Podcast 536: The Gut as the Foundation of Health with Microbiome Labs

(INTRO)

JEANNIE: And I think it was Hippocrates that said all diseases begin in the gut. That's certainly what we were, the foundations of what we were taught in naturopathic medical school.

MARTIN: Hi, this is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast Health Shots podcast. Today, you will have the rare opportunity to meet Jeannie Achuff. I'm going to say it differently. I'm just screwing around.

JEANNIE: The proper Germanic way. Achuff.

MARTIN: Today you will have the opportunity to meet Genie Achuff, which, the name is exotic but Jeannie is a rare breed. One of those people who has lived what she preaches. Well, anyway, we'll find out. Welcome to the show, Jeannie.

JEANNIE: Thank you, Martin. Lovely to be here.

MARTIN: Today you're coming to us as a representative of multiple things. People like me, people who know about alternative medicine, people who know all about healing from difficult, intractable conditions, and most of all representing the brand Microbiome Labs, right?

JEANNIE: Yes.

MARTIN: Let's dive in.

JEANNIE: All right. So, I am a clinical science liaison with Microbiome Labs, and my background in training and clinical experience is as a naturopathic doctor. So, my clinical practice, my private practice, ran for about 17 years. Training prior to that was about five years long. And I got into this field for a multitude of reasons. I was studying environmental studies as a young person. My dad is a cardiologist, and my mom was a nutritionist. There was a lot of thinking around health and wellness and systems thinking. And as I got into my later teen years and was, for all intents and purposes, but not well in a way that anybody could diagnose, I started to investigate, what else can I do? How can I help my system? How can I heal? I discovered that I have celiac disease, which, unfortunately for the younger generation in my family, other members of our family also have it, as it turns out. So for better or worse, I was the leader in my family as far as learning about this and starting to understand the impact of celiac disease on not just gut health, but beyond that, right? The thing that really alerted me to the fact that something was very very wrong with my body was that not only did I have gastrointestinal issues but that was an aside. I had traveled in India and all these places. So, it's easy to write off intestinal issues as something you picked up along the way, right? But the metatarsals,

MARTIN: So many people think, "Oh, it's just an infection. I'll get over it."

JEANNIE: Right. Yeah. Right. And then you can't find an infection and you don't get over it and life continues to degrade. The metatarsals in my feet were chronically fracturing. So, my bones were breaking. That really gave me a sense of, okay, if something's not right in one part of my body, it's affecting everything. And in pretty quick succession, I was about 20 years old. From then, I started to look at naturopathic medicine. I saw a naturopathic doctor myself, got diagnosed with celiac disease, and began to really appreciate the human body as an ecosystem in and of itself. And that's what really led me into pursuing naturopathic medicine for myself. And I think it was Hippocrates that said all diseases begin in the gut. That's certainly what we were, the foundations of what we were taught in naturopathic medical school.

MARTIN: Yeah. And for you, it's duh, really, it's so critical that when you break this, how do I say this nicely? You really have it broken, unfixably broken. So.

JEANNIE: Right, you can't see the world any differently once you see it for the whole interconnected beingness that it is.

MARTIN: Well that certainly gives you a perspective on life, right?

JEANNIE: Absolutely. Yeah. And that wasn't the only health condition that I was dealing with. Many things were all connected to that same issue of what was happening in my digestive system. And something that we've spoken to before, my lifestyle growing up was pretty classic the 70s and 80s, a very hyper-clean household. I had allergies, so I was given allergy shots. I was a competitive swimmer, so I bathed in chlorine for hours every day. So it makes sense that the gene was flipped on in my system for celiac disease, which clearly, it's in our family's genetic pool. But yeah, and that led to several other conditions that I have had to deal with ever since then, and have had to clean up ever since then. But with time, we have this, they talk about it in natural healing, where as you get closer and closer to the root of the problem, you can start to see all of those originating elements that were feeding into what became a much bigger set of symptoms and potentially even diseases, right? And so as you deal with all of these imbalances more peripherally, it brings you back closer and closer to the core, and you to really understand what the root of the issue is.

So, gut health has been near and dear to my heart for a long time and I was at a conference in 2019 in Hawaii. A colleague had introduced me to Microbiome Labs, probably about, it must have been about 2015-2016 somewhere around there.

MARTIN: That's when it was still an independent Canadian company, right?

JEANNIE: He, let's see Kiran Krishnan is a microbiologist who started Microbiome Labs. I believe out of Chicago.

MARTIN: Oh, he was out of there.

JEANNIE: Yes.

