to talk about. So this is gonna be a long series of topics that Karan and I dive into. And so this is part 1 of an extensive series on every single aspect of the gut that you are going to need. To fully enhance your quality of life and your health. So dig in because the information that's presented here is intricate, but it's done so in a manner of where your understanding is going to be easy, deep. So stay tuned because there is a lot to learn and I am just honored and pleasured to start this series and to deliver the goods on everything you need to know about your gut. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the Dylan Gemelli Podcast. I am amped for my guest today. I will keep it very clear as I always do. I am very, very particular about brands and concepts, ideas, anything that I work with, put on my show.
Everybody out there that follows me knows this. And I have really taken a deep study into the gut. Given all the guests I've had on here, people that want to dive into it, experts, et cetera. And I have yet, and this is saying something, 'cause I've had some of the most world-renowned experts on here, run into somebody with as much, much knowledge as my guest today. He has absolutely blown me away. So you gotta sit back and relax and get ready 'cause we're gonna get into a ton. I'm gonna grill him. We're gonna make it palatable, easy to understand, but very scientific. Now he's with Just Thrive. And I bring this up because I have been around, talked to, taken damn near every supplement you can take when it comes to the gut. And with this brand, this company, these people, this group, and especially my guest, I have been far past blown away. I cannot give enough credit, accolade, and appreciation So we're gonna get into everything with Just Thrive today as well, and why I came to fall in love with them. But my guest today is a research microbiologist and he is a health and wellness expert.
He aims to make complex information understandable to everyone, and you're gonna find that relatively quickly throughout this conversation. Now, he's founded a number of successful health and supplement companies over the last 20 years. Including co-founding and leading Microbiome Labs, which many of you have heard of. But he's also been the driving force behind the scientific development of Just Thrive's line of products. And he's conducted and published multiple research studies in scientific journals. He's published chapters in scientific textbooks, reference books, and he has global patents. He's a sought-after speaker on the health of the microbiome. He brings his extensive knowledge and practical application of the latest science on the human microbiome to everyone. So my friends, welcome Karan Krishnan.
Hey Dylan, thank you so much for having me. That was a, one of the best introductions, so I really appreciate it.
Well, I, I mean every word of it, brother. I can't say enough. The last conversation we had, I didn't want to get off the phone with you and I, I actually got off and started getting into more. It took away from my work I was supposed to be doing, but it gave me more knowledge base. So thanks for coming, brother. I think you are just on a whole nother level of tremendous, and I'm really looking forward to taking as much knowledge from you as I can today.
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here and I am very excited to share. Well, so yeah, let's do it.
Let's take advantage of this time, my friend. So, okay, first of all, I want to break some things down very simply for people before we get a little extensive. All right. So can you first explain just simply what is gut microbiome?
Yeah. So the gut microbiome is defined as the totality of microbes. So all of the microbes, right? So we're talking bacteria, viruses, protozoa, amoeba, fungus, all kinds of different microorganisms and their genetic elements. And that is a critical part to keep remembering. So it's a totality of microbes and their genetic elements as they interact with and live within the host. So that constitutes our microbiome. Now, why did I emphasize the genetic elements part of it? That's because that's where we really find the magic in the power of the microbiome and understanding why it's so important, right? So when actually, when I was at university, one of the labs that I worked in was part of the Human Genome Project. And this was a very exciting time in, in scientific research and biochemistry because The thinking was we're gonna elucidate the human genome, right? So we're gonna sequence all the genes. We're gonna find the gene for everything that we do and the gene for every disease that we have, right? We're gonna find the heart disease gene, the Alzheimer's gene, and all that. Then one way or the other, we're gonna find a way to manipulate genes in order to, uh, improve our health.
But what came outta that Human Genome Project was a huge question because when we sequence the human genome, we come to realize that we have somewhere between 20,000 to 22,000 functional genes. Now that may sound like a lot to someone who's not familiar with genetics, but keep in mind that a cockroach has about 22,000 functional genes, right? Or an earthworm has roughly 30,000 functional genes. And so it raised this massive question like, wait a minute, we are not that sophisticated when it comes to our genetics. So how in the world are we so sophisticated? We are the top of the evolutionary ladder. We're at the top of the food chain. We have cognition. We have all of these capabilities. How are we doing all of this without the genetic blueprint to do it? That's when the Human Microbiome Project kicked off and helped answer that question. We have 2.5 million microbial genes in our system, right? We have 150 times more microbial genetics in our system than human genetics, which means that we have this amazing treasure trove of functionality that we house in the microbiome. And the largest part of that microbiome is in the gut.
And so about 90% of what it means to be human in terms of functionality comes from those microbes sitting in your gut. Then if we're not paying attention to them, we start to lose function and we create disease, right? So disease.
And so if there is that much going on in the gut, obviously it plays a massive role on our overall health. But how, let me ask you this, how difficult is it then to keep them healthy and in line? Is it, wouldn't it be extremely difficult given the amount?
You know, actually it's not difficult if you know what to do right now. It has become increasingly difficult in the environment that we're in.
Mm-hmm.
And one of the ways I explain this, right? So if you think about what the human is, the human is a holobiont. That's a very important term because we have a new reference for how we look at the human system. So we used to think of ourselves as this collection of organs wrapped in this skin suit, right? And the organ systems are all connected by veins and nerves and things like that. And then the brain is a central command and it controls everything that happens in the body. Mm-hmm. We have a different view now. A holobiont is a superorganism. What a superorganism is, is essentially a walking, talking rainforest, right? We've got microbes that live in virtually every part of our body that play a role in the functionality of that part of your body, right? Microbes on our skin play a very important role in how our skin functions. Microbes in our mouth play a very important role in how our oral health functions, in our gut, in our joints, in our, even in, in our, in our cerebral spinal fluid. We've got microbes in there that control how those areas function, and all of those microbes work together in order to perpetuate the health of the whole.
So when we start thinking about the holobiont, which is a superorganism, a walking, talking rainforest, We are this beautiful microbial construct that we've now put in an antimicrobial world. Basically, the world around us we've built is an anti-human world. The toxicity in everything that we have, right? Everything is designed to kill microbes one way or the other, and we are made up of microbes. And so we're finally starting to understand that, okay, we've been shooting ourselves in the foot, uh, for the last several decades. Not longer with all of the industrialization and all of the things that have occurred around us. And, and as a result, it is becoming harder to maintain this ecosystem, but it doesn't have to be impossible. And, and the choices don't have to be really difficult for people either.
When do you think, or would you estimate that as a society, as a whole, we started this downward trajectory of making this more difficult and becoming more toxic for everybody? And is it just progressively getting worse and worse and worse?
Yeah, it does seem to be progressively getting worse, unfortunately. But microbes are resilient, right? So if you take the right steps, you can recover them, you can rebalance them. I think as early as the Industrial Revolution, somewhere around 100 years ago, you know, things really started to go downhill. Now with the advent of broad spectrum antibiotics, and, and I'm not against antibiotics, there are definitely times when you need them and they will save your life. But even the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, estimates that at least 50% of the antibiotic prescriptions are written for things that antibiotics don't help, uh, like viral infections and so on, right? And then of course, the use of antibiotics in our food supply with the animals that we eat and all that. And then all of the pesticides, herbicides that are used in the agricultural industry, all of those are strong antimicrobials. Take glyphosate, right? Roundup, for example. Not only is it a strong antimicrobial and we get mini doses of it every time we eat and drink stuff. It's a very, it's a very sinister antimicrobial because it specifically kills good bacteria. You know, compare that to like an antibiotic that you might take.
It kills everything, right? And everything. And then things start to try to bounce back. But over time, you know, glyphosate or Roundup exposure selectively kills good bacteria and selects for the dysfunctional bacteria, right? That's so, so those kind of chemicals and the prevalence in society today of those types of chemicals can be very, very, very damaging to the microbiome.
And this is a point I try to make with people when they say, oh, there's only a little bit in this and a little bit in that. But over time, that little bit accumulates into a lot. And because it's being used more and even sprayover gets into organics, I mean, doesn't it accumulate and continue to accumulate? And I know you said that we're resilient, but I mean, over time, when you beat the crap out of the resiliency, it becomes less resilient, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And, and when I, when I say we're resilient, what I mean is that if we're making the right choices, we can bounce back, right?
Uh-huh. Yeah.
It, it doesn't have to be a lost cause. Meaning like, let's say you're somebody in your forties, uh, and you haven't paid attention to your health at all, your gut health. You've been eating terribly. You're, you know, eating all the, all the processed foods and all that. You're gonna be in trouble in terms of your ecosystem and all that. But it also doesn't mean that it's too late to reverse it. That you, the, to bounce back. That's the beauty of the micro, microbiome and the ecosystem is that the good elements are always there. They might be at such a low level where they're not functional, but you can bring them back. And we've seen those changes. And then your point about the small dosing and ha, and how that creates dysfunction over time. We actually did a study. I, I did a, a study and published a paper with King's College at London. And what we were studying is the effect of small doses of those pesticides on, you know, and, and these are EPA allowed levels of the doses that are in foods, right? So in, in oats and things like that, we were looking at a pediatric microbiome, which is a pristine pediatric microbiome, undisturbed, beautiful diversity, very healthy 4-year-old microbiome.
And we started adding, you know, cereal level. Meaning the amount of exposure that a child would get from cereals that they're eating every day, cereal level of this pesticides into the, the microbiome over a period of time. And in as little as 3 weeks of that exposure, that microbiome started to look like the microbiome of somebody with inflammatory bowel disease. Wow. Right?
Yeah.
Like massive shifts in certain features. Right. And, and, and that those shifts, we were able to start to reverse it once we put interventions in. But it was quite alarming to see the shifts in that ecosystem in as little as 3 weeks, right? And so, so it just goes to show you the potency of the dysfunctional, uh, elements that we have around us and why gut health should be even a bigger focus for people because everything else around you is working against your gut ecosystem and your holobiont, your superorganism.
Can you maybe break down a list of like the biggest culprits that contain glyphosate? And I know there's a lot of things now that contain it, but some that people may not be aware of and, and kind of give us an idea of what to be on the lookout for so we can at least be more cautious on what we're buying.
