SCOTT: Welcome, everybody. You're joining us once more on the Life Enthusiast Health Hangout. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate having you along. I'm Scott Paton. And with us as usual is Martin Pytela, the founder and president of Life Enthusiast. Hey, Martin. How are you today?

MARTIN: Good day, Scott. I'm ready to roll.

SCOTT: Awesome. What are we talking about today?

MARTIN: Today, the topic is the human microbiome. The planet that we are. If you could visualize it, I as a person carry about a hundred trillion microorganisms, they travel with me wherever I go.

SCOTT: Wow. Let's get started.

MARTIN: How our germophobia is making us sick.

SCOTT: That's right. We want everything to be sterile, don't we?

MARTIN: Right. So just focus on this point: we are covered in microbes. We are filled with microbes. Every part of your skin that you touch has microbes. You cannot possible get rid of them. In fact, if you completely eliminate them, you will become sick, you will die.

SCOTT: So we need them. It's a two-way street. They perform functions in our bodies, and we need them for that work.

MARTIN: Exactly. They protect us from harm. They're a necessary part of the barrier between the hostile outside and the fragile inside.

SCOTT: So, we're kind of like our own planet Earth. You've got trees, grass, worms, soil, and fish in the sea. You have animals running around, birds flying around. We kind of have all that same stuff.

MARTIN: Yes at the microscopic level. We are essentially a complex web of life. When we eliminate some, we cause problems. We have visible evidence of it with people with skin problems, immune problems, all manner of trouble.

SCOTT: Right. All the diseases we observe result from things not functioning properly.

MARTIN: Yes, I would say this: There are dangerous germs that can make you sick, but your immune system is designed to handle most of it.

SCOTT: Right. Without any help.

MARTIN: Right. So, let's dive into it.

SCOTT: So, like you were saying. We're trillions and trillions of cells in number, about 35 trillion in number.

MARTIN: Right.

SCOTT: That’s us.

MARTIN: That’s me. The number of cells that make up my body. And then, there are anywhere between 10 and 100 times more single-cell microbes living on top of me and in us. They're adapted for different places. Like, the moist areas inside your mouth, nose, armpits, or the oily regions like your scalp or back.

SCOTT: So, you've got some microbes that thrive in environments like the ocean. You’ve got some other ones that like the Sahara Desert.

MARTIN: Yes. They like the bush.

SCOTT: They like the bush. Literally.

MARTIN: There's a video we have posted on our earlier session on the podcasting blog. You can see the link on the podcast explaining the human microbiome. I found this wonderful video sponsored by MVR, it’s a 5 minute video animated. It's just a wonderful piece of education. I encourage everyone to watch it.

SCOTT: Cool. It gives you a good idea. Because we’re really talking about how we’ve treated these microbes are impacting our health. These are part of the cavalry and we’ve been mowing them down thinking they’re the bad guys.

MARTIN: Yes, indeed. You just said ahead of the slide. Microbes are responsible for much of our immunity. In fact, 80% of our immune system resides in our digestive system. Our gut. And it’s the interface with dangerous ingested foods as they are processed in the tube. You know, the tube between your mouth and anus is actually part of the outside. Because we put dirty things in our mouth and process it and push it down and it comes out still dirty out the back end.

SCOTT: Right.

MARTIN: And the body will allow to bring into the sterile inside, through the villi, through the brush border barrier, only the fully digested and sterile things.

SCOTT: I see. So we take something and we eat something. It has microbes on it. Probably like if you took a carrot, right? It's going to have microbes in it.

MARTIN: Sure.

SCOTT: It’s part of being a carrot. Yeah. So we eat the carrot, raw carrot, it goes in, and some of those microbes are actually gonna be helping the microbes in our body digest the carrot and take all the stuff from the carrot that we want. But there are also gonna be some microbes in there that probably are the black hat guys, the evil ninjas. And so those microbes in our gut and the microbes in the carrot that are the good guys, the white hats, they're gonna be looking after these guys making sure that they don't get in.

MARTIN: That is correct. Yes. That's the idea. And so we have different species in different sections of our digestive system, and there are different terrains, different pH and different objectives. And you can liken it to the climatic micro flora — no, fauna — on the planet. You know, like the cold water fish or the warm water fish or something living in the high Andes or something living in the jungles down by the equator.