MARTIN: I thought that he was out of Toronto. Mistake.

JEANNIE: No. Yeah, he came from Chicago originally.

MARTIN: Okay.

JEANNIE: Yeah. So, he was at this conference in 2019 and I just said: “I'm quite fascinated by what you're doing.” And we had a lovely conversation, and I love the educational aspect of my job. So, I inquired, "What are you guys up to? Is there room for a naturopathic doctor? What might be possible?” And we had an email exchange briefly. But as it turns out, he was in the process of partnering with another company and selling, and all of these things, and then we hit the pandemic shortly after that. There were other factors in everybody's lives, and that ball was dropped. Fast forward to just over a year ago, when someone I know took a sales position with Microbiome Labs, and they said, "Hey, they're expanding their education department." And I'm quite cautious to get involved with any companies just because I'm not a salesperson. That's not my nature, and that's often where the roles lie, and I really like education, but Microbiome Labs has a real emphasis on education and Kiran Krishnan really wanted more than anything in this business to help people understand the significance of a healthy gut and a healthy gut microbiome. That mission has really carried forth, and there are five of us who are in charge of education for this company, and for each of us, it really is something that's near and dear to our hearts and very exciting, and the way that Microbiome Labs has approached gut health is, as you said, quite unique.

MARTIN: I would really like to get your help in explaining very clearly just how critical and central the gut is. In my experience, it's a three-way connection: a healthy gut gives you a healthy brain and healthy immunity. Leaky gut gives you leaky brain and leaky immunity, and,

JEANNIE: Absolutely

MARTIN: It just goes from one door into the other, and well, you probably have a much better way of expressing all that, try it.

JEANNIE: So it's even more than a triad at this point, right? We know that we have, what we would call that, the gut-brain axis or the gut-immune axis. But what we've known about gut health and its significance for the rest of the body all of these years is, as you can expect, finally being studied in science, and now they have these mechanisms and chemicals that they can follow and say: “This explains what some of us in alternative health fields have known for a very long time. So, not just gut-brain gut-immune, but we also have the gut-heart axis, we also have the gut-lung axis we have the gut reproductive axis, the gut-skin axis, so it's a very exciting time because from a numbers standpoint, globally there are roughly 2,000 published articles every month on research that's being done on the microbiome.

MARTIN: That's essentially unconsumable by anyone.

JEANNIE: It is. It is unconsumable. No individual human could take in all of that information every month. Yeah.

MARTIN: As I'm thinking as you're saying it, I'm thinking, of course there's microbiome. There are microbes in my eyes, in my nose, there are microbes in my ears, and it's from the mouth all the way down to the anus and out into the reproductive system throughout, everywhere, right?

JEANNIE: Absolutely. Yes. So, what we know now, there's really, I think, one place that I'm feeling really excited about is that culturally in North America, we really emphasize cardiovascular disease and metabolic health. These are the primary drivers behind early mortality and,

MARTIN: The silo concept of medicine.

JEANNIE: Right. As it turns out, we're looking at the gut as a primary driver behind why there's inflammation in the cardiovascular system. So essentially, if we really break it down into a simple explanation. In the gut, so we eat food right? It goes into the mouth, into the stomach, from the stomach into the small intestine, then into the large intestine, and then excreted in the large intestine in that colon. This is where our microbiome exists. We want, throughout the GI tract, to have a healthy intestinal lining. So, we're going to have all of the cells, they've got what are called tight junctions. There's proteins that keep each of the intestinal cells bound to each other, and then they're protected by a mucin layer. And there's immune system processes happening at that mucin layer, and the body is discerning: “Hey, is this something that we can accept and allow to travel into the bloodstream, or is this something that we need to clear out and get rid of.” 

So, when we're eating, well, there's a lot of factors actually. I'll say this. Our modern lifestyles really do drive a lot of inflammation in our systems and can compromise the gut lining. When those intestinal cells are not tightly bound, that is where we get what's commonly known as leaky gut or intestinal permeability, that allows whatever substances are in the intestinal lumen to travel into the bloodstream. So pausing there, let's look at what can promote that leaky gut phenomenon. Stress is a huge one. And when you think of stress, don't just think of “Oh I had a hard day at work.” People are dealing with prolonged economic stress, divorces, family issues, addictions, all kinds of things. Lack of sleep is a stressor.

MARTIN: Yeah. Watching TV and,

JEANNIE: Watching news.

MARTIN: Raising children. And so on.

JEANNIE: Driving. Driving, traffic. And a lot of people will exercise to alleviate stress, but then it's a fine line between what your exercise habits are and whether they are restorative or are going to promote more stress on the system. 