Yeah. You know, if you look at the vast majority of, of agricultural products in the US, so, so most of your wheat, your soy, you know, in, and all of the, the agricultural grown wheat in, in the US basically has it. And then, and then when you look at oats, for example, oats are another culprit because not in, in the case of oats, they don't just use the glyphosate as a herbicide, but they actually use it as a desiccant, which means that they soak the oats quite a bit in the glyphosate to dry it out before harvesting, right? Most of the corn has glyphosate in it. Most of the cotton products have glyphosate in it that, and most of that cotton has shifted now to India, but then they've created Roundup Ready versions of those so that the cotton that's soaked in glyphosate is coming into the Western world. And then the water runoff, right? So when you look at the farms that are using glyphosate, and as you mentioned, the overspray, it's even moving into the cattle and poultry areas and all that. And then our cattle and poultry are consuming that water. And as a result, they're getting inundated with gly— glyphosate as well.
And, and if we consume the meat, we might get exposure there. So at the end of the day, what I don't want is I don't want people to stress out too much about specifically where they're getting exposure. Mm-hmm. What I, because the stress in itself, we, we should talk about stress and how, how potent of a dysfunction driver that is. But the stress about the, uh, that may even do more damage than glyphosate itself. What I want people to know is that they can be equipped with, with decisions that they can make to undo the damage that these things are doing. And, and that's the critical part, right? That's where you get empowered because when you, when you feel like you don't have control because big ag and big pharma are doing all these things, they're spraying everywhere, they're creating toxicity. It gives people this sense of lack of control. It gives people this sense of hopelessness and, and, and it gives them this throw their arms up and I can't do anything about this anyway. Yeah. Right. But what they, what they need to understand is it's their ecosystem and what they put in it absolutely makes a huge difference over what is around it.
Right. And that's the empowerment part that people, people can really take advantage of.
And I'll make a point on that too, because I'm glad you said that because I don't do the fearmongering posts and the, you can't do anything. We have to play the cards we're dealt, but you have to understand there's a, a thing called knowledge and a thing called wisdom. We get and give all the knowledge here all day long, but the wisdom is how we use it. And being fearful when you get the knowledge is not the answer. It's how do we take what we know and use it to better our life? We, we gotta play the cards we're dealt here. There's, this stuff is not completely unavoidable, but if you know, okay, this has this and this has this, so if I do have it, I'm gonna have to take a little bit of extra precaution or at least realize maybe I don't feel so great and this is the reason. And you said something I wanna ask, 'cause I haven't gotten into this personally and I'm curious. You bring up cotton. I've seen some people talk about clothing, bedsheets, things of that nature. Is it, is there potential then for if, if glyphosate's in cotton or fabrics or anything like that, can we actually absorb some of that in the clothes that we're wearing?
It is, you can, you can potentially absorb it. Yes. Especially depending on what your skin barrier looks like. Right? So we've all heard of leaky gut, but There's this issue called leaky skin as well. And in fact, skin barrier dysfunction is one of the best predictors of longevity and aging.
Okay.
There's a 65-year-long study that is still going on called the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. It's the longest longitudinal study of aging where they took people in their late, late teens, early 20s, over 65 years ago, and they've been following them until they die. Right. And, and they've gotten over 3,000 or 4,000 subjects in the study. Hundreds and hundreds of papers have come out, uh, from it. You know, everything we know about the inflamma-aging idea that aging is an inflammatory disease, that's— that all has come from this massive study. And what this study has shown is that skin barrier dysfunction that can often be seen as aged skin is one of the biggest drivers of mortality and morbidity, which is risk of death and risk of disease. And part of that is because things like glyphosate and all that can actually penetrate through the skin and enter into circulation and create havoc in the body. It can create chronic low-grade inflammation. Wow.
Okay. Well, it's every, everything we do anymore has to be calculated, it seems. But like we said, it's the awareness and the know. So then that would bring me to the next question about awareness. What is it that all of a sudden, because I mean, for you, for somebody that's been studying this for so long, you've known about this problem and people that have been working inside, but more prevalently, I would say at least on my end, more on the social side and more influencers and more even doctors talking about it. And I would say the last 3 or 4 years really is when it's just exploded into, okay, this is a big problem. Why are we just noticing now? And is some of that to do with people trying to sell different kinds of products and take advantage of that? Or what, what has happened more recently? Is it a COVID thing? Can you kind of touch on the reason?
Yeah, that, that's a, that's a great question. So, and I think you, you hit the nail a little bit on the head with, with this, with the COVID side of it, right? So I think COVID played a very important role. In, in the elevation of the awareness around the microbiome, uh, for a couple of different reasons. Number one, it, you know, everything around health and wellness just kind of skyrocketed during COVID right? We saw that in supplement sales and, and, uh, and wellness influencers gaining massive followings and so on. And I think a lot of that is because, you know, people had time, they were at home, and then they became hypervigilant about health and, you know, their bodies and what's happening and all of this fear that was going on. So, So people became hypervigilant and they started researching and studying and trying to understand what is happening with their system. One of the things that became really interesting with COVID was that your gut microbiome played a very significant role in how your body dealt with the condition, with the, with the disease, with the virus, right? And in, and, and in fact, a lot of data came out because then you started seeing this data around measuring the virus in sewers.
In stool waste, right? So, so they were able to— there were lots of groups that were able to look at the spread of the virus by looking for it in the sewage system because people were shedding so much of it through stool, which means that the virus is growing in the, in the gut. And then when long COVID came about, there was a lot of, a lot of research around the role of the gut microbiome in your risk of long COVID. So then a certain degree of awareness started increasing. In fact, one group of physicians I know did a bunch of work around the role of the gut microbiome in long COVID, and then they started training other physicians on that role of the microbiome and to get them to start thinking about the microbiome even more. Now, on top of all that, on the back of COVID you started seeing articles about how Alzheimer's and Parkinson's even are influenced by the gut microbiome. You started seeing how the skin is influenced by the gut microbiome, right? And people are becoming hyper-aware of these degenerative conditions. Uh, you, we started seeing the, the role of the gut microbiome in obesity and metabolic health.
Um, and so a lot of that research started coming out right past COVID. And I think it's a lot of it is driven by the fact that we have very few answers for so many of the common ailments that we deal with.
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You know, and, and, and the, the traditional approach of looking at those disease processes have started to falter because we're not looking at root cause drivers in most of these things, right? We're, we're looking at symptoms and we're band-aiding things and we can reduce inflammation here, but what is the cause of inflammation, right? We could, you could take, for example, lots of supplements or steroids and things like that to reduce inflammation in an inflammatory condition. But then the question is, Why is the inflammation there in the first place? And more often than not, the microbiome is answering that question, right? And so the amount of research, just to wrap, to be able to wrap your head around it, is we're seeing around 4,000 to 5,000 papers a year almost on the microbiome, something or having to do with the microbiome, right? So if you just go from COVID to now, we're looking at 40,000 to 50,000 new research papers. That are on the microbiome. And so that is just catching steam and, and really expanding the interest level on the microbiome. And conventional doctors are starting to talk about it as well. And that kind of starts to bring in the mainstream a little bit, you know?
Okay. So right before I met you, and this, the timing is just like perfect on this, I had one of the best discussions that was just intricately talking about the gut-brain connection. And that's when I realized just how big of a role, because I hadn't had a discussion this deep when it came to the gut. Like I kind of told you before, I get a lot of people dancing, man. Like they, they act like they know what they're talking about, but I never get a straight answer. And this was one of the first times where I got a major correlation and understanding of the massive role that the gut plays. With the connection to the brain, the vagus nerve. And then I started to put this together, like, okay, so if it's got that much control on our mind, which I feel has the most control over the overall totality of our health, then this is maybe the biggest driver and cause of disease, cause of every single problem we have. It could be gut-related, not just mental-related. So could you Could you get into that a little bit on A, how big of a driving force is the gut on our entire totality of health?
B, I've always been under the impression and belief that all diseases start with like cellular dysfunction. Is it potentially, is that inaccurate? And is it that maybe a lot of diseases start with gut problems or dysfunction? So could you touch on both those and then we'll get into the gut-brain connection after that.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I, I think you're, you know, you're, you're thinking about it correctly that all disease starts with cellular dysfunction, but the cell that we're talking about is the bacterial cell to begin with. Right. So, so you can, you can very easily and rationally say that all disease, at least chronic disease, right? So of course there are these communicable diseases and all that, that also start with microbes, but these are things that we can get from each other, the colds and flus and all that. Those are. Considered disease. But let's talk about chronic disease that everyone is concerned about. The vast majority of chronic diseases can be traced back to some dysfunction within the microbiome, which is a change in organisms or change in functionality within the micro, micro, uh, biome, which means that yes, at a cellular level there is a change happening, but that cell that's changing is a microbial cell. And then as a result of the microbial cell changing, it's affecting our cells. Quite significantly, right? So I think you're, you're right in that thinking, but we want to go all the way to the root cause and see what's happening with the microbes first, and then how those microbes affect the changes within our cells.
As an example of that, right? So we know that there's a lot of disease conditions that are driven by dysfunctional mitochondria in our, in our cells, right? It's the powerhouse of the cell. We know some cells have thousands of mitochondria, some have a few. But overall, we know that as you age, especially aging-related conditions, the mitochondria become dysfunctional. And as a result of that dysfunctional mitochondria, the cell becomes dysfunctional, and then the organs that the cell makes up becomes dysfunctional, right? So it's called the mitochondrial free radical theory of aging. It's a very well-thought-out theory showing that the dysfunction starts in the mitochondria. Then you go, well, okay, why is the mitochondria falling apart? Right? Why can't we repair it and fix it? Well, as it turns out, we're dependent on certain microbial byproducts to fix our mitochondria. One of those components is urolithin A, right? Like, people are now familiar with urolithin A, but where did this thing come from, this magical compound? Well, urolithin A is naturally produced in your gut by microbes converting polyphenols from your diet into mitochondrial repair compounds. And we're dependent on those compounds in order to repair our mitochondria.
This is why things like the Mediterranean diet and, you know, polyphenols and fruits and vegetables and all are associated with longevity because you're getting these polyphenols, they're being converted into urolithins. Those urolithins are being used by our own cells to fix our dead and dying mitochondria, right? So then that's how you go to the real root cause of that, right? So yes, mitochondria dysfunction is a, is a driver. But why are the mitochondrias not being fixed and why are they becoming dysfunctional? Well, it's cuz we're missing a component in the microbiome, right? So that kind of, that's where we need to go to really understand the drivers.
Never once, never once has that been broken down to me that way. And I've had this discussion, I don't know how many hundreds of times. That was brilliant. I, and I see I'm a, I've been studying urolithin A for a long time and have never heard that. Not once. Yeah.
