In this episode, I am speaking with Kiran Krishnan and Tina Anderson. Kiran is a research microbiologist and an expert on gut health, and Tina is the founder of Just Thrive Probiotics. We will touch upon an array of topics, including the link between gut health and the immune system, probiotics, IgG, and much more.
Tina has been super generous and offers a 15% discount on your first purchase of Just Thrive Probiotics. Use the code TEB upon checkout.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Tina, Kiran, and I discuss:
- The gut’s REAL role in immune health
- How modern-day lifestyle affects your overall health (this may shock you)
- The difference between colonizing and non-colonizing probiotics and why they matter
- The critical role if IgG in health
- Just Thrive Probiotics (why they are among the best in the market right now!)
- The amazing study that links Just Thrive Probiotics to fat loss
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Transcript
Ari: Hey there. Welcome, Kiran. Welcome, Tina. Such a pleasure to have you.
Tina: So excited to be here, Ari. Thanks for having us.
Kiran: Yes. Thank you, Ari. Always a pleasure talking to you.
The latest science on the gut’s role in human health
Ari: Yes. Likewise, my friend. We’ve had two interviews now. One for the upcoming Superhuman Energy Summit, which is about to start, and then one on the podcast, which was released a few weeks ago, talking a lot about immune health, which was excellent. I want to dive deep with you even more. I know that at the end of the last podcast, I specifically said to you, I want to talk to you for like five more hours because I know there’s much more knowledge that you have in there and that we could dig into. Now, I have you and Tina on and I want to talk more about gut health.
We talked, as I said, specifically on immune health last time. Paint the picture for me, the broad picture of gut health and human health. What do we now know? What are the latest cutting edge insights into the role of the gut in human health?
Kiran: Yes. One thing that we do know is that the gut, which houses the vast majority of microbes that live within our system, houses most of the functionality for human function. In terms of genetic material, some of the estimates are that 90% of metabolic activity that we require to be human, come from the genetic elements within the gut. Then there’s also metabolic byproducts that we count on, that we cannot make ourselves that don’t come directly from food, that we depend on the gut microbiome to provide for us. One example of that is urolithins.
Most people know that there’s benefits to eating foods that have high carotenoids in them or polyphenols. Colored fruits and vegetables have a beneficial impact. One of the big ways that those polyphenols are impactful is the microbes within the gut will convert those polyphenols into something called urolithin A. Urolithin A then goes on to fix our mitochondria. It helps recycle broken mitochondria, helps establish new mitochondria. It’s a very powerful antioxidant. All of these really important housekeeping cleaning functions in the body are dictated by the presence of this compound that A, we cannot get from diet, and B, we cannot make ourselves.
That just illustrates the really intimate connection between the gut microbiome and our overall health. That same thing, same concept is implicated in virtually every chronic illness.
Ari: There’s a lot to unpack in what you just said there. I want to maybe mention a few specific things. I’m glad you brought up the phytonutrients and specifically, the gut mitochondria access. That’s something we talked a lot about in-depth in the upcoming Summit interview. That’s probably the one that interests me the most. I definitely want to talk about that, but I also want to just mention, there’s the gut immune access.
There’s a gut-brain access, there’s even related to the gut immune access, there’s a gut lung access. There’s probably some other ones I don’t know, gut heart access, maybe a few other ones that I can’t even name off the top of my head that I’m sure you can. Talk to me about maybe– You just mentioned a bit about the mitochondria piece, but talk about the gut immune, and the gut-brain access a bit so people can understand those connections and how they work.
Kiran: Yes. The immune side is really fascinating. There are two big claims I’ve been making in presentations that I’ve been giving to medical doctors and health professionals, related to the immune function with reference to the microbiome. The two big claims are, A, the immune system as we know it would cease to exist without the microbiome. That’s claim number one. Claim number two is that the microbiome is a neighborhood watch for the immune system. Both of those things are really profound statements in terms of how the immune system functions. I can unpack each of them to a certain degree.
I’m sure we could jump in bigger detail, but let me talk about the very first claim, that the immune system would cease to exist, the way we know it without the microbiome. Most of the immune cells are obviously made in the thymus or in the bone marrow. What we make by ourselves are really immature immune cells. They really cannot function as immune cells. We make T-cells and we make macrophages, dendritic cells. None of these cells actually have the capability of functioning as defensive mechanisms in the body until they get matured.
They get matured in organ systems that are dependent on the microbiome. Places like the Peyer’s patches or the mesenteric lymphatic system. Those are the sites where these naive immune cells go to mature and to proliferate. Those are two really important things. The analogy I give people is that if we have a military that is our defense mechanism, imagine our own biological system, the thymus and the bone marrow as giving birth to baby versions of soldiers. They’re not equipped, they’re not matured. They don’t know anything about defending a country or territory, where these things have to go at to mature is in the household. Then they go to basic training, where they get the training done.
Those aspects of the maturation of the cells and the training, all are dependent on the immune system. There are studies on no biotic or sterile mice that showed that sterile mice that are born without a microbiome cannot propagate immune response properly. In fact, in very specific infectious pathologies, like with influenza, if they cut off signals from the microbiome and they infect a mouse with influenza, the dendritic cells that respond to the influenza infection stop responding. The dendritic cells to recognize the presence of the influenza and then appropriately respond to it, need specific signals from the microbiome just to be able to do that.
Ari: These are dendritic cells? You’re not talking about the brain, you’re talking about dendritic cells near the gut.
Kiran: These are the circulating immune cells. We’ve got a couple of classes of cells that will eat up infected cells or eat viruses, eat bacteria. They’re called phagocytic cells. We’ve got macrophages and dendritic cells. In a viral infection, dendritic cells are especially important because not only do they go and they’ll eat viruses when they see it, but they will eat up infected cells. Cells that are infected with the virus, and then they’ll present viral antigens to T-cells and B-cells to propagate a more advanced, robust response to the presence of the virus. These dendritic cells are really critical in initiating and starting the process of a defense against a viral invader.