SCOTT: A very, very different species.

MARTIN: Right. Depending on the different sections of the digestive system.

SCOTT: So you have different types of flora in your mouth. You have different in your small intestine, in your large intestine, and your colon.

SCOTT: And so on.

MARTIN: Right. Yes. And they live there. Like the specific species will live in that certain section.

SCOTT: Right. That's where they like to be. You don't find them somewhere else.

MARTIN: Right. And if they're not, you have a problem.

SCOTT: Right.

MARTIN: And so that lines the sterile foods will lead to sterile guts. So if you're eating foods that have been sterilized or you have not inoculated yourself or you have killed it off through the use of antibiotics or chlorine or,

SCOTT: Microwaving.

MARTIN: Drugs. Yeah, I guess that too. But drugs do a terrible job on these things, right? So if you end up with a sterile gut, that means your team on the inside is missing or is weak. That makes you susceptible to attack.

SCOTT: So these black hat guys we were talking about are able to get through and into the bloodstream and into our body cells where they're not supposed to be.

MARTIN: Right. But even they can just proliferate in your gut. They might not even get into the blood. But let's just say that you travel to some tropical country and you eat the local food or drink the local water. It’s so common to have the gringo go down to Mexico.

SCOTT: And spend three days in the washroom.

MARTIN: Yes, indeed.

SCOTT: Montezuma’s revenge. Right. And it really is that we're too stupid to have enough strength in our digestive system through our germophobic lifestyles.

SCOTT: Right.

MARTIN: Too much Lysol, maybe.

SCOTT: So how does,

MARTIN: Yeah, go ahead.

SCOTT: I was gonna ask you about the last point — the greater microbial diversity. Yeah. Microbial diversity.

MARTIN: Well, the point was that researchers have confirmed that in rural cultures, the primitive cultures, there is much more microbial diversity in the guts of people as compared to the urban dwellers who eat sterile foods.

SCOTT: Hmm.

MARTIN: Okay. Next one. So what's an example of a sterile food?

MARTIN: Well, you harvested the carrots and instead of wiping them on your jeans before you start eating them, you first rinse them, then rinse them in chlorinated water, then you put them away for six months. And then you bring them out.

SCOTT: And you boil them.

MARTIN: And maybe even peel them before you touch them? Yeah. And boil them. That’s about as sterile as it gets.

SCOTT: Yeah.

MARTIN: I stuck on this picture of a baby with his mouth firmly planted on the floor. To illustrate that to build a healthy flora, you need to essentially lick everything.

SCOTT: And that's what babies do. It drives us all crazy.

MARTIN: But it's by design. This is what's supposed to happen. And the baby, as he goes through the birth canal, he inhales and ingests and licks the birth canal and then the mother's skin and the saliva and the intimate behaviors between the mother and the child. And then as they evolve, they start crawling and they crawl in everywhere and they inoculate their own immune systems through these encounters. And it's supposed to be gradual. It's not supposed to be a big onslaught all at once.

SCOTT: Right

MARTIN: It's not like vaccination where you shove a mega dose of multiple toxic things into the bloodstream direct.

SCOTT: Right. Well, when you think about it, most of the time, for the first three months or so, the baby's always being held.

MARTIN: Yes.

SCOTT: So the type of bacteria that it's being associated with is that of its mother or father usually.

MARTIN: Right. The oral stuff. Stuff you can lick and breathe and transfer that way.

SCOTT: Yeah. And then later on, as it gets stronger, the baby goes on the floor and now it's finding other things.

MARTIN: Right. So the weakening of the immune system happens through the technological interventions. Instead of going through the birth canal, the child is born by C-section. He's wiped and washed with antibacterial wipes. And he might even be drinking chlorinated water and antibiotics. And just generally too much cleanliness. Too much Lysol on the kitchen counter. Not that good.

SCOTT: Ouch.

MARTIN: And so, yeah, I stuck a picture of a child. I found it on this Baylor International Pediatric Initiative. Anyway, this is, I don't know if it's a boy or a girl, but that's cold sores and sterile gut. Weak immunity. If your gut is sterile, you are automatically susceptible to infections, whether it’s a stomach flu or the runny nose, or worse, the stronger things like dysentery, or the lung infection that you inhale and cough, or the skin problems like these cold sores. That’s just a consequence of weak immunity.