We don't have a gene for urethane, right? So, so think about the relationship with our microbes in this case, right? So here's a compound that's so important that it fixes the engines of our cells, right? Arguably the most important part of our cell. Without those engines, our cell doesn't function. This compound fixes the engines. We don't have a gene coding for it. We can't make it ourselves. We've outsourced that to the microbes in our gut. That's how closely we depend on them for that functionality, which is at the core of ourselves, which are core at the engine of ourselves. So just understanding that component itself, it's like, wow, that is nuts how much we depend on them. And then you bring in things like short-chain fatty acids, right? So you look at butyrate. Butyrate is so important for so many functions in our body, our natural GLP-1s that, that give us satiety signals and tell our our, allows our gut to tell our brain, hey, enough food. You know, we, we gotta turn down the hunger hormones, kick up the satiety hormones so we can burn fat, fueling the immune cells that go around to protect you, the macrophages and all that.
They all fuel off of butyrate, modulating immune response in the body and dampening all of these unfavorable immune responses. The list goes on and on and on about what butyrate does. What is our gene that makes butyrate? Nothing. We have no capacity to make our own butyrate, right? So this compound that we are so dependent on that if I took outta your body the ability to make any sort of butyrate at all from your gut, right? Then you, you, you would be sick, dysfunctional. You would not be able to repair the lining of your gut. Your immune system wouldn't work. You would get obese. You would, you would have all these metabolic issues. You'd become insulin resistant all within a mere period of just months. If not just a few short years, right? And we're so dependent on these compounds and we cannot make them. We need the microbes in our gut to make them for us.
Wow. So the, the amount of role that gut health plays in all of this is beyond what we most actually understand and think is basically what you're saying in a nutshell.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you look at the scariest of con— disease conditions, right? So look at Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, right? So these are, very scary neurodegenerative conditions of which the prevalence rates keep increasing over time. And then you go, what is happening? Like, why is this happening more and more? Well, then you look at, in Alzheimer's, for example, there, there was a study, a landmark study that was published in 2017 showing that gut-related endotoxins, this is something called LPS, right? LPS is an endotoxin that's made by about half of the bacteria in your gut. But, but when your gut is leaky and it, and that endotoxin's allowed to leak through, it can make its way up the vagus nerve and through your circulation and end up in the brain. And it ends up in these regions of the brain called the perinuclear region. It's deep inside the, the nuclear region of the synapses, and it creates inflammation in that part of the brain, which starts the protein misfolding and the damage that occurs to the brain tissue. So they found. Very high concentrations of gut-associated endotoxins in the perinuclear regions of the Alzheimer's brain.
Because up to that point, the question was, why is there inflammation in the brain? Why is the— why are these proteins misfolding, right? Why are they starting to see this degeneration? They knew that that degenerative process, that in that misfolding process, was part of how the disease progresses. But again, you go, further and you go, why? Why is that happening? Well, as, as that 2017 paper showed, one of the key reasons is because stuff from a dysfunctional gut, it's making its way to the brain, right? And so, and, and by that same token, every single day you go through life, you're gonna have inflammation in the brain and it's gonna damage your brain cells to a certain degree, right? And what you want is when you go to sleep, you want that brain to be able to repair itself so you wake up the next day with the same brain you had the day before.
Yeah.
If that doesn't happen, right, every day you're gonna wake up with a little bit more damage to the brain.
Right.
And as that progresses, you're gonna develop dementia and, and all of these issues around the brain. So how do we repair our brain? Well, that we're dependent on the gut for a compound called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is a compound that makes its way to the brain when you're sleeping and starts repairing the damage that occurred that day. Right. So if you think about those two dichotomies, right, you have a gut that has the capability of repairing and supporting your brain when you go to sleep. So you wake up the next morning with the same brain you had the day before. Now take a dysfunctional gut. Not only is it not doing that repair, it's actually producing a compound that accelerates the damage in the brain, right? And, and this is one of the things I really want people to understand about their relationship with their gut. Your gut and your, and your, and its, and its ability to protect or drive diseases on a spectrum. Right? Let's say the left-hand side of the spectrum is an ideal gut that is protecting, repairing, providing resilience, providing all the nutrients, providing all the compounds to make your body, your brain, your muscles, all of that function optimally.
And on the far right-hand side is a gut that's not only not doing those things, but actively accelerating damage and dysfunction, right? So a dysfunctional gut doesn't just hurt your system by the absence of functions. It deliberately hurts the system by the presence of toxigenic functions. So everybody's gut is somewhere on that spectrum. And what you need to do is make decisions each day that push you more to the left than you are to the right. Right. And that is where the magic happens in terms of resilience, you know, longevity, all of the things that we're all seeking.
So BDNF, how do we get is the, is there a way to supplement that or is it just through the microbiome health? I mean, because as you described it, it is a very, very vital and clearly something that we need to, to, to really shed more light on. 'Cause this is another thing you don't hear talked about very much. And the way you just broke that down, I mean, you put a little fear in me. I, I don't get scared. I wanna make sure I'm addressing this, so I'm thankful for the information, but how do we, stabilize that, enhance it? What do we have to do?
Yeah, so, so there's really only two factors that you need to think about when you, if you want to get, you want to feel like you're getting accurate amount of, or adequate amount of BDNF. Number one, you have to make sure your gut is not leaky, right? And we'll talk about what leaky gut is because a leaky gut counteracts the functions of things like BDNF and short-chain fatty acids and urolithins and so on. All of those beneficial compounds that we need. Need for our brain health, cellular health, and so on. So, so first thing is we wanna make sure that the gut's not leaky. The second part is we want to ensure positive or high diversity in the gut microbiome. There's a number of microbes within your microbiome that actually can make BDNF, and there's some microbes that stimulate a signal to make BDNF. The only way to ensure that you have all of those microbes working in concert is to have high diversity within your microbiome. The diversity can be measured. There are stool tests that one can use to measure diversity, but there's certain behaviors that we have to engage in to ensure diversity is high, right?
And so when you, when you increase diversity in your microbiome, you actually more often than not cover all of these functionalities that I've been talking about. The urolithin production, the short-chain fatty acids, the BDNF, the serotonin production in the gut, the dopamine production in the gut, like all of the neurotransmitters, all of those get covered if we have adequate diversity in the gut. So one of my recommendations to people always is leaky gut. We gotta stop the leaky gut and we gotta increase diversity. If we do these two things, then you're well on your way to having a resilient gut that's gonna be on that left-hand side of the spectrum that's protecting you and not driving disease.
Okay. So BDNF noted, it's kind of like fertilizer for your brain type of thing, I guess, essentially.
Absolutely. And it's made by a healthy, diverse gut microbiome. When you go to sleep. It only, it only occurs where it's a diurnal system so that your gut works on a 24-hour clock like your, like your body does. Yeah. And it's waiting. So BDNF is one of those housekeeping genes that turns on in your gut, just like something called the migrating motor complex, right? This is a neurological sweeping that occurs in your bowels to clean out your bowels so stuff doesn't stay there and get putrefied and rot in the wrong places and produce gases and, and You know, can also produce cancer cells and all that if it stays there. This is why fiber can actually counteract colorectal cancer risk is because it's sweeping things away. That same migrating motor complex, all of those things occur at night when you're resting. This is another reason why sleep is so important for health. It goes beyond just the rest that we need. It's actually a way of turning on housekeeping genes and cleanup genes. In our gut microbiome.
Okay. Let me ask you this, cuz this was, and correct my numbers here cuz I could be a little off, but I, I'm pretty sure I, cuz I did a lot of studying on this after I had this conversation. Is the, the gut and the immune system are extremely intertwined. It's, isn't it like 75% of like the body's immune cells are located in the gut? Does that sound about right to you?
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's actually 75% or so of the immune sampling tissue. So all of the immune-related tissue is in the gut, is in the digestive tract. Yeah.
So the, the, I mean, the immune system and the gut are extremely intertwined.
Yeah. So I actually love doing lectures on the, on the immune system and the gut because it is one of the most fascinating biological connections, right? So, and, and, and the immune system is very hard for people to understand, especially even people who are trained in this, in this field. The only way to understand it is through analogies. And so think about it this way. So imagine the immune system is like the military, right? They, they've got soldiers, they've got tanks, they've got equipment, they've got all of the things to fight a war that they need. They, they just have no general. They have no plans, right? They don't know who the enemy is, right? They don't know what the enemy looks like. And, and, but they're all sitting there ready to go. So they need direction. Now, why is the, why is the system built that way? Right? So why wouldn't our immune cells be born out of our bone marrow? And our thymus with innate knowledge of who the enemy is. Well, that's because who the enemy is changes depending on where you are, where you live, you know, what age you are and so on, right?
We want our immune system to be able to recognize a new virus as a problem, even though it's never seen it before, right? We want our immune system— if I, if I go from my home here in Chicago, go to Europe for, for a week in the summer, my, I want my immune system to be able to adapt. To that changed environment. And so by nature, our immune system is an adaptive part of our system, but it has to adapt very quickly to changes in our ecosystem. How does it do that? Well, it uses the microbiome as the eyes and the ears. So think of the microbiome as the general to the army or the intelligence force in the army, right? So your immune system can respond, but the intelligence it gathers is from the microbiome itself. Now, how does that work? And, and another analogy I'll give you is, and, and this is the job of the immune cell. I, I have, I, I feel very bad for our immune cells, right? Because if you think about most of the immune cells are in our, what we call the mucosa layer, right? So inside our body we have like 4,000 square feet of mucosa layer, right?
Our gut lining, our lungs, our brain, our urogenital tract, everything is this mucus layer. In that mucus layer is covered with 100 trillion microbes, right? That those are resident microbes that live there. And then the immune cells are patrolling that area because that's how all of the things enter into our body is through a mucus layer. So they're patrolling that mucus layer, but every cell in that mucus layer is a bacteria, virus, or fungi or some sort, right? And they're patrolling for bacteria, viruses, fungi, and so on. The ratio is 200,000 to 1. For every 1 immune cell you have patrolling your system, you have 200,000 microbial cells in that area. So imagine the job of this immune system and the way I, I let people understand it is like, imagine you're at a music festival and it's in a huge stadium and the stadium's closed off, right? Then there are 200,000 people in that stadium. There are 5 people among the 200,000 that intend to do harm to people, right? And you are the lone security guard. In that stadium of 200,000 people and everyone looks the same, right? How in the world do you identify the 5 outta 200,000 that may be a potential problem?