So, Iron Man, marathon running, all of these things, moderate exercise is the key. And then we think of food, eating habits, of course, eating irregularly, high-fat diets, processed food diets, and as we mentioned in our previous conversation, the introduction of chemicals into our food supply, namely glyphosate, which is used on grains, which is developed as an antibiotic. So,

MARTIN: This should be underscored and italicized. People get this: It is actually killing the microbes that are feeding the plant. That's how it is a herbicide. It doesn't kill the plant. It kills its interface with soil, and it's the microbes. So anyway, when you introduce that even in trace amounts into your body, guess what it will do?

JEANNIE: Yep. It does the job that it was designed to do.

The movement of you mentioned being in this industry for what 40 years now, and I was quite, for all intents and purposes, I was quite young when I became aware that something needs to be different. I started working on organic farms when I was in high school and became aware that there's something going on with our food industry. So it once was a niche or hippie preference to eat organic foods but we now know from this standpoint of all of the hard science around the microbiome. We need to be eating organic foods to support a healthy microbiome, good gut health, and that translates to every system in our body beyond. 

To your point, when we are living this modern life that we're living and we run the risk of having that compromised gut barrier, anything that's coming from the intestinal lumen into the bloodstream needs to be vetted by the immune system. When our microbiome is out of balance, when we're in a state of what we would call dysbiosis, there is typically a predominance of bacteria that are more pro-inflammatory. These are going to be what we would call Gram-negative bacteria. Gram-negative bacteria release something called lipopolysaccharides or endotoxins. Those chemicals come through the tight junctions. They get into the bloodstream, and they are simply put pro inflammatory molecules that are now circulating in your blood vessels through every organ in your body.

Does what we eat affect our health globally through our system? Absolutely. And then the next question is going to be, well, what's the, where's your body's vulnerability? Whether that's a lifestyle vulnerability, maybe you, a lot of manual labor, or something, and your joints are going to be a vulnerable place. Or perhaps you have a strong genetic predisposition to cardiovascular disease or reproductive issues, right? So it's a question of if you've got that heightened level of inflammation in your system that is rooted in an unhealthy gut, where's it going to land?

MARTIN: Yeah. Release a swarm of mad bees. They're going to land on something.

Well, so there we are. So in medicine, most people are preframed and pre-educated by the TV that they watch because doctors… have you ever seen a TV show that's got a naturopathic clinic as the center of its attention?

JEANNIE: Nope.

MARTIN: No, you get a general hospital and emergency room and all that sort of drama. And you're pre-educated into thinking that everything can be solved by a little bit of surgery and a quick drug.

JEANNIE: Right.

MARTIN: Anyway, so to the point, right?

JEANNIE: Right.

MARTIN: Exactly how you don't get better.

JEANNIE: Correct. Yes. We need people who can bone set and help us when we have a car accident. And I think the future of medicine and certainly people in the conventional world who are starting to see this, the future of medicine is really going to be taking an integrative look at how all of the systems are connected.

MARTIN: Right. Yeah. 

JEANNIE: Now, interestingly, I think that, coming from my background of environmental studies, working with the gut microbiome makes a lot of sense to me because I have that ecological, the ecosystems model of thinking.

MARTIN: Yeah. 

JEANNE: And what I suspect is, hopefully, medical people are scientists.

MARTIN: I don't know, most of them are mechanics that have been trained by a DSM or whatever they call it. 

JEANNIE: Well, and that's, it's become very narrow, as you said, medicine is siloed, right? So, we're siloed into all these specialties. And what we're seeing now in our modern lifestyle again is just disease that really is the primary driver of all ill health.

MARTIN: Yeah. Let me try this line. I think they're exceedingly good at treating the disasters that we can face, but they're terrible at avoiding them.

JEANNIE: Yes, that's a good way to put it. Yeah. Preventive medicine is a very limited,

MARTIN: Not their thing.

JEANNIE: Not their thing. No. When we really are looking at what preventive care is, it starts in the gut, truly.

MARTIN: Yeah.

JEANNIE: I've taken here; this is one for your grandkids. So I've taken a new angle with my son when it comes to getting him to eat his vegetables. The vegetables aren't for you. They're for the bugs that are living in your system, and you need to make them happy. So just trying to get, he's got all these arguments for why he's not going to eat the Brussels sprouts or the zucchini or what have you.

MARTIN: Yeah, this is exceedingly well stated because after all, it is the bugs that are the intermediary. They are predigesting the food before it can pass through that barrier that you were showing with your interlocked fingers. It's the bugs that make it possible for it to be actually passable.