The studies show that without the microbiome, the dendritic cell just sits there naive, not knowing what to do. The immune system would cease to exist the way we know it without the microbiome. The second part, the neighborhood watch part is really important, because to give people a real perspective of understanding what the task of the immune system is, we have to illustrate for them what’s going on inside the body. We’ve got something called the mucosal layer that covers virtually every part of the inside of the body. It covers every entry point within the body as well.
Anything that goes through your eyes, nose, mouth, or your urinal tract, even through your skin, will enter into a mucosal layer. In that mucosal layer, that’s where the sampling and the decisions are made. Where your body decides, should we attack this? Should we not attack this? Is it something we should build tolerance against, and so on. Now, in that mucosal layer, there are over 40 trillion microbes already present that are part of our commensal flora. Every square millimeter of that mucosal layer where a new pathogen enters is already covered with microbes.
The surface area of the mucosal layer is almost 400 square meters, which is close to 4,000 square feet. That’s a massive surface area covered every millimeter with microbes. That’s where pathogens enter. We have about 200 million immune cells that survey that whole area. Think about it, 40 trillion microbes already present in the surface area as big as a 4,000 square foot apartment. You’ve got 200 million immune cells that are supposed to survey this entire system.
The analogy I give people to help them wrap their mind around that. Imagine you go to a music festival, a really fun, awesome music festival. You have to imagine it right now because it’s not happening at the moment. At that music festival, there are 200,000 attendees and most of the people are having fun. Of that 200,000 attendees, there may be five, that are potentially egregious. They are toxic. They’ve got things with them that could harm other attendees, and you are the lone security guard in that sea of 200,000 people. It is your job to find those egregious attendees who look just like all the other ones and neutralize their activity.
There’s no possible way to do that. The only way you can do that is if the other 199,995 attendees were also on your side, keeping an eye out all with radios. When they saw something suspicious, they would radio to you and tell you what’s going on. That’s what happens with the immune system and the microbiome. The microbiome acts as the neighborhood watch for the immune system. The moment they see a new pathogen or something that enters into the system that is causing disruption, they actually have a way of alerting the immune system to show up to that spot to deal with it.
Ari: Got it. I’m overflowing with questions right now. I’m going to try and zero in on a couple of them. One is, in the analogy you just gave or not even necessarily in that analogy, but just the fact that we have all of these millions of bacteria all over our mucosal membranes that are there that are not being attacked by our immune system, but are, as you said, basically, part of our immune system in a way, they’re integrated with and communicating with our immune system and helping the immune system do its job. Maybe this is an important point to understand, but why is it that our immune system does not attack those microbes as foreign, as pathogenic?
What allows our immune system to determine, “Hey, these are the good guys. I’m going to allow these two to sit there,” versus, “Hey, here’s a pathogen. Let’s go seek it out and destroy it?”
Kiran: That’s one of the most important questions in immunology in general. That’s been a point that has been confusing immunologists for decades. Until we started discovering the idea that there’s this crosstalk between the commensal microbes, and that includes viruses, bacteria, proteus, and so on, with the immune system. What goes on is you start to develop this ecology, if you will, within your system. Hopefully, that’s developing early on before your immune system even matures.
Remember in the first six months of life, you really don’t have a functional immune system. Most of your immunity comes from mom’s colostrum and antibodies and all that you get through breastfeeding. Once your immune system starts to mature, one of the things that occurs is this important crosstalk where the immune system is constantly sampling the microbes around it and the microbes are constantly presenting their antigens to the immune system.
It’s important for the microbes to continuously tutor or stimulate the immune system, showing them what they look like. If I’m bacteria A and I’m a part of your commensal flora, I’m constantly socializing your immune system going, “Hey, immune system. This is what I look like. I’m a good guy. You don’t have to attack me.” They’re constantly triggering something called pattern recognition receptors and showing the immune system what their patterns look like.
Now, the other part of it is they also have the capability of turning on something called a Treg system. The Treg is like the calm down part of the immune system where the innate immune system sees something and it wants to go crazy, go at it, but then the Treg system comes down and goes, “Hey, we don’t have to attack that. Take it easy.” That’s the building of oral tolerance, what we call.
Your commensal microbes have a way of not only socializing the immune system from the day you’re born to create this recognition between the existing microbes and your immune system but then they also have a way of triggering that calming down part of the immune system so that your immune system doesn’t inadvertently attack your own microbes. Now, that can all go awry too. There’s lots of conditions where that goes awry.
In particular, if the innate immune system gets triggered to respond to something in an area where, of course, you’ve got a lot of your own microbes and there’s constant attack in that area, the innate immune system may start mistakenly identifying your commensal microbes as part of the problem. Then anywhere it sees those commensal microbes, it’ll start attacking them. That’s the thing that occurs, for example, in Crohn’s or colitis where your innate immune system starts attacking your own microbes in your gut lining. The triggers for that are numerous.
Ari: There’s one more piece here that I think is probably important. Then I want to jump to gut-brain, and then we’ll move on from there. I think everybody’s fascinated with immune system stuff right now for good reason, so worth talking about this. There’s lines of research, many different lines of evidence around kids growing up in very hygienic, sterilized, indoor environments versus outdoor environments playing in the dirt, growing up on farms, and outdoor environments, as well as things like exposure to pet dogs growing up versus none exposure.
Showing various benefits to the increased exposure to a wide array of different microbes, how do those pieces fit in with everything that you were just talking about? How important is diversity of exposure to different microbes, to the proper functioning of the microbiome and that crosstalk of the microbiome and immune system?
Kiran: It’s critical, and the reason for that is because the immune system needs practice. These are almost like simulated war games. When a nonthreatening microbe enters the system, especially if it’s a microbe that is not commensal to you, meaning your immune system hasn’t been seeing it every day of your life since you were born, then it helps trigger a immune response.
Eventually, what happens is the microbes that are commensal to you will recognize that that’s not a microbe that doesn’t need to have a full immune response to it, but it’s enough where it actually revs up the immune system, allows your immune system to proliferate, the T cells and B cells start proliferating, you’ll start getting more secretory IgA produced, more IgM produced, and then eventually, the most egregious parts of the response don’t happen, the whole cytokine storm type of response because that gets dampened by the microbiome and certain parts of the immune system itself.