The only way, the only way you can do it is if the other 199,995 people are working with you and they're radioed into you and they will tell you if they see anything awkward and they tell you exactly where it is, right? They'll radio in and be like, hey, I see something at concession stand number 4. That looks odd. Maybe you should come over here. That's the only way you can potentially patrol a stadium of 200,000 people. And that's exactly what your microbiome does for your immune system. Anytime you have a virus, a toxin, a bacteria, a fungi, anything that's infectious or toxigenic that enters into your system, one of the first things that detects it is the microbes in that area, your friendly residential microbes. And they go, this looks odd. Right? It's not supposed to be here. They radio to your, your immune system to recruit your immune system to come here. Now, how do they radio to your immune system? They shoot off inflammatory flares and your, your immune system hones in on where the inflammation is and comes to that area and then starts attacking whatever is in that space. Now, two, two dysfunctions that are extremely common, and this will un— this will make people understand why lots of people's immune systems don't work the way they should, right?
So remember that process. Something something comes in that shouldn't be there, we need to attack it, we need to quarantine it. The first thing that sees that is the microbes in that area. They shoot off inflammatory flares. Imagine you had inflammation throughout the body. How is your immune system gonna know which flare to go after? Right? It's gonna take it forever because it's gonna chase every inflammatory flare it sees. So that's like a, a, a fire truck, you know, going to 50 different smoke alarms when only one actually breathes fire, right? So if you have a neighborhood with 500 homes and 400 smoke alarms are going off, but actually only one house is on fire, the fire truck's gonna be like, we don't know where to go, right? They're gonna be lost. It's gonna take 'em a while to find the actual house that's on fire. So now when you have chronic inflammation throughout your body, it takes your immune system so much longer to respond because it can't find where it needs to go, 'cause there's alarms all over the place. So that's one very, very common dysfunction. Chronic low-grade inflammation causes immune dysfunction in people because their immune system doesn't know where to go.
The second very common dysfunction is the dysfunctional microbes. So if, if the toxin landed in that area where you had dysfunctional microbes who themselves don't want to be detected by the immune system, they're not gonna sound the alarm, right? They're gonna go, that's fine. I don't wanna alert the immune system. Do what you have to do, virus. Do what you have to do, toxin or bacteria. So they don't alert the immune system. And so they, it takes the immune system a very long time to accidentally find this damage, right? So when we think about the microbiome and the, and the immune system, we have to know that they're intimately connected. And you, and, and a dysfunctional microbiome means your immune system has no intelligence. It has no direction. It doesn't know where to go and it doesn't know what to do. And so you, we have to, have to have a healthy microbiome to have a healthy functioning immune system.
So, and you know, every time that you're sick or there's a problem or any sort of disease, generally you're gonna go right to a hs-CRP, a high sensitivity C-reactive protein. You're gonna see an elevation. I mean, a, a 100% of the time, any problem you've got, that's gonna kind of be the point where it's like, okay, that's high. I know I have a problem. So do you say then that if that is elevated, that chances are that the core root problem of that elevation is coming from some kind of gut dysfunction? I don't know, 90-some percent of the time or more. Do you, do you think that sounds about accurate?
It is. Yeah. So if you have chronic low-grade inflammation, meaning things like hs-CRP are chronically elevated, it almost certainly is a gut-related issue. In rare cases, it could be something else. You could have, you know, massive lesions on your skin. You could have, you know, issues elsewhere in the body. But, but that's rare. The most common source of it is a dysfunctional leaky gut. In fact, leaky gut is such a big source of chronic low-grade inflammation, and chronic low-grade inflammation is the start of most chronic disease processes, right? So So that is a very important connection for people to understand that chronic disease, almost every chronic disease we can think of, whether it's diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, dementia, autoimmune conditions, all of these things, they all start with the presence of chronic low-grade inflammation. And the chronic low-grade inflammation almost always comes from a leaky and dysfunctional gut, right? So a leaky dysfunctional gut thereby becomes the number one driver of chronic disease. This was actually very well illustrated in a paper in 2015 in a journal called the Frontiers of Immunology, where the researchers worked out the, the pathways and all the connections. And what they showed was that a leaky gut, a dysfunctional leaky gut, was the number one cause of mortality and morbidity.
So risk of death and disease worldwide, right? It's a number one driver of, of death and disease worldwide because they showed how a dysfunctional leaky gut causes inflammation. Chronic low-grade inflammation, which is a very specialized type of inflammation. And then that chronic low-grade inflammation basically sets the process of disease in the body, right? It even changes how certain cells behave, right? I've been doing a lot of work in joint health because one of my passions is alleviating the biggest drivers of disability worldwide, right? So the second biggest driver of disability worldwide is osteoarthritis. And osteoarthritis is a joint degenerative condition. And when you start studying the pathology, what's happening, why is it— why is the joint actively degenerating? And it happens in over 90% of adults, right? It's basically present in every adult over the age of 30. There's some degree of degeneration happening. Basically what is happening is the increase in chronic low-grade inflammation in the body. Takes these cells called the chondrocytes, which are the cells that normally build the cartilage for you. They repair your cartilage, they build it, right? All your life they've been doing this for you. They've been building, repairing your cartilage, and maintaining your cartilage.
When chronic low-grade inflammation is high enough, these cells switch in from going from a building cell to a breakdown cell. So they were an anabolic cell, which is a building cell. Now they become a catabolic cell where they're not only no longer building cartilage, they are actively degenerating it, right? And so you could see when, and those are, those kinds of cells are present in your muscles, in your brain, in your heart, everywhere. You have these building cells that have been building and repairing things your whole life. But because chronic low-grade inflammation is high enough, it switches those cells to an active degenerating cell, right? So now everything in your body is actively degenerating, including the lining of your gut and other areas. And so you could start to see why chronic low-grade inflammation becomes this massive driver of change in your body and physiology that leads to disease, right? And, and, and the gut is most responsible for that.
So if one is suffering, and I'm gonna get you into the breakdown of what leaky gut is, but I wanna ask you this, if one has a leaky gut issue, are they going to find it difficult to absorb supplements? Like let's say bodybuilders aren't getting the response they're supposed to get, or somebody like I was telling you, I've always had an inability that seems to absorb potassium well and, and other things I run into. Is that more than likely some sort of gut issue that's causing that problem?
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a gut and a gut-liver issue as well.
Uh-huh.
So about 80% or 85% of everything you absorb through the lining of the gut goes to the liver first, and then the liver has to process it, right? And send it to the right places. Or some cases the liver has to make carriers for it in order to get it to the right tissue. The problem when you have a leaky gut is not only is the absorption part compromised because the lining is inflamed and damaged and so on, uh, but all of the toxins that are being produced in that leaky gut, 80% of it goes to the liver, and then the liver is undergoing massive amounts of toxicity and can't do the work that it's supposed to do. This is actually why we have such a crazy prevalence of fatty liver disease. In the Western world, right? So the number one, right? The number one reason for cirrhosis of the liver used to be either hepatitis or alcohol, right? Just, just 5 decades ago. Now those two are so low in their prevalence because our cirrhosis is coming from fatty liver disease, which is a metabolic issue that starts with leakiness in the gut. So yeah, absolutely.
The absorption of nutrients is heavily compromised. When your gut lining is compromised. And I'll give you a little bit of a deeper, uh, explanation for that because this system is super elegant in how it works, right? So in the small bowel, which is where you absorb all your nutrients, you've got these beautiful finger-like projections called the glycocalyx, right? So the glycocalyx, so you, you've probably seen, uh, pictures of the kelp forest, right? What the kelp forest looks like, right? So it's got these beautiful vines. These are these mucosal vines that are all tangled up together and all that. And at the edge of them, they have something called the brush border enzymes. That's where enzymes sit to help you break down and bring in nutrients through the lining of the gut. Now, this is an important checkpoint because your body doesn't want you to just actively absorb anything that's coming through, right? 'Cause there could be some bad stuff in there. So this glycocalyx, this kelp-like forest, acts as a checkpoint for all of the nutrients and food and all that, that you're supposed to be absorbing. And the production and the structure of this gly— glycocalyx kelp forest is governed by microbes in your gut.
So then when microbes in your gut are dysfunctional or dying off, or you have bad microbes instead of good microbes, this kelp forest breaks down and no longer exists. And your body's ability to discern what to absorb and how to absorb it starts to shut down. So you absolutely become nutrient deficient even though you're eating adequately.
So we're just going down the list here of everything. So cellular dysfunction could be coming from the gut, brain issues, and even mental health issues could be coming from the gut. Immune system problems coming from the gut, liver problems coming from the gut. So essentially every damn thing that we operate on could probably be caused by some sort of gut issue.
Yeah, that, it, that is the most common driver I would say. And I, I, I don't think that's hyperbolic to say it. Yeah. I think the research supports it. It very well, especially among the population. If you just look at the biggest commonalities of drivers of all of these issues, it is a dysfunctional gut in most people. This is also why even basic gut symptoms are still the number, the top symptoms that people go to hospitals with or go to see their doctor, basic digestive issues. Yeah. Because all of these things that we're talking about with the gut's connection to the brain and immune system and all that, tho, those are even deeper dysfunctions.. But prior to those dysfunctions happening, people are feeling it as bloating. They're feeling it as indigestion, as loose stool, as irregular bowel movements, right? Those are the early canary in the coal mines that people tend to ignore. Or maybe they use Band-Aids, right? They might use Pepto or they might use some other over-the-counter digestive thing to try to reduce the, the symptoms. But what they're not think— understanding is that those are the canary in the coal mine saying, hey, your gut is moving into a severe state of dysfunction.
It's going from the left-hand side of that spectrum towards the right-hand side. And at some point they're gonna experience a deeper dysfunctions like we talked about, the immune, the brain, the joint, the liver, all of that stuff.
Okay. Well, an hour later, we're finally gonna get to leaky gut because I told you what was gonna happen beforehand. I knew this. There's too much that, you know, so So let's break this down adequately for people to actually understand. I know you will. I have asked this question so many times and you know how hard it is for me to get a straight, easy, sufficient answer. Could you just please break it down? What is exactly leaky gut and maybe give some real signs and symptoms where we know that that is the exact problem that we have?