JEANNIE: Precisely. Yeah. They're metabolizing our food, they're breaking it down, they're helping us to absorb nutrients, and then they're also producing one of the byproducts or the metabolites that a lot of people are familiar with from the gut microbiome is butyrate. We're hearing a little bit more about butyrate these days. Butyrate is a short-chain fatty acid that's produced from some of what particularly were called the keystone species in the microbiome. The real key players that are helping to direct what's happening metabolically, what's happening with the pH, they're really helping to form that ecosystem and to maintain ecological balance. Butyrate is essentially fuel for the intestinal cells, so if we don’t have enough organisms that are capable of producing butyrate, then we are lacking in this essential nutrient that our intestinal cells need.

MARTIN: Two-step right? The right microbes in the space but the food that they need to get otherwise it doesn't happen.

JEANNIE: Exactly. They need the substrate. So fiber.

MARTIN: Right.

JEANNIE: They need fiber. They also need, so it's all about the relationship too, right? That's something that again, in our world of thinking, has been so mechanistic and reductionist. People tend to think, well, what's the one probiotic I can take that's going to help me?

MARTIN: Yeah. Which is the most important tire on your car, please?

JEANNIE: Right. Well, let's just keep the front right tire. I think that'll get you,

MARTIN: That'll do it. That's the one.

JEANNIE: That's a good analogy. Yeah, you need four tires and in a gut microbiome. This is a key piece when we're talking about the microbiomes throughout our systems. The gut requires diversity. So, we need hundreds of different species of organisms there, and we need them all to be interacting, right? There are going to be different bacteria that will break down, say cellulose and starch, and they're going to be then feeding their byproducts to the other species that will then produce butyrate. Right. There's all of these relationships happening.

MARTIN: Yeah. The cascade. The fabric of life.

JEANNIE: Yeah. It is fabric. It's a community. But conversely, for example, in the lung or in the reproductive tract, we want very little diversity. There should only be a small collection of organisms that are there. But the way that the body develops its wisdom around who was in what organ systems all starts in the gut. So.

MARTIN: The Microbiome Labs right, if we have not made a case for people to focus on this, this is critical, then we have failed here, but I don't think we have.

JEANNIE: We're just getting warmed up.

MARTIN: Yes

JEANNIE: Yes, this is a really good question, and that relates back to my point. A lot of people want to know what's the one thing I can take that's going to make me superhuman or super skinny or whatever it is that they're desiring. And I'm hearing a lot right now about peptides, right? People think that peptides are going to solve all of their problems.

MARTIN: Sure.

JEANNIE: Sure, there might be some things that,

MARTIN: Those are such potent regulators that you can easily overregulate yourself into trouble.

JEANNIE: Absolutely.

MARTIN: Be very careful what you're steering for.

JEANNIE: Yeah. And overdoing it, right? Like your term of overregulate. So balance is really a key word when we're thinking about the microbiome, and it's not about one probiotic strain. It's not about one food. It's not about one medication. That is where the Microbiome Labs paradigm is again, just something I really love that speaks to the ecologist in me because the goal is not to populate the gut microbiome with a particular lactobacillus strain. The goal is to really help to develop a well-educated, well-resilient microbiome. So, how do we do that? The bottom line is it's actually not super fancy. These are the things that we talked about before. Sleeping well, eating a diverse range of foods, fibers, colors, polyphenols, sitting down when we eat, chewing our food.

MARTIN: There we go. Chewing. Chewing. 20 chews on a single mouthful. I would like to just for a brief moment, take you one step back, and that is honestly, do not put chlorine in your body. Do not drink water that has not been filtered.

JEANNIE: Yes.

MARTIN: And do not drink food that has been grown with glyphosate. So, only organic. Okay?

JEANNIE: Yes. Only organic. Yeah. And that goes for not only your fruits and vegetables, but also your meats, and in your neighbor's yard, in your, educate your neighbors.

MARTIN: Oh my god. Go in your neighbor's yard after they just did the treatment for their dandelion or whatever they do.

JEANNIE: Yeah. No, it is, as we look at working to heal our own microbiomes, it's important that we recognize that we are a part of a larger ecosystem and that we share what we know with the people we encounter, right? So, it's and it can be tough. I'm sure you found this, right? It's kind of that balance of … How much do you share if you're not invited to share?

MARTIN: Yeah. I get this: “Don't talk about that. I've heard your story. Stop it.”