Think about the exposure to lots of bacteria and microbes as being constant training for their immune system, but since the things we are mostly exposed to are not harmful to us, they don’t produce toxins, they don’t have [unintelligible] factors. The microbes themselves that are entering our system are not trying to kill things and cause more problem. The immune system makes a little bit of a response that gives them enough practice, but then it can easily scale back the breadth of the response itself. One of the things that tends to occur then is that helps with the modulatory aspect of the immune system as well.
Studies show that greater exposure and thereby greater response to other microbial species actually helps propagate the regulatory part of the immune system as well. Like our Treg system, the FOXP3 Treg system, whose job it is to give us tolerance against things, is primarily stimulated by exposure to other microbes. Because what happens is you get exposure, you get a little bit of an immune response, then the Treg system comes in and says, “Hey, we don’t need to respond wildly to that.” Now you’ve got this Treg system that’s continuously being propagated. That then provides you oral tolerance of things like environmental components, food particles, and so on too.
Ari: Very interesting, fascinating stuff as a random data point that I just learned yesterday or the day before that connects to this discussion. This is news to me as of a day or two ago. There’s 10 million viruses in every teaspoon of ocean water. I surf and so I was just in the water yesterday morning with ocean water filling into my nose, and my mouth, and my ears. It’s quite interesting and I think just a remarkable thing to even think about that you can have exposure to tens of millions of viruses in your mucus membranes and swallowing them and not get sick and for all those reasons you just described.
Kiran: Yes, and the experience of getting sick is really a certain phase of the immune response against the pathogen. We all have all of these viruses and bacteria and all have the capability of entering into the system and then eliciting an immune response. Now, depending on the nature of the pathogen, it can elicit that other phase of their immune response, which is where you start to feel sick. The fever, the inflammation, and all that is a phase of the innate immune response. 99.9% of the things we encounter all day long, the immune system neutralizes it like that.
We’ve got secretory IgA, we’ve got natural killer cells, dendritic cells, macrophages, eosinophils, basophils, all of these frontline actors that just constantly notice things, are triggered by the microbiome, show up, neutralize it. Most of those things are not egregious anyway so they’re not trying to take over the system and our body deals with it perfectly fine. That speaks to one of the narratives when the pandemic started that was bothersome to me because they kept talking about the danger of the pandemic because we have no immunity against it.
That part is actually off because not having immunity against it is a quagmire because our immune system is perfectly well designed to handle this. This happens to be a virus that triggers, that targets vulnerabilities in our health, in our bodies, and so for certain people, it’s going to do a really significant amount of damage but in most people, if you’re relatively healthy, it’s going to your immune system’s perfectly equipped to see something new like this, handle it, build a certain degree of tolerance to it or a certain degree of defense against it.
It’s getting practice all day long and I think something like surfing, so not only are you in the water, you’re getting virus exposure. When you’re in the sand, you’re getting virus bacterial exposure. All of that stuff actually just continuously trains your immune system in a significant way, and that’s one of the things that Tina and I talked about long time ago when we first started working together because Tina’s background comes from the pharma side.
You see that real dichotomy in the pharma side where it’s really about, “Oh my God, pathogens, microbes, bad, kill, kill kill,” versus yes, there’s a tiny amount that actually could be egregious, but most of them are really good for our system in terms of training our immune system.
Ari: Yes, very interesting. There’s also I think you’ve probably seen some emerging lines of evidence around potential cross-immunity from exposure to common Coronaviruses and T cell responses to that may be leading to a portion of the population having significant resistance or lack of lower susceptibility to COVID-19, which is, I think connects with the point about, it is through exposure to a lot of these microbes and pathogens and viruses that train the immune system and potentially– I mean, I guess to phrase it differently, what would be the consequences of staying indoors and not having any exposure with the natural world, not having any exposure with other people such that you rarely got exposed to many new microbes. Then, at some point, you got exposed to some new circulating virus. Like a flu virus or a Coronavirus or something like that.
Kiran: Yes, and I think that the whole staying indoors thing is not a long term solution at all for this, right?
Ari: Then just to be clear, I wasn’t like suggesting that it’s an argument against lockdowns or something like that as a temporary thing. I’m just saying like in a hypothetical thought experiment way, what would happen if people stayed indoors for years and then subsequently got exposed to a virus?
Kiran: Yes, I mean, then we would literally be going out into the microbial battle zone completely handicapped, for sure. Imagine it’d be the equivalent of having a team in a sport and having zero practice for two or three years and then all sudden putting them against one of the best teams, right. Yes, absolutely. I mean, we need that practice, we need that exposure. Fortunately, there’s a lot of ways of gaining exposure. Some of the best is doing the things like you do going out surfing, going out for hikes, being outside in nature, getting a dog like we said, and then close contact with people is a really important version of exposure as well, which we need to start bringing back.
Like for myself, we started expanding our circle of people that we keep close contact with and that’s really important. Yes, exposure is a fundamental part of the functionality of our immune system and if you think about evolutionary biology, we exist in a pattern of exposure. We were not born in a vacuum or sterile environment, nor were we reared and raised in a vacuum or a sterile environment. Our system is designed to function through exposure. Exposure is important.
The gut-brain connection
Ari: Got you. I want to talk about the gut-brain component too and make sure people understand that aspect of things. We don’t have to give it as in-depth the treatment here as you did the immune system stuff, but how does the gut connect to the brain and the microbiome connect to the brain? What’s going on there?
Kiran: Yes, so there are some really intimate connections. In fact, I was just doing an interview on this and people asked me about the idea, the notion that the gut is a second brain and I would argue that the gut is not really the second, which indicates it’s inferior, it’s the other brain really, right. It almost does some of the same things that the brain that we’re familiar with does, but in many ways, it does things that the other brain can’t do.
They are intimately connected through the vagus nerve, which a lot of people have heard about so there’s a neurological connection between the enteric nervous system, which is the nervous system that covers the entire digestive tract. In fact, it’s the second-highest concentration of nerve endings. The spinal cord, it’s got more nerve endings in the spinal cord, only second to the brain. That enteric nervous system is directly connected to the brain through the vagus nerve so we have a neurological connection.