Leaky gut is one of the most important things to understand. And in fact, you've got the right person here. I kind of wrote the textbook on it. This is a Springer Health reference book that, that researchers, doctors, and all that use. Springer Health is one of the, the, the most well-known in textbooks and all that. Everyone went to university has Springer Health textbook. Endotoxemia is the clinical definition of leaky gut. And I wrote the, the chapter on it. So here's what's happening, right? Here's what's important to understand. So your, your lining of your gut. Where you're supposed to absorb stuff. So your small intestine is a semi-permeable barrier, right? That's what makes it a little bit difficult because it's designed to be able to absorb certain things and ward off other things, right? It's not like our skin, which is supposed to be an, a, a complete barrier. We're not supposed to be absorbing too many things through the skin or our skull, for example, right? And, and those barrier systems are much more hardened barriers. But the lining of your gut is a very dynamic semi-permeable barrier, which means that food comes in, you break down food, it, it starts to break it down to the tips of that kelp forest that I mentioned.
And then you've got all of this surface area where those nutrients are supposed to be able to come through, enter into circulation, go to the liver, and then the liver sends it around the rest of the body. But with that food comes bacteria, viruses, fungi, toxins, and all that. And this, this dynamic absorbable system is supposed to be able to ward off anything that's negative. So how does it actually do that? Well, there are a number of checkpoints in the lining of the gut that have to be working appropriately in order for the selective permeability to function, right? So the first checkpoint is this mucus layer. So all of your intestinal cells are sitting kind of shoulder to shoulder. It's a one-cell-thick layer, right? Your skin, for example, is like hundreds of cells thick, but your gut lining is only one cell thick, and these cells are sitting next to each other shoulder to shoulder, and the space in between them are, is called a tight junction, right? So imagine these soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder on top of them, or let's say in the case of we're looking at a, at a, at a fort, uh, and you've got soldiers protecting the fort.
In front of them is a giant pit of slime, right? Why is there a giant pit of slime? Because as things are attacking the soldiers, The slime grabs those things and slows them down, and it allows for the soldiers the time to evaluate which of those things are good and which of those things are bad, and then make decisions, right? If the thing that's coming through is bad, they can shoot an arrow at it and take it out, right? If the thing is good, they'll allow it to come through. So that slime pit is really, really important to slow down the transit of things coming through the lining of the gut. And those soldiers, when they see something that they do want to allow, the space in between them opens up that tight junction. They release these proteins. There's about 40 proteins in between them. They open up, the stuff comes through, and then they cinch up close again. Right? So you have to have these few things functioning. You have to have that slime pit, which we call the mucus layer, that slows everything down. It traps things and slows everything down. And then you've got these antibodies in the mucus layer that neutralize identifies bad things.
You've got your immune cells that can make their way there, and you've got the soldiers that have weaponry that can actually target things that are coming through that mucus layer that they detect is not good. Right? And then the things that should get through, when they make it to the soldiers, they can step aside, open up the gap, and allow things to go through. That's how the system is supposed to work. That's how we can act as a semi-permeable membrane. Now, where things start to fall apart, right, is because all of those things I just described— the slime pit, the mucus layer, right, which is the slime pit, the proteins in between the soldiers, the immune antibodies and cells that are there kind of hovering and governing everything— all of those are dependent on your microbiome, right? All of the signals, the development and management of these structures, these checkpoints, if you will, are determined by the microbiome. So when you have a dysfunctional microbiome, Your mucus layer is super thin, right? If not, in some areas it's completely gone. That means that that pit of slime that slows things down is not there. Things can bum rush the system.
It doesn't give the immune system, it doesn't give the soldier cells enough time to see what's coming through and make decisions. So the default mode, then they attack everything, everything that comes through, including your own food particles and all that. And as it's attacking everything, it's creating inflammation in that area. You might feel it as indigestion, you might feel it as food sensitivities when you eat certain foods. And then eventually that attack, that inflammation will damage those soldier cells enough where then big gaps appear in between them and anything can just leak through without any sort of checkpoint. So we need that slime layer, that mucus layer. We need those soldier cells and the proteins in between them to open and close. We need the functioning immune system in that area surveying things. All of those things are dependent on the microbiome. When your microbiome is unhealthy, all of those things fall apart. You don't have a semi-permeable membrane anymore. You have a fully permeable membrane that leaks through. And here's the crazy thing about it, right? Remember, the small intestine is like 20 feet long. So you can have this leakiness in your gut for say 6 inches of your gut and the rest of it is okay.
Or it can be 6 feet and it can be very profound in terms of its impact, or it can be 16 feet. And it can be extremely profound. So how impactful leaky gut is to your health is, is determined by how much of your gut is leaky. And it's a progressive issue unless you stop it and reverse it.
I would like to discuss several facets of this. Now, there's a lot of influencers and people that I actually hold in high regard that like to get into different foods that cause this and actually foods that I think are quite good for you, and I think they're fearmongering. And I'm curious as to, I want to get into some of those with you first, but I, before we get into that, I, I have a couple questions that I think a lot of people are going to wonder. One, is there a way to test for a leaky gut issue? And if not, how would one really know if they have it or don't? And then we'll get into like factors of foods that we should eat to prevent it, lifestyle things that we could do to avoid it. Things of that nature. But when you make a comment like, man, it could be 6 inches or 6 feet, obviously I think if you have higher symptoms, you'll know there's a bigger issue there. But like, I'm looking for measurables or, or data ways to understand as opposed to just guessing.
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's really important. And I've done, uh, and published a few studies on leaky gut. We can test it in the laboratory. There are some really good assays that you can use in the laboratory, but unfortunately there isn't a commercial test that's accurate at all for leaky gut. Okay. Part of, part of the reason is because it's a, it's a very dynamic process. You need a much more controlled environment to take samples of certain things and then measure it in the lab. The best way to measure it is actually the leaking through something called LPS, which is an endotoxin, right? So, uh, that LPS is made by the microbes in that slime pit, if you will.
Right.
And normally if your gut is healthy and you have a healthy slime pit, that, that LPS is just stuck in there. Doesn't create any problems. But when your gut is leaky, that LPS is allowed to leak through and ends up in circulation, and you can measure it in the blood. And when you see high levels of this LPS in the blood, it's very indicative that your gut is leaky and it's directly proportional to how leaky your gut is. Right? Okay. Whether you have a basal layer, a level of it, or you're very high level. And in fact, the best way to test for that is when you're eating a meal. Because when you eat a meal, there's all kinds of havoc that goes on in your gut, right? Lots of hydrochloric acid is being released, enzymes, all these bacteria dying, the food is tumbling through and there's bicarbonate and bile and all of this crazy chemical churning. If your gut is leaky, when all of that stuff is happening throughout your bowel, you get a lot of leaking through of that endotoxin. And so the best way we measure leakiness in the lab lab, and then, and, and we use it in published studies, is we take individuals, they come in fasted, we give them a high caloric meal, like a 2,000 calorie meal, and then we measure the rise in endotoxins.
Right? Yeah. And if we see a 5x increase in circulating endotoxins within 3 or 4 hours of the meal, we know that they have profound leaky gut, but they may still be asymptomatic, right? So you can't test it at, at home. But I would say this, it would be very smart. For virtually everyone to assume they have leaky gut because they likely do. And even if they're asymptomatic, which most people are for a long period of time until you start seeing immune dysfunctions and metabolic issues and brain issues and anxiety and all that, until you start seeing those and those start becoming apparent, you may be asymptomatic. In our first study that we did, we did healthy young college students, if there is such a thing, but you know, by, By the FDA definition, right? So healthy normals by FDA definition in a clinical trial are people that don't have any disease conditions, they're not on any medication, they're normal body weight, they, you know, normal body mass index and all that. So they're 22, 23 years old, physically in the prime of their lives, no conditions at all, no complaints. About 55 to 60% of those people had very severe leaky gut.
And, and so if those people have severe leaky gut, if you have any gut symptoms, If you have any immune symptoms, if you're anxious, if you have issues sleeping at night, if you have any skin conditions like eczema, psoriasis, acne, if you have any autoimmune conditions, all of those things are related to a significant leaky gut. So you probably have leaky gut.
Wow. Okay. See, that's another thing I wasn't aware of, especially with things like psoriasis and eczema, because there's a million different people that seem to know how that happens or occurs. And I'm always just confounded by that one. So that's a, that's a good one. So the LPS test, is that something that if I got on Quest Labs that I could order, or how, how would one go about getting that?
They, they don't have it on Quest unfortunately. Yeah. Because, and the reason is because when you, when you take, when you measure LPS in circulation and you pull blood or serum out, LPS starts to degrade very quickly. And within 4 hours it loses about half of its concentration. So what we do in the lab instead is we pull the syrup sample out and then we have to freeze it at -80°F to preserve it. Right. And that's just not practical to do in a commercial lab because they, they shake the samples and all that. So it's very hard to test it commercially, but just know that everyone has it to a certain degree and, and you can resolve it in a relatively short amount of time as well. So I would just encourage everyone to do the things that are needed to stop the leakiness of the gut because virtually everybody has some degree of leakiness.
So what about somebody that is, let's say right after they eat or within 5 or 10 minutes, they're just having to go to the bathroom, you know, having the excretion and it, it becomes like something that happens every time they eat. Is that indicative of leaky gut? Because I've seen that with a lot of people.
Yeah, it can be. So that is often a condition called visceral hypersensitivity, right? So your, your gut is laced with this really, really dense neurological system called the enteric nervous system. It has the second highest nerve endings next to your brain. It's even more so than our spinal cord itself. So it's, it's thought of as like the other brain, if you will. If your gut is leaky, you've got a dysbiotic and dysfunctional gut. What happens is when food starts to hit the system, it creates this havoc, this, this type of neurological havoc, if you will. And then that causes spasmodic activity in your bowels instead of a very smooth rhythmic, uh, contraction that moves the food along, right? You get the spasmodic activity and that spasmodic activity accelerates the food through the small bowel. And then the large bowel is likely inflamed. And so the large bowel cannot absorb water. So most of your water absorption occurs in the large bowel. And as a result of the large bowel not absorbing water and the food being accelerated through the small bowel, You end up getting loose stool that's just coming out whether you want it or not.
Right. Yeah. And that is visceral hypersensitivity. That's also the people that when they eat the first bites of food, they get bloated. Right. And, and I hear that from people all the time. They're like, no matter what I eat, even if I drink water, I get bloated. Right. And, and that's not gas because there's not enough time for the food to get there and ferment and create gas. That is an immunological neurological response. To inflammation and, and a dysfunctional gut lining.
Okay. So that's again related to a gut issue.