SCOTT: So we need to stop the killing and start nurturing.

MARTIN: Right. So here's the associate director of the CDC telling us we have reached the end of antibiotics. Period. This slide is supposed to help us illustrate the point that, indeed, through our agricultural practices and our indiscriminate use of antibiotics in treating infections, we have created, we've nurtured bugs that have become resistant to the antibiotic itself.

SCOTT: The so-called super bugs that live in hospitals and they can't get rid of.

MARTIN: Yeah, those. So it now happens that you have to be very afraid to go in places where these things exist. And they exist on farms, they exist on your food, they exist in grocery stores, on the packages of food. So you should be handling your food very carefully, and you should be afraid of ground meat. Because ground meat takes the surface and buries it deep inside the mass. So if you're eating ground meat, you should be cooking it fully, no pink middles — because you need to cook them off. When you're cooking a steak or big slab of meat, you cook the whole surface. Unless that poor thing has been tenderized with needles. I don’t know if you’ve seen this mechanical tenderization where they have these needles that puncture things.

SCOTT: Yes.

MARTIN: Of course you're familiar with it. So that drives the surface bacteria back into the meat. So if you then cook your steak medium rare, you'll have raw bacteria in the middle.

SCOTT: But if you just have a T-bone steak, you sear it on both sides, you've basically killed all the bacteria on the outside of the meat and there isn’t any inside it.

MARTIN: That is correct. But if it was tenderized mechanically,

SCOTT: Not the case. So the problem is we’ve been using antibiotics in our farming system, and then we've been using them in our medical care. So basically, we've been killing microbes like crazy. Agent Orange, I guess, sort of thing — just shearing everything away. The result is we’ve got a weak gut. And the result is that we've got bacteria that's becoming very, very resistant to treatment.

MARTIN: Right. So we have this double whammy situation: we are less resistant and the bugs are stronger. So we need to be really concerned here. And I found this video on Frontline — a whole program from PBs, it's called “Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria.” it’s a whole program that deals with where they are, how they come about, and what you can do about them. And the “what you can do about them” part is fairly limited. And we have some tools in our arsenal. We have Colloidal Silver, which is working with some of them, but some are resistant to Silver. Some are defeated by Copper. And then, of course, we talked in our previous program about Humic Acid, which provides the terrain for the immune system, that gives it the intelligence to deal with microbes it hasn't previously encountered.

SCOTT: Hmm. Okay.

MARTIN: And there comes the soil part.

SCOTT: Right. We need to get these microbes back up to snuff and in quantities that we need in order to be healthy.

MARTIN: That's correct. We need to ingest both the lactobacilli or lacto bacteria, which are created by fermentation, or they create fermentation. But we need to eat unpasteurized fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurt, or kefir, however you want to pronounce it. So those, and we also need the soil-based ones. Because they help us build the strong culture. Bacteria make up most of the flora in the colon. Look at that, up to 60% of the dry mass of feces are these bacteria.

SCOTT: Wow.

MARTIN: And it’s estimated that between 300 to 1,000 species live in the gut. And going back to the slide we showed earlier, rural dwellers have a more varied, wider spectrum of these than urban people. Anyway, they live in the gut and they are important. They produce vitamins like Biotin and Vitamin K. Vitamin K is important for your blood clotting issues. Hormones that will store fats. Lactoferrin, that's a hormone that deals with the binding of Iron in your blood. So if you are suffering from bad blood or not enough hemoglobin, you may actually need better gut culture, better bacteria in your gut.

SCOTT: Well, and everybody needs to be concerned about that, right?

MARTIN: Oh, absolutely. Big issue. And these microbes, they don't eat the same food that we want. In fact, food for bacteria is typically indigestible to humans.

SCOTT: Hmm.

MARTIN: And it's been known as prebiotics. They come under the name of fructooligosaccharides, fructose from fruits, saccharides as sugars, oligo meaning complex and soluble fiber like Inulin. That picture there is a molecule of fructooligosaccharide.

SCOTT: Wow.

MARTIN: Inulin, that’s the fiber that's in plants. And I’m sure you’ll remember, these are added to the superfoods. They’re very important nutrients that are frequently missing in the food.