We’ve got an immune connection there, our lymphatic drainage is to go from the gut, all the way up to the brain, and vice versa. It’s a two-way street. Then we’ve got immune function as well. There are studies that show that immune responses in the gut can then be seen in a very quick amount of time in the brain. Cytokine response, chemokine response, interleukin response, these things move through the body between the gut and the brain,] very quickly.
The other part of it is there are certain functionalities of the brain provides us that require components from the gut. For example, the formation of GABA, which is really important to brain function. Serotonin, even though the question is how much of the serotonin that’s produced in the gut ends up in the brain, it’s unclear, but nonetheless, we know that serotonin deficiency in the gut does impact mood disorders.
Dopamine function, for example, the production of dopamine, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, really important, and what’s interesting that of BDNF is it’s called brain-derived neurotrophic factor. As it turns out, it’s actually gut-derived and we haven’t changed that terminology just yet. All of these things are compounds that the brain needs to function that actually come from the gut.
One of the more common things are just production or short-chain fatty acids; butyrate, propionate, acetate all have important brain-related functions and we depend on our gut for it. It’s a two-way system and they’re very intimately connected.
Just Thrive Probiotics
Ari: Very, very interesting. Let’s jump in from here into probiotics. Obviously you guys work with Just Thrive probiotics and you have a few different gut products, gut health products. What are some of the biggest myths and misconceptions out there when it comes to probiotics? I mean, there are so many different competing claims. We have everything from the typical old school acidophilus supplements to spore and soil-based probiotics, to what else, the lactobacillus species, Bifidobacterium species, and prebiotics postbiotics the whole thing has become complex.
There’s also the yeast species, Saccharomyces boulardii. Like, where does one begin in the realm of probiotics, and maybe speak to a few different myths, common myths, and misconceptions that are out there?
Tina: Okay, yes, I could talk about that. We have one of the biggest myths that I love to talk about is the refrigeration aspect of it. So many people, doctors are finally starting to talk about probiotics, which gets us so excited but then they’ll say to their patients, “Oh, make sure you get one in the refrigerated section.” We always say like, how could that possibly make sense because of a probiotic needs to be refrigerated in order to stay alive, it means it can’t even withstand the room temperature of the store shelf. How in the world would it survive your body temperature, which is 98.6, much less the harsh conditions of your stomach which is very acidic and meant to be a gastric barrier?
The answer is most of them aren’t. I mean, the majority of probiotics. We’ve done many, many studies on this showing that the majority of probiotics on the market that are made up of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium are dying before they ever get to the intestines. That would probably be one of the biggest myths that we see out there, and then going hand in hand is the myth that more is better.
You see the probiotics that have 50 billion CFUs, some with 250 million CFUs, and it just keeps going higher and higher and higher. Really, there’s no science behind that. There’s no science at all and the reason a lot of these companies are doing that is a lot of it, of course, is branding and marketing, and just trying to say more is better but a lot of it is just that because they know most aren’t even surviving, most aren’t even getting there alive. Even if they did get there alive, they’re not really making a change in the gut flora.
Those are some of the biggest myths that I see is that it doesn’t need to be refrigerated in order to be a high-quality probiotic, and really the amount of CFUs that are in the product. Really, there’s no studies say more is better. Really, what we need to focus on is what are the CFUs that are in there? What are they doing to the gut, what kind of change are they doing the gut? The strains that are found in Just Thrive, the Bacillus spores, we actually have a study that after two and a half weeks, showed a 30% favorable shift in the gut flora. It’s really profound to see that type of a shift in just two and a half weeks.
Ari: There’s a lot in there. I want to come back to this point about what are the different species doing when they get in there. To the point of living versus non-living, I think there’s another interesting layer to that story, which is that there’s some research that seems to have come out in recent years suggesting that some species of bacteria, even if they’re dead, seem to have a beneficial effect either on gut health or, for example, immune health, and I think connecting to the gut immune stuff that Kiran was just speaking to. Can you talk a bit about how even dead bacteria coming in through the oral route can help benefit microbiome health or benefit the gut immune crosstalk?
Kiran: Yes. Like we talked about before, in general, getting exposure to bacteria is a beneficial thing. Now, the idea of dead bacteria causing a response in the body is actually quite well-established. It actually creates something called a probiotic paradox. The probiotic paradox in the research world, the scientific definition of a probiotic is a live microorganism when adequate amounts confer a health benefit to the host. That live part is really important to be a “probiotic”.
Now, there are some bacteria, which are sold as probiotics, that actually when they’re dead will have, actually, in some cases, a more profound impact than the live version. The way they killed them is a heat-killed strain, and then they put it into the system, and you get a similar effect as a live strain. In fact, in some cases, better effect. A great example of that is the rhamnosus GG, a very well-known strain of lactobacillus.
Numerous studies have shown that dead rhamnosus GG works better than the live version. Then, that creates a whole new category of bacterial therapy where these are not probiotics, because they don’t fit the accepted scientific definition of probiotics, these are what we call metabolic response modifiers. They have very specific components within them, whether it’s a cell wall component, some of their DNA, RNA, or even these little nanoparticles that microbes can make inside of them, they’re these nanovesicles. When those are released, they actually have impact on our metabolic response.
Here’s a limitation of those, which is also important to note. Number one, those are very subspecies specific. The rhamnosus GG effects that we see, you don’t see the same effect in wild-type regular rhamnosus. It’s this really special GG variant. That’s the same thing with acidophilus DDS-1 or infantis 35624. In order to get those benefits, you need that very specific subtype.
What we have as a major problem in the probiotic industry is companies will say, “We’ll use the rhamnosus GG research to promote their product that has generic rhamnosus it.” Because the generic rhamnosus costs nothing to buy out of China or anywhere else, and the rhamnosus GG is a high-level strain, it costs more, it comes with licensing things, and all of that, so they use this borrowed science on their generic stuff and it does not translate. That’s one really big egregious thing, is that there is science behind some of these dead bacteria but it has to be that specific subtype.