Yep. And, and if you look at anxiety, for example, right? So anxiety is so prevalent these days. There was a 9-year-long study in Netherlands called the Netherlands Study on Anxiety and Depression. And, and it was basically a government-funded study to understand what are the drivers of this high prevalence of anxiety, especially in younger people. We're seeing it in younger and younger individuals. And so they were following all of these biomarkers in individuals for 9 years, uh, and just to, to correlate different biomarkers and risk factors for the presence and the development of anxiety and depression. What they found was that there was one biomarker that was the most predictive, and even over a 9-year follow-up period, if that biomarker was prevalent in that individual, that individual always had anxiety. Anxiety, and depending on the severity of the, the concentration of the biomarker, it predicted how severe the anxiety was. And that one biomarker was that LPS, lipopolysaccharide, that, that endotoxin in circulation. And LPS in circulation only comes from a leaky gut. So basically what they showed over a 9-year-long study across their country was that the presence of leaky gut gut and the resulting LPS in circulation was the number one determining factor of whether or not you developed anxiety.
And for the people that over the 9-year period continued to have elevation of LPS, they continued to have anxiety. For the people that LPS came down for one reason or the other, maybe they changed their diet, they did something, they didn't control for that stuff, anxiety went away, right? So, so it just shows you just how impactful the presence of this LPS and the leakiness of the gut is. In, in all of these disease pathologies. In fact, my, my, my chapter in this textbook is all about all of the disease connections between increased LPS circulation and all of the common disease pathologies associated with it.
Okay, so I'm piecing some things together here now that you say this. All right, so let, let me ask you this. We've got the relation to anxiety. A lot of people will tell you, doctors included, that, and because you brought up the skin conditions earlier, that psoriasis is caused by stress and anxiety. So the correlation here could be that the leaky gut is then releasing the LPS, which is causing higher anxiety, which is then also leading to the eczema or the psoriasis. Am I, am I onto something here?
That, that's exactly right. Yeah. So, and this is a, this is true of acne as well. Right. Yeah. So, so people with acne have, I think it's 3.5 to 4 times higher likelihood of having anxiety. Now part of that is of course because they're unhappy with the way they look.
Sure.
But, but, but the anxiety part of it, which is different than depression, is, is related to the amount of LPS because then there's studies that show that elevated LPS is a driving force behind acne lesions, and that same LPS is a driving force behind anxiety.. And so that's why these conditions correlate to one another. There's also, you know, a dramatically increased risk of type 2 diabetes with having elevated LPS, right? So in fact, there's, there's a study called the CODIOPREV study. This is a 2021 study that published 490 patients. They were following prediabetics to see, and until, if and until they became diabetics, right? And they were looking at all of the biomarkers. Biomarkers that were predictive of an increase in insulin resistance until the point they became diabetics. And there was only one biomarker, only one that was predictive over 98% of the time, and that was the serum LPS, lipopolysaccharide levels, right? The same lipopolysaccharide that creates anxiety, the same thing that creates psoriasis, that creates acne, the same LPS that creates the inflammation in the brain that we talked about earlier. That starts the process of Alzheimer's, right? And the same lipopolysaccharide that creates the dysfunction in the enteric nervous system that starts the process of Parkinson's.
They found that to be true in Parkinson's as well, right? And so you look at this common cause among all of these seemingly unrelated conditions, and you start to understand where the root driver of all of this is. Right? And why all of these conditions are concurrently increasing in prevalence, right? Because we're doing medications and this, that, and the other for each of them, but all of them have a common root cause that we're not addressing effectively enough. Okay.
So man, this is insane. You're turning me into Sherlock Holmes here cuz I'm following your, you're leaving me all these clues. So let me ask you this, you know, there's a lot of discussion around fiber. There's a lot of fiber supplements, a lot of powders, a lot of different things I've tried too. And I find that a lot of them, it might be overdoing it, or it could be actually exacerbating or creating a bigger problem than it's supposed to, intended to be fixing. Are these supplements causing leaky gut, these powders? Is there too much fiber? Is that gonna cause like, you know, I mean, too much of anything isn't good. Is that becoming a problem by trying to overcompensate? Can you correlate that together for me?
Me. Yeah, yeah. You know, the fiber is probably one of the most important nutrients, foods that we need to consume, right? So, but, but there's a way to do it and that's the really important part. Like you see the fiber maxing and things that people are doing on, oh yeah, on TikTok and social media. That's not necessarily the way to do it because fiber, the, the magic of fiber comes from your microbes utilizing it properly. And, and there's a very stepwise manner to increase the types of certain types of fiber within your diet, a, either as a supplement or through food sources. To improve the utilization so that your body, your, your, not your body, but your microbes are converting it into the right compounds, right? So just to, just to double-click on the importance of fiber, there's been a couple of large-scale meta-analysis, and to me, this is one of the best biohacks there is, right? We talk about all of these longevity biohacks. Listen to this about fiber, right? So, so the, the latest one, a 2028 meta-analysis, and then there's been a very recent one just this year. I'm looking at very specific conditions.
There's a, and this, these involve over a million patients, over a million subjects in this meta-analysis study. What they showed was that for every 10 grams of fiber you add to your daily diet, you reduce your all-cause mortality. That means dying from any disease by 10%, right? For every 10 grams. And that's all the way up to almost 40 to 45%, right? So if you can get yourself to 40 to 45 grams per day of the right kinds of fiber, You'll reduce your risk of dying from anything by almost 45%, right? There's, there's nothing else that'll do that. And this is, and we're talking about studies that are 10 years long, million subjects, massive amount of data, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, right? And yeah, that's the thing we really have to talk, talk about.
Break that down for me then in terms of right and wrong ways, like fiber-rich foods, supplements to maybe take, like, I don't know, psyllium husk for example, things to avoid. Is there too, is there a or getting too high that could cause an adverse reaction. Break that down please. 'Cause this is like, this is one of the most confusing and polarizing topics diet related right now.
It is for sure. For sure. Yeah. I, I think step one, we have to understand that fiber is essential, right? So if people are saying you don't need fiber, that's com— completely wrong. Fiber is absolutely essential.
I agree.
Right. And, and I like a combination of food and supplementation because I want to really Dial in my fiber intake to make sure I'm maximizing my benefit. But how do you do that? Right? So what you want to do is that most people in the Western world, most people listening to this, probably cannot utilize the fiber effectively because their microbiome's not diverse enough, right? So they need to start stepping up the diversity. And one of the ways you do that is by stepping up your fiber intake incrementally, right? Yeah. So let's break down fiber in itself. There's two really kind of two types of fiber. Let's, let's throw in a third so that people have a, a variety to think about. So first one is soluble fiber. Soluble fiber is gonna be things like psyllium husk. It's gonna be partially hydrolyzed guar gum. It's gonna be inulin, you know, so chicory root and things like that. Basically what soluble fiber means is that it's, it's a type of fiber that'll bind water and it'll form a gel in your system as it's moving through. Then there's insoluble fiber, right? So insoluble fiber is fiber that does not bind water..
And so it just moves through, it's like roughage. So it's like the kinds of fibers you get from seeds and nuts and things like that. So it's gonna move through your system and it's gonna move and improve your bowel movements. And then the third kind are resistant starches. Resistant starches are really interesting and dynamic because they are starches, but like, you know, they come from like sweet potato, for example, or, or kiwi fruit and things like that where they are fibers that we cannot digest and break down. So they don't increase insulin response or glucose response, they basically move to the large bowel where our microbes are gonna break them down, right? So generally the way you want to think about fiber is you want to get about 70% soluble fiber and resistant starches and about 30% insoluble fiber. Now what I would encourage everyone to do is just go on Google and say, list, you know, gimme a list of soluble fiber foods and gimme a list of insoluble fiber foods. And you'll see, you know, So you'll, you'll see your regular vegetables in, in, in one column around soluble fiber, and then you'll see nuts and seeds and things like that in the insoluble fiber.
Then resistant starches you'll get from sweet potato and roots and tubers. So cassava and, you know, sweet potato and, and, you know, other kinds of roots that you, you, you might utilize. So those are the, the, that's the food side. And then what you wanna do is start trying to add some of those foods into your daily diet incrementally. Right? You don't have to be super measured about it. You don't have to be weighing stuff. You can ask ChatGPT and say, hey, you know, how do I get 5 grams of soluble fiber from food? It'll tell you exactly what food to eat to get about 5 grams. My goal for everybody with every meal is to get about 5 grams of soluble fiber, about 5 as food, 5 grams of soluble fiber as a supplement, and then a gram or two of insoluble fiber, right? Okay. So that can be as easy as taking a scoop of a fiber supplement. So look at something like a psyllium husk or partially hydrolyzed guar gum or inulin. These are all soluble fibers, right? So you could look up soluble fiber supplements, get about 5 grams with that meal, and then add about, add about, add a food that'll give you about 5 grams of soluble fiber, and then add some food that'll give you about 2 or 3 grams of insoluble fiber to that meal.
Meal. And that could be just a sprinkling of nuts and seeds, right? Or a handful of nuts and seeds with the meal. Now, if you make that your goal and you work your way to that, then you'll be in really, really good shape. What you don't wanna do is go to 15 to 20 grams of fiber tomorrow when you haven't been eating fiber at all, right? So add in about 5 grams per meal between supplementation and food. So you can get between 5 grams of each, so you get around 10 grams per meal. Meal each day and then keep up with that for the first 2 to 3 weeks. And then the next, then after that 2 to 3 weeks, bump that up by another 5 grams per meal, right? You wanna get yourself to around 30 to 40 grams per meal and try to do that with as much diversity as you can, right? So when, when you look up the foods that give you fiber, try to add in different types of foods. You'll be doing broccoli and carrot shavings and, you know, things like that, that, that tend to have fiber in it.
Just diversify the fiber as much as you can, but go slowly and incrementally adding 5 to 10 grams per day each week, right? And work yourself up to around 45, 50 grams per day. Then you're doing well. Now on top of the fiber, you want to add polyphenols. Yeah. And polyphenols come from colored fruits and vegetables, right? So berries are the best sources of polyphenols that feed the microbiome, right? Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. Eat about a pound. Berries a day if you can, right? If you can afford it and if you have access to it, frozen berries are fantastic, right? Because they, they pick 'em at the height of, of, of ripeness and then they freeze 'em so they remain in that higher nutrient status. And then just thaw 'em out and just eat it, a handful of it after every meal. You'll be feeding your microbiome significantly. And then here's another really important trick with all of this. You need to put a microbe in there. To help utilize the fiber better, especially if you haven't been consuming fiber, right? Okay. So, so you want to add a probiotic that helps you utilize the fiber better.
This is where the spore-based bacteria come from. We did a study where we, where we added the probiotic with, with fiber and prebiotic, and we saw about a 50 to 70% increase in the beneficial compounds that your microbes produce when they ferment the fiber. Fiber, right? So adding a spore-based probiotic can dramatically enhance your body's ability to utilize the fiber itself.