JEANNIE: Yeah. Right. They want to block you. But when people start to recognize, hey, and I noticed this with my family, I go back and see my siblings and my parents, and they all kind of go, you seem to be doing something right. “What's on? What are you up to? What's?”

MARTIN: Yeah. How come you're not as badly off as I am? And then you get to share.

MARTIN: The big picture. Yes.

JEANNIE: Going back again to the founder of Microbiome Labs. Kiran Krishnan is a microbiologist, and he learned about these spores, bacterial spores, which are called bacillus species. The bacillus spores had been discovered earlier in the last century, somewhere around the time of World War II, believe, and it was in relation to European soldiers observing people local to the ground, mostly in the Middle East, I think, and what they were doing to care for their health, especially their gastrointestinal health.

MARTIN: Let me paint it in a really vivid story. It was the German soldiers in the 1940s fighting in North Africa, suffering from dysentery like you wouldn't know. And the locals would follow a camel and scoop up some fresh poop and ingest it straight in their mouth.

When they suffered from dysentery, the Germans were feeling icky about that. They researched it and discovered Bacillus subtilis. That was the first one. That's the first thing. Right.

JEANNIE: Yes. They've isolated it, and they started to use and study the spores. So in Europe, they have been used far longer than they have been in the US. The introduction into the United States was in the early 2000s in Europe. Our spores are housed in the UK, I believe, primarily. The spores were introduced as a means of supporting general health and balance, particularly when you're looking at something like dysentery, that's obviously very strong, it's a robust pathogen. Having traveled through India, I had my dance with it, it's just awful. So balance after that also is challenging, right, so you don't only have an acute situation to deal with, but then also what happens after that, what, how is your system capable of recovering? The spores in the Microbiome Labs flagship product, the MegaSporeBiotic, is a combination of five spores. As you mentioned, one of those spores is the Bacillus subtilis, which is known as hu58 because the lab where it's stored at a university is in the UK. I don't remember which one it is but,

MARTIN: Hereford University? 

JEANNIE: Is it Harvard? HU?

JEANNIE: We've got the Bacillus subtilis. We've got Bacillus indicus, Bacillus coagulans, Bacillus licheniformis, and Bacillus clausii. So each of these spores, they have their own unique physiologic function as a group, collectively, the way that the spores are working physiologically for us in our gut is that they're not coming in in the same fashion that a Lactobacillus or a Bifido strain would be and with the hopes of it populating the gut. 

The spores are going to come in. They are visitors. They're a transient population. The washout is roughly 30 days. They're going to be in the system for about 30 days at a time. And they're helping to run the environment. They're supporting short-chain fatty acid production. All of those metabolites that we want to be encouraging in the system. That's anti-inflammatory, fuel for the intestinal cells, producing vitamins like the carotenoids that are nourishing for the system. 

And then, for example, the Bacillus subtilis that you mentioned has its own what's called quorum sensing, which I just think is the coolest thing. So it arrives on scene and it goes okay, hang on a second, there's too much of you over here, not enough of you over here, I'm not sure where this Bifido strain is, we need to repopulate. I think of it like the orchestra conductor comes in and helps to organize everybody, get rid of the excess, repopulate those that we want to be there. It's just this really lovely, I would say, phenomenon of the spores coming in, helping to gently support ecosystem balance, rather than coming in, and this is one of my favorite things of being a naturopathic doctor, I'm always looking for ways that we can encourage the body to do what it knows how to do. Not come in and do something for it. 

When we're looking at restoring health, when we're looking at restoring balance the emphasis on facilitating what the body knows how to do, what that microbiome knows how to do, that's really the key because that's where you also get long-term sustained health and wellness. If we come in and we give someone just a Lactobacillus formula, they may feel better taking it. But once they've come off of it for 10 days, 20 days, will they still feel as good as they did on it? It hasn't restored function, right? The idea with the MegaSporeBiotic, even though they have this 30-day wash out, is eventually the system is brought back into balance. You're not dependent on MegaSporeBiotic for the rest of your life, right?

MARTIN: Yeah. You're building a healthy territory rather than just simply covering it. Yeah.

JEANNIE: Exactly. And what can be again is that where we really do invest in some trust in what the body knows how to do, because as with anything, when we've gotten way out of balance, the process of coming back into balance is not a fix, right? That's not the paradigm we're working with. It's rebalancing. And rebalancing is always comfortable, right? This is where we have to be strategic when we employ something like a formula like this one, like the MegaSporeBiotic, is going slowly, letting the system start to warm up to the introduction of this new information that's coming in. And some people will have more gas, or they will have more constipation as that rebalancing is happening.