That’s one thing. The second thing is the metabolic response does go away over time, because like any other nutrient, it’s triggering a metabolic response, it can fade or can change because it’s not making an actual change to the microbiome. Our whole focus has been if we really want to see profound change in people, and lasting change, we have to focus on changing the microbiome itself. We’re talking about things going in at 10, 20, 100 billion even, which sounds like big numbers, but remember, it’s going into a sea with 40 trillion organisms.
Unless you can influence the change within the other 40 trillion, that tiny minuscule drop you’re putting in doesn’t really create a profound effect. Our focus has been what are the things that occur that you can do or stop doing that actually changes that sea of organisms, because that’s where the profound effect is.
Colonizing vs non-colonizing probiotics and their role in gut health
Ari: Got you. Okay, I think there’s one more layer here, I think, that’s of importance, at least in my mind, which is colonizers versus non-colonizers. Part of that is what you just addressed there. There’s some species even that reach the gut still alive and maybe don’t colonize, they have a transient effect, and unless you can keep taking them every day, the effect leaves relatively quickly.
Then, there are other species that you can take as probiotics that colonize and have some sort of lasting effects there and maybe also interact in profound ways with the other microbes in that system, which I believe you were getting at, Tina, when you were referring to the study that showed a 30% improvement in gut flora as a result of using this probiotic. Talk to me about non-colonization versus colonizing species.
Tina: Yes. Well, the spores actually, they do colonize, but then they eventually do leave the body. They stay there for about 21 to 28 days where they go to work through every part of the intestinal tract and the small intestine, all the way down to the distal colon, and then, they will eventually leave the body after 21 to 28 days. They’re pretty unique in that they could actually do both, they’re colonizing and then they are actually transient too.
Kiran: Yes. To expand on that, one of the things that people tend to mistake is they think colonization is permanent or there’s a time component to colonization. Colonization can be very temporary. Colonization is really the act of a single cell embedding itself and then forming a colony. A colony is actually hundreds of thousands of cells in one little lump. Each colony represents the progeny of a single cell that established itself. There’s no time factor in it, you can colonize for a day and then detach and leave, it’s still colonization. Like you said, there are strains that actually just move right through.
Now, some of those will actually produce metabolites as they’re moving through or will induce the production of metabolites as they’re moving through. Boulardii fits in that world. That’s Saccharomyces boulardii, the yeast. It’s not a great colonizer, meaning it doesn’t necessarily go in and live in the gut for any period of time, but as it’s moving through, it actually has really profound immunostimulatory effects.
Then, in some cases, they’ve also shown that it does produce acid as it’s moving through, which actually gives it a really interesting effect in modulating the ecosystem that is then beneficial for lots of good microbes. In a general sense, you can think of egregious type of microbes or egregious types of fungi don’t do well in low pH environments, they prefer the pH to be elevated, so any time you can bring down the pH in the gut, you’re really helping the good guys flourish.
Ari: Got you. Okay. Something like– Let’s just compare as a practical example, I don’t know, lactobacillus species, or acidophilus, or something like that versus the bacillus species, the spore-based probiotics, that you guys have in Just Thrive. How do they behave differently in the gut?
Kiran: Yes. For the most part, when you take a lactobacillus species as a probiotic, most of it is going to die in the stomach. They’re not really designed as robust organisms that can survive the gastric system. Now, the death of them, if you’re taking the right species like lactobacillus rhamnosus GG or acidophilus, if those species are in the mix that you’re taking, then they will have a metabolic response in your body that could be favorable.
In the case of rhamnosus, it can do things like shorten the duration of colds and flus because there are components of it that stimulate the immune system in the right way. In the case of infantis 35624, it actually shortens the duration of diarrhea in kids, so it has those impacts. Just the most generic of probiotics, let’s say you just go to Big Box store and you buy one that has 50 billion CFUs of a bunch of Lacto-Bifido, ost of what’s happening there is they’re dying in the stomach. The components of those bacteria are moving through the system.
In some cases, they will help trigger some immune proliferation, so it could be training for your immune system. But in some cases, the DNA within those species may be problematic because the genetic pool in the microbiome is really important because that’s where a lot of functionality is derived. If you’re loading your gut with the same genetics from the same 10 species and there’s there are 100, 200 billion at a time, you could be introducing a non-natural denominator into the genetic pool.
That is the part that scares me a little bit about those, what I call, kitchen sink formulas that have 15, 20 random strains in really high doses. Because there isn’t a natural version of that happening in the body. We don’t walk around in the natural environment and pick up 100
billion Bifido or Lacto and take it in between meals and so on. That’s the part that makes me nervous about those kind of products, and why I don’t use them, why I never recommend people to use them. I have rhamnosus GG as an example in my cabinet for cold and flu season. If my kids start getting sniffly, they get the spores and then they get that because it’s been shown to be useful for that function. That’s the difference.
Now, the spores when they go in, they go in, they colonize in different parts of the gut. They do start the colonization in the small intestine. They will also move down into the large intestine. During their colonization, they are actually modulating the rest of the microbiome. Like Tina mentioned, one of our studies showed almost a 30% increase in diversity in the rest of the microbiome, when you introduce a spore. Then they’re competing against overgrown and dysfunctional bacteria. They’re producing short-chain fatty acids. They’re tightening up the tight junctions by producing stimuli that close up the tight junctions in the gut, so they’re doing all of this really important– [crosstalk].
Ari: Just for people who don’t know, the tight junctions are the critical factor when it comes to gut permeability to leak– [crosstalk]
Kiran: Yes, exactly. That’s a leaky gut. Then they’re increasing the growth of keystone strains, which is the part that was really exciting to us. Because these keystone strains in your gut, are these relatively dominant strains in terms of volume that are inversely correlated with numerous chronic illnesses. Being able to get those keystone strains up becomes really protective in overall health. There’s a significant difference there in what’s going on when you take these different products.
Ari: In the context of obesity, they’ve looked at microbiome differences, and most of that research is really focused on bacterio– Geez, I can’t say.
Kiran: Bacteroidetes?