Got it. We're gonna get into that in a minute, but I gotta tell you, my friend, you're pissing a lot of people off. The, the people that are anti-fruit, the oatmeal mafia, that— I mean, everybody's gonna be coming left and right with these facts.
They love it.
I'm a big proponent of fruit. I, I absolutely despise it when people act like you shouldn't eat fruit. I, I will never grasp that concept. It, it is horrible. I appreciate the fiber breakdown because I swear to you, brother, like I see that is probably that and potassium to me are the two things that people lack the most in their diet. You know, that they struggle the most with and don't even realize it. And I think a lot of people are extremely unhealthy because they don't eat fiber and don't know. And so thank you for the breakdown of the importance there because these things that people, they just don't understand. And a lot of people think they do. I, I, before I ask you about the spore, just a couple questions on certain foods. So, you know, I, I mentioned earlier about people that provide a little bit of fear about foods that cause these problems. One thing I wanted to ask you about, well, two things. One is oxalates like spinach, peanuts, things like that, causing holes in the gut and, and issues like that.
Almonds.
Those are things that I've seen people of, you know, higher level of following and supposed intelligence. I don't wanna take shots, But is this true? Do they, do they really those, cuz there's a lot of benefits to something like spinach especially. And I understand everything should be done in moderation. So could you touch on that a little bit and clear that up?
Yeah, it's a, it's a very, very rare risk. Basically they, they're kind of picking one compound in there that in a very, very small population could create an issue and then yeah, making it a sweeping assumption, right? Our body deals, our microbiome actually deals with oxalates beautifully. In fact, we have a, a microbe in there called Oxalobacter formigenes. Its entire job is to just break down oxalates into very useful compounds that the rest of the microbes can use. In fact, Bacillus does that as well. So the ecosystem is very well geared towards dealing with oxalates. There's rare conditions where some people may have oxalate issues and sensitivities, they will typically have very apparent problems like a lot of crystallization and severe gout and things like that, right? And, and they'll know already. But for the average person, it is not at all an issue, not at all a risk. And, and to, to, you know, to avoid those kind of foods because of this unverified fear of oxalates is, is really damaging. It's, it's the same as avoiding fruits because you're fearing sugar. You know, and, and, and yeah, just, it's not equivalent at all.
Right. And, and I think at the end of the day, people just need to be eating higher diversity of these good foods and not worrying about all these minute compounds that are within them.
And I feel like some people do it just for content and some people, I think they actually say it so much, they start to believe it. And that's easy to do. I, I used to do that way back, you know, and I, I don't now, but I mean, it's easy to do. And you know, things like spinach, especially when you cook 'em, don't you, isn't it even less of a problem if you're cooking it than it is?
Yeah.
Raw. Okay.
Same, same with like the lectins, right? So you hear a lot about lectins and anti-nutrients in plants.
Yeah.
That, that's such a common thing, like, like phytic acid and, and so on. The thing is cooking basically, you know, neutralizes all of that stuff, especially Slow and low cooking like you're supposed to, right? With, uh, with plant. So I, I actually looked into this because when there was somebody that, uh, you know, I thought knows what they're talking about, they were talking about this, a doctor, I don't wanna name names, but he's talking so much about these, the, the, uh, the anti-nutrients in tomatoes, right? So the lectins in tomatoes and how awful tomatoes are because they're so full of lectins. And I kept scratching my head and going, you know, listen, one of the most most well-studied diets in terms of its health benefits is like the Mediterranean diet, right? Yeah. There's just so much data out there on how beneficial it is. In fact, there are cancer hospitals that switch people to a Mediterranean diet and they get better outcomes than when they're eating a conventional diet and so on. And I was like, tomatoes are such a foundational part of the Mediterranean diet, right? So yeah. And so I started digging into, if tomatoes are so awful for you, how is it in the Mediterranean diet?
It's not a problem at all. Well, number one, most people aren't sensitive to lectins, right? They're not necessarily causing problems in most people, but the way they cook tomatoes in, in, in Italy and so on is a long, slow simmer, right? In healthy olive oil. And they have these amazing polyphenols and all that in the olive oil that neutralize the, the pro-oxidants. And then they, they also mill the tomato afterwards to get the sauce out. All of those lectins and all that are left in the seeds and, and so on that, that are now milled out. And so, You know, there's, there's, there's so many ways around it and cooking is a very foundational way to do it. So I, I really encourage people not to be fearful of these kind of foods because the fear around it itself can create more dysfunction than anything in the food. And we need to eat a diverse diet, right? That is so clear in the literature that high diversity is gonna, in your diet supports high diversity in your microbiome and high diversity in the microbiome is the healthiest kind of microbiome you can have.
Totally. I'm Italian, brother, so I've been eating tomatoes my whole life. So I, I know, and I, I know when you eat them properly, the benefit. And one thing I will say, and I won't get into this too far, but when you become a character— so the anti-lectin guy— it becomes, well, you're getting all this attention, you get all these comments, it gets polarizing, you get all these views. I don't operate that way, but some people do. And then, like I said, they start to believe their own it, but I think it's important to really break down the actual facts and the non-facts because what you just said is the key. You create confusion, which then leads to stress and anxiety, and that is one of the, if not the biggest killer, stress kills, and that will create every other sort of problem. So I want to point that out. I want to finish here with going into the Spore probiotic. Probiotic. Now, you know what's crazy is my mentor brought up Spore Probiotics to me, I wanna say at least over 10 years ago, and I didn't know anything about probiotics at all. And he said, don't get any of the regular probiotics.
This is the one. I had no idea why. I just blindly listened, which I don't do to anything now, but I'm, I'm being honest. But what I've learned now over time is there's several differentiating factors and we're doing a series here obviously, so we're gonna break this fully down in our next episode. But give us a little teaser here. Just quickly explain the why spore probiotics and what it does here that's different. Yeah.
Yeah. And, and when it comes to probiotics, strain specificity is so important, right? So people lump probiotics in, in these big categories, but they're all very different. And what strain you pick and what kind of strain you pick is extremely important in terms of the functionality you get. Now, you know, I, I did some pioneering work on the spore-based probiotics about 15 to 16 years ago. And, and in fact, we brought the very first multi-spore probiotic to the marketplace. And the reason I honed in on the spore-based probiotic was because it is the closest resemblance to how we interact with microbes in the natural environment, right? So, so when you, when you look at, You know, our engagement with microbes in the, in the natural environment, the way our ancestors did, they, they're consuming dirt and they drank waters outta rivers and streams, and they're digging for roots and tubers. They're plucking fruits, they're hunting animals and eating their gut intestines. And, and through all of those engagements, they're getting these large amounts of spore-based bacteria that are, that tend to be ubiquitous in the environment. So, and, and they're also differentiated. They're not soil-based organisms, they're specifically spore-based organisms.
Now, what's unique about the spore-based organisms is that they have a natural coating that they put on themselves that allows them to survive through the gastric system and enter into the intestines alive. Right. And that's a very important key because most probiotics, in order to be able to function, have to get to the gastric, have to get to the intestines alive. And the gastric system is very good at killing microbes. That's one of its job. It's called a gastric barrier because the pH is so low, it decimates microbes, right? And, and hence the, you know, different companies have added special capsules and all that to try to get it to survive. But the reality is there are, there's one category of microbes that have been given the capability by nature to survive through the gastric system. Now that was really interesting to me. I said, Why is there this, this microbe that has this natural capability of surviving through the gastric system when 99.9% of all other microbes get killed off? What is it doing in the gut that's unique? Then once it gets into the gut, we, we, we discovered that it also does something called quorum sensing.
Quorum sensing is the ability of this microbe to read the microbial environment, and it can actually pick up chemical signatures of all the different bacteria. That are in that environment and identify dysfunctional bacteria and beneficial bacteria. When it identifies dysfunctional bacteria, it can bring down the level of dysfunctional bacteria by either directly competing against it, producing antimicrobials, or alerting the immune system to the presence of the dysfunctional bacteria. That's called competitive exclusion. And then it produces compounds to bring back the growth of the beneficial bacteria. On top of that, it's creating signals that repair all of those structures we talked about that are dysfunctional in a leaky gut, that mucus layer, the tight junction proteins, even the replacement of the intestinal cells themselves, right? So it's doing all of this amazing housekeeping work in your gut for you. It was baffling that this microbes can do this naturally, right? So that's what we started studying and we were able to publish the first study in a, in a major gastroenterology journal showing that when you administer these spore-based probiotics at the right dose, you can actually stop that leaky gut by 75 to 80% in at little, as little as 30 days without doing anything else.
Right. Really? Just adding in the spore-based probiotics.
Yeah.
This was published as a frontier paper in the World Journal of Gastrointestinal Pathophysiology. That's the journal. And they published our paper as a frontier paper because it was the first time that anyone has showed that you can actually stop endotoxemia, which if you remember is the clinical name for leaky gut, right? That was actually the impetus then for me to write the chapter in this book because from that paper we showed that we can actually stop leaky gut, which we talked about is, you know, at the foundation of all of the disorders.
Will you show that book again and read the title so that people know?
And I'm gonna link it. Yeah, this is, it's a fantastic book. It's called Probiotics, Prebiotics, Symbiotics, and Postbiotics. It's a reference textbook. It's got, I don't know, like 50 chapters in it. My chapter is somewhere in here, so it's very well referenced. It's a, it's a textbook that, you know, people who are very curious want to learn more about any of this, but then also mostly purchased by researchers and, and professors and research and doctors and all that. They use it as a reference textbook, you know, for, for looking up things related to probiotics and, and all that. But that endotoxemia, that leaky gut, is, is a, is a very prominent chapter in here. And the spore-based probiotics were the, were the ones that were able to resolve it. Let me, let me actually tell you a really interesting story about spore-based probiotics that we did a study with at Cleveland Clinic, right? So, so as you know, C. diff, right? Clostridium difficile is a big issue. Issue. Yeah. You know, somewhere around 30,000 people a year die from C. diff. It's a massive diarrhea, bloody diarrhea, and so on. And, and it's, it's hard to treat and it comes back very often for people that have it because of this presence of this type of pathogen called Clostridium difficile.