SCOTT: Right

MARTIN: We need to add it back in.

SCOTT: And that’s a great way to get it back, isn’t it?

MARTIN: Indeed. So we’ve listed the category on our website, on Life-Enthusiast under products, you’ll find it in the probiotics section. There’s a whole category of them.

So that’s where you find all of them. If you could maybe forward, we’ll just discuss the individual ones that we have. These are pictures of the products, what they look like. Big deal. These are here for a reminder. The main reason you want to take them is to restore healthy elimination and nutrient absorption. And you need to have the whole broad spectrum of it. Some soil-based, some lacto-based. Some came from fermentation, some need to be fed by the prebiotics. And they all benefit from having the Humic Acid in the body as a terrain from which to move forward. So the reminders: the Body Biotics, which is a soil-based set of organisms. They call them, of course, consortia of microbes. It's available either in capsules or in chewables. The chewables are kind of cool because they make your breath smell better.

SCOTT: Plus, one of the areas we probably don’t get a lot of probiotics is in our mouth. 'Cause there's that whole saliva and what goes on in our chewing. That’s really, really important.

MARTIN: And we don’t eat enough dirt.

SCOTT: And we don’t eat enough dirt.

MARTIN: Right. And then the next picture is the full set made by Genki. Genki is a wonderful Canadian company that is quite unique. The methodology is the natural fermentation method. What they do is they start with grains or grasses, and they sprout them. And once sprouted, they ferment them using the sauerkraut culture type of fermentation. Then once it's fully fermented, they dry it, put it in bags, and they also bottle the liquid. And that is just phenomenal stuff. That’s the juice of fermentation.

SCOTT: So you can take the juice or the dried stuff?

MARTIN: Yes. And then the blue box there, that’s mainly inulin and a prebiotic mix that helps people, especially with candida and other yeast or fungal infections in the digestive system, because it supports the good guys. Then the next one is called Strata-Flora. It’s probably our strongest, broad-spectrum, wide-range, anything from the mouth to the anus, take care of every single aspect of your digestive and eliminative systems. So iif somebody has trouble, that by far will be the best. And then the last one is a bag of Humic Acid. It's a powdered thing, also available as a tincture, but that’s what we should throw in.

SCOTT: Cool. So that covers it pretty well. I'm just kind of curious with something like Strata-Flora, how much would you suggest? Is that something someone should take a couple teaspoons a day or more?

MARTIN: It varies. Depends on the state of health. People who are just starting out with a very troubled and bad digestive system, they might need three, four, or five teaspoons of it a day.

SCOTT: Okay.

MARTIN: But some people need only very little. Half a teaspoon a day is plenty for some. So you need to feel your way through it. You need to find out what your body wants and how much it requires.

SCOTT: This is from one of our customers who gave us a five star for the Strata-Flora. "Wow. I just continue to be enthused about this product. I have a customer who just bought another bottle from me. She said, ‘This is all that I’m taking now. Whenever I have gas, I just take this and it goes away. It has really cleared my skin up and I’ve lost five pounds without changing anything else.’” She and I both looked at each other in amazement. We’ve both had the same experience. I had lost seven pounds without changing anything. I had gone off the product for a while and felt worse. Needless to say, I’m back on it again. I think it is clearing things out of my insides that have been there for years. Thanks for a great product. You have a winner here.”

MARTIN: Indeed. Well, I mean, what more can you say, right? The results discussed that some of these problems were in the upper, and some in the lower. Some were related to food processing and nutrient extraction and so on. That’s the testimony to the broad range and broad reach of this product.

SCOTT: Cool. All right. So Martin, if somebody wanted to know more about these products — maybe how it can help with their digestive system, what should they do?

MARTIN: Well, they can read up at the Life Enthusiast website, www.life-enthusiast.com. Look under the products category for probiotics. And if that’s not enough, give us a call. We can be reached at 1-866-543-3388.

SCOTT: Cool. All right. Well, thanks for joining us everybody. Hope you got a lot out of this. We certainly enjoyed bringing this information to you. And stay tuned, head over to the Life Enthusiast Co-op website. Make sure you’re signed up for our newsletter, and we’ll let you know when we have our next hangout. See you then. Bye-bye.

MARTIN: Thank you.