Ari: Thank you, bacteroidetes and firmicutes, yes. Are the Just Thrive probiotics the spore-based probiotics, have they been shown to alter those keystone species? Is that what you’re referring to or a different species?
Kiran: More specifically species within the bacteroidetes category, bacteroidetes and firmicutes are a phylum of bacteria. That’s one of the bIgGest groups that you could find in terms of when you’re looking at grouping bacteria all the way down to the species level. Saying bacteroidetes is more like saying, canines. Actually, it’s beyond canines. There’s lots of different canines within that group. Those are the two bIgGest phylum in the microbiome. You’ve got bacteroidetes and firmicutes make up almost 95% of all the microbes. They have hundreds and hundreds of species within those groups.
Now, where that research is changing a little bit is that the early research on bacteroidetes and firmicutes had sequencing technology that was really good at identifying the difference between the phyla. Then when you go deeper into it, you find out that there are firmicutes bacteria that are actually really important for metabolic health and then bacteroidetes bacteria that can be detrimental to metabolic health. Then they have to go deeper and go okay, which firmicutes and which bacteroidetes?
Now, our understanding is there are certain microbes down to the species level or down to the genus level that are especially important for obesity. One of them, in particular, is achromasia musino phyla. Achromasia is absolutely a keystone strain. It’s in fact, the only species within the achromasia genus that exists in the gut, in general, and it’s inversely correlated with everything in the metabolic syndrome spectrum. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity, Polycystic Ovarian, all of these things, dementia, all of those things are inversely correlated with the amount of achromasia you have.
The other group is bifidobacteria, especially certain groups of bifidobacteria like bifidobacterium longum and adolescentis are especially predominantly people who tend to be lean and have healthy body mass and metabolic response. [crosstalk]
Ari: I want to mention for all the listeners that they will be quizzed on all the names of the bacteria species after this is over.
Kiran: And the pronunciation dude, that’s the hard part.
Ari: Exactly. I got nailed on bacteroidetes.
Kiran: Right. Now getting down to that level, what you can see now is when you adjust those few species, that makes a huge profound effect on metabolic health and obesity. In fact, we have a study that’s publishing on that. What we did is we took individuals that were obese. These are people with a BMI of 30. They’re not morbidly obese, they’re not super overweight, but they were obese. What we did is we had this hypothesis that if we can just make tweaks within their microbiome, they would start to lose weight even though they don’t change their behavior.
We gave them, and this was placebo-controlled, we gave them a probiotic which is a spores and we gave them a prebiotic which is xylooligosaccharide, which is one of those specialized prebiotics that feed achromasia to help feed bifidobacteria. What we wanted to see was over a 90-day period without them changing any behavior, meaning they’re not adding exercise, they’re not dieting in any way. They’re still eating Cheetos and all the fast food, can we see an impact on metabolic health? Sure enough, in that 90-day period, we saw a 38% reduction in visceral fat mass without any lifestyle changes.
Ari: Wow. 38?
Kiran: 38%.
Ari: How long of a period?
Kiran: In 90 days, so three months and that’s the visceral fat. That’s the most important fat around the trunk area. That was done through DEXA analysis. We’re not doing the handheld things and all. This was full dual X-ray system.
Ari: Again, this is from your prebiotic, correct?
Kiran: No, this is the probiotic and prebiotic, the combination of both. The other thing that we saw was sugar metabolism. Indicators of improved control glucose metabolism, and insulin response. We also saw a reduction in inflammatory cytokines. In some individuals, we didn’t have a large enough group to see this significantly, but in some individuals, we saw an increase in lean body mass, which is really fascinating because they’re not exercising. Why is their lean body mass or lean muscle increasing? Then that goes back to that, microbiome muscle axis. There’s a benefit to the microbiome for you to have more muscle, more lean body mass.
Maybe part of the reason why we look at pictures and recreations of most of our ancestors, they were all pretty ripped and lean for the most part when they’re walking around, and they’re not doing exercise the way we think of exercise. [crosstalk]
Ari: Recently, I saw a couple of studies related to specific species of bacteria in the gut and endurance performance linking with performance and endurance athletics, which is interesting and only makes sense, of course, that it might also modulate strength. It might also modulate lean mass and protein synthesis and things of that nature.
Kiran: Absolutely. That may be one of the fundamental differences in different races of people in different parts of the world. You have people in different parts of the world that have more natural physical and athletic ability versus people in other parts of the world. Some of that may be environmental factors based on the microbes that they tend to have predominating their system.
Ari: Interesting. Okay, I want to talk about IgG supplements as well. Actually, before we get there, a quick question on the study showing decreased visceral fat mass. Was there any fat loss in the placebo group?
Kiran: No, not at all. There was no fat loss at all in the placebo group and in fact, if I’m not mistaken, I think there was a slight increase in the placebo group.
Ari: Well, I’m just blown away that you got that magnitude of effect size with no lifestyle change. [crosstalk]
Kiran: Zero lifestyle change. That was completely surprising to us as well. We assumed we would see some reduction, that was the hope but that much reduction really speaks to the connection between dysbiosis in the gut, the liver dysfunction the inflammation that occurs, and then the deposition of fat and the swelling of adipocytes in the truncal area. That’s why truncal obesity is so much more correlated with disease and health dysfunction than subcutaneous fat. Because truncal obesity comes about as a result of dysbiosis and the same dysbiosis that causes chronic low-grade inflammation. It’s all connected, the truncal obesity is just a symptom of it.
IgG supplementation
Ari: Yes, that’s amazing. I’m blown away by that effect size. Okay, IgG supplements. Let’s talk about that because you also have an IgG supplement. First of all, what are IgGs? Or what is IgG for people who are unfamiliar with that? Why would we want to supplement with it? What is it doing at the microbiome level, at the immune level? What’s going on there?
Tina: IgG stands for immunoglobulin G, and it’s the most common antibody that we find in our body. The role of IgG that our body already produces is to find and neutralize toxins and then our body safely removes them. The IgG supplement that we have is an IgG supplement that actually gives you more IgG. It helps in the guts which is so critical.