MARTIN: So, for most people, you start with that, just say, okay, MegaSporeBiotic first, do one bottle before you do other things?

JEANNIE: So, interestingly, not necessarily. Depends on what's happening with a person. For some you have to go more gently if they're very inflamed. If they dealt with a chronic disease of any kind, something ranging from something as severe as Lyme disease or they've had mold exposure and they're dealing with mycotoxin illness. Those kinds of things can be quite… their system is full of inflammation, right? So you really have to go slow and careful. But we've got many people in our practices who have, they've just, chronic headaches or they've got menstrual cramps or they have chronic digestive upset. So I'm always listening, where can I begin with this person? What's appropriate? What can their system handle? I will often actually begin with, I don't know if you're familiar with the Mega IgG200, which is the bovine serum immunoglobulins.

MARTIN: It's awesome, there are just so many wonderful products in this lineup. I'm going to just include a link, we're just highlighting the most important ones. IgG, once you get to understanding what those immunoglobulins do. Well, maybe you can explain it.

JEANNIE: Yeah. Well, they really, I have enthusiasm for them because I also have that enthusiasm and it was, it was sort of to build. When I was first introduced to that formula, I thought, "Oh, cool. That's cool." And then I started using it with people and started taking it myself, and I didn't start taking it until at least 20 years after my celiac diagnosis. And I've done everything, right? I have really healed the system in as many ways as I knew how and things were fine. But when I started taking the IgG, I went, "Oh, like it could be better."

MARTIN: It took away some of the headwinds that you were facing, right?

JEANNIE: Yeah. Well, we all, if we back up to the idea of the LPS, right, that I was talking about. These pro-inflammatory molecules that can leak through the intestinal barrier. The IgG can bind to those LPS. That is its primary job. So, it's binding to those pro-inflammatory molecules and escorting them out of the body. So, when those, we all have gram-negative bacteria in our microbiome, again, we're not looking to get rid of these species entirely, but we need them to be in balance, right? They need to be kept in check. 

When we eat a meal, let's just say you go and you get French fries and a burger and you eat fried food or pizza or something like that, something heavy and greasy, and the gram-negative bacteria just by sheer fact of eating a meal like that are going to have their little party, and there's going to be a lot of them that die in that process. They die when we eat. That's how their life cycle goes. So, you've got all these gram-negative bacteria releasing all of this LPS and flooding the system with this potential high inflammatory load. So, not that I'm promoting to do an experiment with the IgG, but it's, that's the extreme case of it, right? And when you introduce IgG into the system, it can help to escort all of that out. But even when we're eating well, and we're staying in balance, again, those gram negative bacteria are going to be dying off when we eat our meals, we are experiencing an exposure to LPS. To have that taken out of the system regularly can help to reduce brain fog. It can help to reduce just that inflammatory state that makes us feel groggy and draggy. And.

MARTIN: Yeah, myself, I'm sufficiently broken to the fact that if I do eat French fries, and I will, what the heck. I can promise you that two days later, my skin will break out because the inflammation level has just broken through, and it's high enough that all of a sudden, I'm visibly damaged.

JEANNIE: Yeah. Right. That skin axis for you speaks loud and clear.

MARTIN: Oh yeah. Loud and clear.

JEANNIE: Yeah. The IgG, that's often what you ask, kind of where will I start? And keeping in mind that as we, I'm always thinking specifically again, on a particular function or diagnosis or anything, my paradigm is not to treat a diagnosis. You are not your diagnosis. This is not that you are not siloed or assigned to this for the rest of your life. I'm looking at it functionally. What is the pattern that we have in this symptom, in this system here. Okay, we have high inflammation. Let's look at how we can help to reduce that inflammation. Let's look at promoting balance. Let's look at promoting this ecosystem in doing what it knows how to do metabolically so that we can support proper GI and then just proper system response, right? How do we allow the system to have that resilience so that we can walk through moment to moment of our day and have proper vagal nerve activity, right?

MARTIN: Yeah. Any one thing, whether it's tiredness or inability to think clearly, or allergic reaction, or whatever it is that you have, those are resources that are made worse by an inflammatory response in your body. 

JEANNIE: Right.

MARTIN: Any and all of these things will get better when you bring that noise down.

JEANNIE: Right. Yep. Yeah. Exactly. 

MARTIN: Yeah. There you go. We're going to talk, oh, by the way, do these things require refrigeration?