Now, Clostridium difficile lives almost naturally in most of us. The, the time it becomes a problem is when we take big courses of antibiotics and it knocks out all the competition for the Clostridium. So then it starts to take over. Right? Normally it's treated by antibiotics. And so antibiotics try, you, you try to knock it down, but then antibiotics of course knock everything else down and makes it even more favorable for the Clostridia. So we did a study with a, with a, a top researcher at Cleveland Clinic on the microbiome. And, and we were looking at the spores to see if the spores could go after the Clostridia. Right? And as it turns out in, in the study, she found out that the spores did it did reduce the Clostridia as well as, as, as powerfully as any antibiotic she had tested, right? So the, so the rate of diminishing of the Clostridia was very powerful, but how it did it was so interesting, right? So, so the spores will identify the presence of the Clostridia, will surround it, will physically surround that Clostridia, and then it started producing chelating agents to starve the Clostridia of iron.
Iron. So Clostridia and other pathogens, they need iron for their genetics, right? This is why they dig and look for the blood. And so it starved the Clostridia in a manner that even we couldn't think of and then killed it off in the, in that respect. Just, it, it just, you know, shows you the intelligence of nature that we can't replicate. We just have to be smart enough to know it's happening and identify it and utilize it, right? And so that, that was such an elegant thing to see. It just baffled me that these microbes know how to do that.
That's amazing, man. Geez. I am blown away literally by some of this information that you've given. So what we're going to do, and we kind of decided this midway through, but this is, this is the plan now, is this is just going to be a full-blown series. So next we're going to get into the full breakdown of how we we really treat full-blown leaky gut, how the, the differences between all of the different probiotics we see. Maybe we'll get into strains, explanations on the makeups of these products, because it is so damn, like, confusing. There's so many terms and names that you just look at a bottle and go, what the hell is this? And I mean, unless you know, like, an expert like you, you just look at that and blindly go, oh great, it's going to fix my gut, and it could be probably actually causing more problem.
Yes, that's very important to note. It can. Yes. Yeah.
So we're gonna get into a whole thing there, and then I think after that we'll get more and focus just on gut-brain. We, we have so many things that we're going to get into on this. This was the, like, just full-blown synopsis on gut health and awareness, and I think really just so factual and so in detail, but you broke it down so nicely, and I just appreciate attention to detail, but making it so understandable, man. You really do it better than anybody I've ever met. And I've talked to supposedly some of the most brilliant, but you've topped them all, my friend.
Thank you so much. It's one talent I figured out. And, you know, I actually figured it out in college. One of my jobs in college was I was a tutor for, for science, for science and math. Right. And I would tutor all these athletes and even med students in microbiology and so on. And one of the things they always said to me is like, oh, why can't my professor explain it this way? Uh, because I totally get it. And I was like, all right, I gotta make a career out of explaining stuff somehow or the other, you know? And so, uh, so here I am living the dream of being able to explain all this crazy nerdy stuff that's in my brain. But, but hopefully in a way that, that it empowers people so that they understand what's happening in their system. I want people to have a visual understanding of the leakiness of their gut, what's happening there, the things that are leaking through, how that connects to The things that they're feeling, right? The anxiety they're feeling, the skin issues they're feeling, the metabolic issues, the insulin resistance, like how all that's connected.
And then of course what you can do about it, right? Because the beauty of all of this is you can absolutely reverse all of this stuff that we talked about today, right? You have, um, so much more power than you think in order to be able to fix the issues that you're experiencing.
Amazing. I can't wait till the next one, man. And I, I gotta tell you, this has been so enlightening that I'm gonna listen back to this multiple times. And while you were talking, I looked that book up and I found a way to get it a little bit discounted. So I'm adding that to my bookshelf.
Amazing.
I did. I looked it up immediately. I'll, I'll tell you how I found it when we're done here. But, um, I know we went long today, but this has been so fun for me and I know the audience is just gonna love this top to bottom. So thank you not just for taking the time, but for the way that I can tell, it's easy to see that you've really spent your life working on this. You don't get this wise and this smart by just throwing together a few years of work here. I can tell how much time that you put into this. This seems like your life's work and it is just what you're doing for others is, it hits home for me, man. So it's just really appreciated.
Thank you so much for saying that. That's, that's, that's my whole joy in all of this, you know, is just being able to convey this information in a way that makes sense to people so they can take action. And, and it has been what I've been dedicated to doing over the last 20 years in one way or the other, developing this level, this level of understanding, keeping it all in here and then being able to share it. And that, that sharing is, is my way of giving to the world, to the community. And, and it's, and I'm, I'm always extremely grateful grateful for platforms like yours where I can do that, right? Because without it, I'm just sitting here with all this stuff in my head and it's not helping anyone. So eternally grateful for the opportunity to be able to do this with you.
Honored to present this information and get you out there, my friend. So thank you. And I do want to give a quick offer for all my, my listeners out there from Just Thrive, who is now family to me, by the way, and I stand by them them beyond a million percent. So you check the description, I'll have links down there and explanation. But in short, if you do a 90-day Just Thrive probiotic subscription, then you're going to also get a 90-day supply of the digestive bitters. So that's basically $90 free for you right there. I'm taking all of these right now. And I know that I've had gut issues and taken all of the wrong stuff. So I started these about 3 weeks ago already can tell a significant difference. So make sure that you check below and take advantage of that cuz that, that's a steal to say the least. And Kieran, maybe real quick, the digestive bitters. Yeah. What, can you just give a quick synopsis of that and then we're gonna get into that more on the next episode?
Yeah. Bitters are absolutely fascinating. So all throughout your digestive tract, starting in your mouth and then all the way down your intestines, on your liver, on your pancreas, even on your heart. In your heart, you have something called bitter taste receptors. These bitter taste receptors need to bind bitter compounds that, that come from things like dandelion and, and so on. And in, and then when they bind these bitter compounds, it turns on a switch to activate that part of your digestion. So upwards of 50% of your digestive signals or switches are turned on by bitters, and nobody consumes bitters in their diet. Diet, right? Wow. This is part of the reason why we are so poor at digesting and breaking things down because we've turned off half of our digestive signaling. And no wonder you get bloating and indigestion and constipation and all of that stuff because all of these digestive switches are activated by bitter receptors. And without activating bitter receptors, you have com— incomplete digestion and it leads to all kinds of, uh, issues down the road. So, uh, we gotta get the bitters into the diet. I've been using bitters very diligently.
Dringingly for the, for 6, 7 years now. And, you know, and, and it's hard. Most people don't like bitter tasting food. So being able to take it as a capsule with your meal takes care of the problem, right? So it's amazing that, that, that, that our team at Just Thrive is giving that away because that is like a, it's a rescue for your digestion and you should take it with every meal.
I take it with my biggest meal. I take 2 with my biggest meal and a probiotic, the, the, the spore probiotic after every big meal that I, I have, so it's perfect. It's working. All right. So man, thank you. I can't wait to put this out and then record the next one. So super stoked, pumped, everybody. I know that you're gonna enjoy this. Listen to this wholeheartedly. You're probably gonna need to listen to it multiple times, but stay tuned for plenty more to come because we are going to fix the world's gut together. Dylan Gemelli, sign it off.
I HAVE A VERY SPECIAL OFFER FROM JUST THRIVE FOR EVERYONE
Use my link below and receive 90 DAYS OF FREE Digestive Bitters when you sign up for 90 days of the Probiotic!!!
https://justthrivehealth.com/DYLAN
Episode #142 Featuring Kiran Krishnan! The GUT Breakdown Your Health DEPENDS ON! The most comprehensive breakdown of the gut you will find!!
A few months ago, I was introduced to the brand Just Thrive. Someone who I consider a brother told me they were at the top of the mountain for their well known Spore based probiotic and that they were the one company he trusted for total gut health and alignment. After trying their products I quickly realized and saw the significant difference between them and the many other "top name brands" I had tried. I was able to meet with them and was introduced to Kiran Krishnan, their chief microbiologist. I was told he was the brain behind them launching the first spore-based probiotic guaranteed to arrive 100% alive in your gut. I was enamored within 5 minutes of our initial conversation and knew that I found the person I had been looking for that had all the answers. FAR too often in discussions about the gut, I find myself getting answers that a politician would give, dancing all over the place without ever fully addressing the question. Kiran destroyed that narrative and gave a literal textbook lesson on the gut... I say literal because he actually has written in an actual textbook called "Probiotics, Prebiotics, Synbiotics and Postbiotics" Human Microbiome and Human Health!
As you can hear from the start, this was a planned one off episode that was supposed to go the normal hour in length but mid way through I realized that an hour would cover next to nothing with what we needed to get to. I have decided along with Kiran to make this a series in where we tackle ever topic about the gut, IN DETAIL, to help people change their lives!
This episode is the foundation that gives a clear overview of all the different aspects of the gut from the gut and brain connection, immune function, A FULL explanation of leaky gut along with aspects of probiotics and how to take care of our gut. We cover the bases on foods that affect our gut, sleep, stress and the broad spectrum of ways the gut controls our minds as well as how it can contribute to disease and illness. Kiran dissects how many factors and roles the gut plays and how the smallest weakness in the gut lining can cause havoc within our bodies. The way that he explains things scientifically yet in a manner of which is easy to understand without causing confusion is a breath of fresh air. MANY people say and discuss "leaky gut" without ever truly breaking it down and Kiran gives a master class on what it is and why it is one of the leading causes of health problems the world faces today. We discuss the exposure to toxins and glyphosate and how drastically this issues are affecting gut health along with how gut health is one of the leading causes of anxiety! We also have a long discussion on fiber and the role of importance it plays on our gut! We conclude with a discussion on the power with a spore based probiotic and what sets it apart from other forms!
Words cannot express my gratitude and appreciation for this intricate breakdown and what I have already learned from Kiran and my new family with Just Thrive!! This interview has inspired me to take my studies RELENTLESSLY to the gut, and how to provide as much information and help to everyone! I will be working closely with Kiran and Just Thrive on creating awareness, guidance and plenty of educational content to change the lives of everyone!! STAY TUNED because there is PLENTY MORE TO COME with myself and Kiran! DO NOT MISS THIS EPISODE!!!
Follow Kiran on instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/kiranbiome/?hl=en
REMINDER
I HAVE A VERY SPECIAL OFFER FROM JUST THRIVE FOR EVERYONE
Use my link below and receive 90 DAYS OF FREE Digestive Bitters when you sign up for 90 days of the Probiotic!!!
https://justthrivehealth.com/DYLAN
ALSO Take 20% off at Just Thrive SITE WIDE with my link below
https://justthrivehealth.com/DYLANGEMELLI
SAVE $200 OFF THE CAROL BIKE with Code DYLAN
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