So it’s basically helping these frontline soldiers come in and find these toxins, so when you’re talking about pathogenic bacteria, we’re talking about mold toxins, different environmental toxins, viruses, all those types of things. That’s the role of IgG, to bind and neutralize those toxins and have them safely removed from the body, and by supplementing with IgG, you’re getting more of the soldiers, if you will, to help your body fight all of these toxins that come in.
Ari: Okay. A couple of questions. One is on mucosal membranes, and I don’t know if the gut is different in this regard, but my understanding is secretory IgA is the predominant antibody. Is IgG normally present in the gut? Is it a predominant thing that’s going on there normally? Do we have our own IgG that’s in there, and this supplementary IgG is just bolstering what would otherwise be occurring naturally?
Kiran: We don’t have a whole lot of our own IgG in the gut mucosa. You’re totally right that IgA is a predominant antibody in secretory fluid, including the mucosa. Most of our IgG is in circulation and that’s the most abundant antibody in circulation. IgG is heightened specific to antigens. It’s very antigen-specific, the way it functions, and this IgG is really interesting. It comes from a bovine source. So imagine the cows are out there roaming around, they’re in a pasture, they’re encountering all things out there, viruses, bacteria, molds, environmental components, and all that.
Then their immune system is building IgG against all of these things, and these are the antibodies that have the capability of binding, neutralizing the effect of these components. When we pull out the IgG from the bovine source, we’re getting this amazing plethora of little neutralizing drones, if you will, that have high degree of specificity for the types of things we would encounter in the environment.
The reason why we became really interested in this IgG product is because, and Tina and I were in a few of these meetings where we were working with a consortium of HIV researchers, who are trying to find a really good solution for HIV enteropathy. That is the severe type of leaky gut dysfunction that occurs in HIV. The NIH, National Institutes of Health, published a study a number of years ago that showed that gut dysfunction and the degree of leakiness in the gut was a better predictor of mortality in HIV than viral load.
Then it became a challenge to the research community in HIV to figure out what can we do to then improve the barrier function in the gut and reduce the inflammation toxicity that’s going on to the gut, that seems to drive the progression from HIV positive to AIDS. That’s a big thing in controlling the progression of that disease. When we started meeting with these researchers and formulating studies, one of the companies that we came across, well, there is this company called Entera Health that actually has this IgG product.
They, at that time, had already published two studies in HIV patients showing that even in the very severe form of leaky gut mucosal, dysfunction inflammatory response in the gut, that their IgG could actually start to undo some of those responses to a point where, actually is modulating the inflammatory response in the gut mucosa. When we saw that we’re like, “Holy cow, what a perfect partner to the spores because the spores do that same thing but through a different mechanism.
The combination of the two would be extremely powerful for gut healing if your gut is dysfunctional, and then beyond that for day to day protection against the gut. Think about these IgG is highly specific drones that bind and neutralize things, all these egregious things that we get exposed to through our digestive tract and the IgGs basically lending a helping hand to our immune system because it’s not very hard for our immune system in the gut to get really overwhelmed, especially if your mucosal system and all that are dysfunctional.
Ari: Okay. The IgG antibodies, when taken this way, bind to what exactly? They bind to toxins or to viruses, or what, and how do they know, and you’ve alluded to this, but I want to ask directly how do they know what to bind to and what not to?
Kiran: Yes, it’s a game of chance in a way. Every IgG that’s produced, whether it’s our own IgG or in cows or any other animal, the antibody is produced towards a very specific candidature. That IgG, that single protein only binds one, maybe two different antigens, so they are highly specific for certain antigens. When you have a plethora of IgG, then you’ve got a whole bunch of very specific, binding antibodies that have their own targets.
Ari: What I’m saying is, and this is only partially joking, could you expose cows to COVID-19 and then take their IgG antibodies and process them into the supplement, and would that– I mean, just obviously this is a very hypothetical, but would that have some beneficial effect, hypothetically speaking, in the context of taking it as a supplement, and if you’re exposed to that virus, our scope too, would it help in that regard?
Kiran: Hypothetically, yes, because, the animal will respond to it, will create an adaptive immune response, will formulate these IgG antibodies towards various components of the virus, and then if we extract that out and take it ourselves, should we encounter the virus in our digestive tract, it will absolutely neutralize it. The problem is it won’t do it in the respiratory tract, but if we breathe in the virus, the IgG that we take supplementally stays in the digestive tract.
However, that being said, just the fact that the IgG takes a major load off of the immune system, it does provide the immune system with some free capability to go, find and attack a new invading virus in a different part of the body. With the immune system, it’s this really interesting balancing act. We don’t have unlimited immune response at any given time. If we get overloaded with a number of things at once, for example, if you get the flu, COVID, and you’ve got a gut infection at the same time, your immune system is going to find a way to prioritize and triage what it’s going to deal with first.
One of the things we think about and you see this in HIV patients is when you take in the IgG, it actually alleviates some of the workload off of the immune system, so then it has other things that can go deal with. So yes, absolutely, and so, the way that IgG binds things, again, the proteins have a very specific shape to them. They have a really specific three dimensional and quaternary formation, so that’s how the proteins are folded. They fit a very particular antigen. Then when you take them in, they’re just swimming around, looking for the antigens, and if they see the antigen, they’ll just swim up to it and bind it.
Some of it is a matter of chance because they don’t necessarily hone in on the antigen. Some of it is just letting them swim around and they come in contact with the antigen. What does it bind to your mentioned? It does bind to viral particles, it does bind to whole viruses, it binds to bacteria, bacterial toxins. We know it binds to C. diff toxin, for example, it binds to over 12 different mold toxins, so micro toxins that people tend to be exposed to. A whole variety of things.
Ari: Very, very interesting. Now, these antibodies are proteins, correct?
Kiran: Yes.
Ari: Okay. Are they partially digested by our digestive tract when we consume them orally, or do they mostly pass through undigested? That’s the first question I have. Then the second one is, and this might be hypothetical. I’m curious if there’s any actual research on it, but in certain proteins, like for example, whey protein, there are certain bioactive peptides, that the peptides actually pass through and make it to our bloodstream relatively intact in the form of dipeptides, and tripeptides things like that, where they have certain unique effects and benefits.