JEANNIE: No, they do not. Excellent question. They travel well. The spores have high survivability. So, not only do they travel well, the way that they function in our systems, once we ingest them, they are still in their endospore. They're happily encased. They make it through the mouth, through the stomach, through the small intestine, and when they hit the proper pH, that's when they open up, and they begin to engage in their metabolic duties. So yeah, which makes them also antibiotic resistant. They can be a beautiful complement to supporting somebody if they have to be on antibiotic therapies. They don’t have to be away from your typical food regimen. Yeah. They're quite flexible as far as a supplement goes.

MARTIN: All right. So, only 20 more products to go through. 

JEANNIE: Right. That’s right. 

MARTIN: Okay. So, you said MegaSporeBiotic is your starter, and then so that's the seeding of the garden, so to speak. 

JEANNIE: Yeah.

MARTIN: Actually, maybe more tilling the garden. 

JEANNIE: Yeah. You're creating an environment in which, I think I mentioned both species, right, and there will be situations in which I will recommend that somebody takes a Bifido supplement because we are trying to drive the system a little bit in one direction as we're working to recondition the gut. We're working on those deeper layers, but we need to help them adapt their physiologic response, like for sensitivity, pollen exposure, things that, we think, we know that the Bifido species help with that immune balance, that TH2 response. There are instances where that's appropriate, and we do want Bifido to be thriving in the microbiome. That's part of what the spores are doing, is that they're creating this environment where, while we're doing maybe some more acute work, we're really rebuilding those populations so that physiologically the immune system gets the right information to respond as it's supposed to, to our environmental experiences.

MARTIN: Then, how about some of the other ones?

JEANNIE: Sure.

MARTIN: I had it on screen and then I had to go look up something for somebody else. I had it as a reminder. But for example, there is the MegaMucosa, right? Or the MegaPre. 

JEANNIE: Yep.

MARTIN: Or the MegaMycoBalance. All of these ones that have Mega in their first name. 

JEANNIE: Right. Well, that keeps us identifiable, right?

I really like the MegaPre. That's one that I often will introduce early on. Similarly, I will introduce it slowly. We're promoting, we're basically giving fuel to the organisms that we want to be thriving. 

Megapre is nice in the sense that it's what we call precision prebiotic, meaning there are a lot of prebiotic foods and fibers out there. But if someone's gut is out of whack, they're not digesting properly, they're experiencing bloating and discomfort, and all these things, introducing prebiotics too early can actually feed some of the organisms that are causing their digestive problems. The MegaPre does a really nice job of encouraging the populations of species that we, particularly what we call the keystone species who, again, they're very central players in the metabolic function, and the ecosystem balance. 

MegaPre does a really nice job of feeding those and getting those populations to become more robust. So, in combination with the MegaSporeBiotic, that with the MegaPre creates a nice, essentially a nice I would say, facilitation of the organisms that will create a balance. Now you mentioned MegaMucosa. This one is more targeting the health of the intestinal lining. It does contain that IgG in there, which is great because that again is going to be helping to carry out those inflammatory metabolites. 

Meanwhile, the other ingredients, so we've got amino acids in there and bioflavonoids, those ingredients are really helping to restore the intestinal tissue. They're helping to soothe and heal that intestinal wall so that the leaky gut is reducing that potential. So, quite a healing, I typically will use that one, it goes to a level, people often will use glutamine, and that can be soothing, but from a long-term perspective, if we're really going for restoration, the MegaMucosa will be, not only reducing the inflammatory load with the presence of the IgG in that formula, but then also really the intestinal cells and that,

MARTIN: Strengthen the barrier, improve your defenses.

JEANNIE: Those are some fantastic formulas. As you noted, we have MegaMycoBalance. This one doesn't get as much airtime, I would say. It's a really lovely formula for yeast for people who struggle with candida, any kind of yeast infection, promoting post-antibiotic health because we have those folks that are quite sensitive if they've had to take antibiotics. The yeast is ready for action and will assert itself quickly. 

The MegaMycobalance does a beautiful job. It's not an antifungal in the classic pharmaceutical sense. It essentially is an acid compound that helps to just interfere with the replication of the yeast. It creates an environment in which yeast just can't reproduce. It interrupts their reproductive cycle. It's one of the themes with the Microbiome Lab's products that I really appreciate is just how gentle they are. It's working with principles. We're not, we don't have them to, “Hey, we got to go in and kill the bad guys.” How can we orchestrate the environment? How can we encourage the players to behave in such a way that we move back into a state of resilience and balance, rather than disrupting everything and trying to put all the pieces back together.

MARTIN: If you nurture the good guys well enough, they'll win. The body will naturally always choose the positive.

JEANNIE: Yeah, we're rebuilding. Rebuilding and rebalancing.

MARTIN: Well, we've been talking for like 40-something minutes. I can go on for hours, but I think we should just try and just wind it together and just let people understand that there's an entire page with the microbiotic formulas and that there are multiples here. Like, for example, something for your pyloric valve and something for your vaginal health and something for your bone health, the calcification, there are just so many, there's something for your sleep or whatever, there are wonderful extras there.

JEANNIE: Yeah, we could have several conversations, but yes, I agree with you. Before I get excited about something else, we can summarize the margin.

MARTIN: There is also one for your dog. Okay. FidoSpore is an awesome little thing. So, if you want your furry companion to have a healthy gut and not as bad a breath as they usually get. 

JEANNIE: I will attest to that. My dog came to us on a raw food diet. The breeder had him on all the good things. He just was so well cared for, and we kept that going. But he always had bad breath. He just always had bad breath and, "Why does this really healthy dog have bad breath?" And the vet said, "Well, it's probably just a biome issue." And I went, "All right, then." So, yeah, Fidospore, he does not offend us with his breath anymore. But that's another axis, the gut-oral.

MARTIN: Yeah. It comes back up.

JEANNIE: Yeah. So, I think if I were to encapsulate this conversation, really, that's the punchline. It does start in the gut. And we cannot emphasize enough taking care of what we put into our mouths and how we expose our system to stress, environmental toxins, etc. And we all need to be conscious of the fact that we live in a world where we're constantly navigating all of these things. So, how are we going to keep giving our system, maybe we do need a full healing process, and we need to rework a pattern that's started to be expressed as a pathology. And that's certainly a good number of people, but there's some of us who just were cruising along and it's like, well, how can I continue to cruise along? 

I'd like to be cruising this way when I'm 80. So, what do I do? How do I do that? And an interesting side note, when I look at the microbiome testing, because we do stool testing. There's an age difference as far as what I see in the microbiome patterns. So, people who are over roughly age 70-75 tend to have more diversity. They tend to have species that I don't see in as robust populations in the younger people. And when I started to notice that pattern, it just tracks. Those are people who were raised on food that was grown before we were inundating our fields with chemicals.

MARTIN: Yep. This was just at the age of DDT, but definitely before glyphosate.

JEANNIE: Yes. Yep. So again, organic foods, how can you recondition your gut? How can you support a healthy gut lining? How can you eat as many different colors and textures of foods as possible?

MARTIN: Yeah. As you're listening to it, think about this. How many courses of antibiotics have you gone through? How much chlorine have you pushed through your mouth? How have you lived? Have you taken a lot of strong chemicals in your life or not? And so on. And then, the technology here, the Microbiome Labs, I think it should be good to just explain how the company stands out from just the general supplement industry.

JEANNIE: Yeah. Well, from a just the principles of the company are really focused on education, as I said before. That's a key factor in how we do everything. Can we, is this something that's understandable, that's translatable, that's backed by research. We also have finished products. We have multiple studies. That's not common in a lot of supplements. A lot of supplement companies will say, "Okay, I've got this formula with five ingredients, and this ingredient's been studied for this and this ingredient for this." But what's happening when you put them together? right?

There's a synergistic effect that either works or doesn't work. And again, it comes to what I think is really an appreciation for this ecological model, which is that, we have to know what the relationships are going to be between the ingredients in any of our formulas. And so, we have finished product studies, especially on MegaSporeBiotic, we've got 14 studies on that product alone, which really helps us to not only convey to the consumer how this is working, helping healthcare providers know how to prescribe it. But we also really can start to understand what will be the impact on people's systems. What is this actually going to be doing mechanistically speaking. We have a lot of research that our company is currently trying to move towards doing what we call real-world evidence. Where we're looking in a clinical setting at how are the products being used And then what is the impact in those particular scenarios.

MARTIN: Right.

JEANNIE: All very exciting.

MARTIN: If you're still listening, I would encourage you to subscribe because we need the love on the YouTube channel. But second, write to us either in the comments or directly and let us know what you want to hear more about because we have the offer of going in and doing a deep dive on any one specific product. Ask us, we might come back. Jeannie, this has been a delight. Not just today's conversations, all of the conversations that I've had with you. And I'm so encouraged that you're working where you're working and that we get to represent a line that I really feel positive about. So folks, Microbiome Labs, pay attention. It all starts in the gut.

JEANNIE: Amen. Thank you for having me, Martin. It's been a pleasure.

MARTIN: You bet. This is Life Enthusiast Health Shots podcast. You'll find us at life-enthusiast.com. I'm Martin Pytela. Thank you.