I’m wondering if it’s possible that, I mean, do these antibodies just pass through us and get excreted out or do some of them actually get absorbed into circulation and maybe theoretically have some unique benefits if they’re entering circulation?
Kiran: Yes. That’s a really great question. I mean, they are proteins, they’re pretty small proteins from a strand standpoint and complexity standpoint, but it doesn’t mean that they cannot get digested. There may be a portion of them that do get digested and they would yield things like peptides, little tiny peptides, and it’s not at all outside of the realm to think that those peptides themselves would have some beneficial effect within the body. We do know that a good portion of them do make it through the small intestine.
At least the proteolytic part of the small intestine, and then, in certain parts of the small intestine, they function perfectly as antibodies, but I wouldn’t be surprised that a small portion gets digested. Now, this, again, speaks back to– And every time I think about a therapeutic, I try to connect it to an evolutionary behavior that would make sense. We know lots of cultures do this where they drink the blood of these animals right there. The Medjay, they still do that these days. They drink cattle blood. In fact, they survive on cattle blood for long periods of time and there may be some inherent benefit in doing that.
Ari: Very interesting. Tina, I know that you used to work for a pharmaceutical company. What made you leave that and enter the realm of natural health and probiotics and gut health?
Tina: Well, it was a lot of the abuses that we saw in the pharmaceutical industry. We saw a lot of overprescribing of medications to people, we saw it with our own family members. We had one family member, she had like a stomach issue and she was on medication which caused a skin rash, she was on another type of medication, and then she had joint problems. Then next thing you know, six months later, she’s on a dozen medications and not getting better.
Then we saw it in the office, on a regular basis we had one example that always comes to mind is when we won this huge bid for one of the largest hospital systems in the country, the pharmaceutical rep came in and said, “Oh, my God, this is great. My job now is to go to every doctor in this hospital system and lower the number that he prescribes these cholesterol meds to.” Basically, encouraging doctors to be prescribing meds at a time when they really didn’t need to prescribe them.
It was really frustrating that there was never a focus on getting to the root cause of things. Even in this whole situation that we’re dealing with in this world of the pandemic, it’s like we all want to get to the root cause of like, how do we take care of ourselves to better fight these things, and what do we have to do? Nobody seems to be talking about that. That was our frustration in the pharmaceutical world. I read a lot of Wayne Dyer, Norman Vincent Peale, and my husband and I are pretty deep thinkers and we were like, we need to do something that is more in line with who we are and the way we lived our lives anyway. Through the grace of God Kiran came into our lives.
Kiran: We ran into a super nerd that could help some of that come to fruition.
Ari: Nice.
Tina: It’s really the most gratifying thing I’ve ever done in my career. There’s no doubt about that. Just, especially at this time, right now, knowing that all of my loved ones are taking, I’m doubling up on the IgG with all my parents and my in-laws, and my kids are on that, everyone, all my family members, and it’s just so great to know that I feel like we are actually making a difference right now in this crazy time with everybody, all of our customers and our family members and friends.
Ari: Beautiful. Kiran, I know that recently we had another podcast we talked about MegaSpore and these probiotics from them. Can you talk briefly about the differences between MegaSpore and Just Thrive spore probiotics?
Kiran: When we first started the use of spores as therapeutics, we went right to the health practitioners. It’s a new story, it’s a complex story for people to understand because all they’re used to seeing 50 strains, 25 strains, 100 billion, 200 billion. We said we’ve got to have the opportunity to sit down and talk the science with people, present them the concepts and the ideas so that they understand where we’re coming from. Our immediate reaction was to start working with health professionals.
We formulated megaspores, started talking to health professionals, going to conferences, and so on. It’s a powerful product. What we tended to find out after the first 500,000 patients that were on it, is that a percentage of people, when they go with a full dose of megaspore, they’ll get like die-off reactions like Herxheimer reactions, which are expected in some cases and so we needed that to be managed. We were very excited that we were working with health practitioners because we could train them in how to manage the dosing to reduce that type of effect.
Then we met Tina and Billy and we all have really great compassion together with the same type of passion for this industry. Tina and Billy wanted to do something similar in the retail space. We said, “Okay, well, let’s create a retail version of megaspore that’s not quite as potent because then you’d get that kind of response and a certain percentage of people.” We wanted it to be a version that anyone can start right off the bat, the dose recommended on the label, and get all the benefits of it without having to be managed.
Then the biggest important thing for us is accessibility. Megaspore you have to get it through a practitioner. Not everyone has the luxury, the capability of working with a practitioner. We wanted to be able to get that access to people in a much simpler way. That’s where Just Thrive Health came into the picture. We were very excited to work with them. The differences are just in dosing to a certain degree. You can think of it like megaspore is the prescription grades that you need to work with their doctor on to manage the dosing. Then this is more like over the counter, OTC version that you can use yourself and dose yourself.
Ari: Got you. We talked about a few products here and I want you to just quickly summarize three products that we talked about, probiotics, spore-based probiotic, prebiotic, and IgG, and what kinds of benefits someone could experience from or would typically experience from using these supplements?
Tina: The probiotic is what I always say is ground zero. That’s what you start with. You start with the probiotic because we need to be focusing on gut health. They’re all gut health supplements, but that’s where we start. Because if you envision a garden, the garden’s been stepped on and trampled down, and there’s weeds growing all over, the probiotic’s going to go in there and it’s going to attach to the soil, and it’s going to get rid of the weeds and help those plants have been stepped down and trampled on, come back to life. You compare that to the gut, that’s what it’s doing in the gut.
As a result, when you start to clean up that garden in your gut, you start to have more energy. A lot of times, people will come to us because they have gastrointestinal issues. Of course, that makes sense. People turn to a probiotic when they have some gas and bloating or constipation and diarrhea. What happens is they start to notice, “Oh my gosh, I have more energy.”
I have one friend who said it saved her marriage because she’s like, “I never wanted to go out with my husband anymore.” It just makes sense. When you start to rid your body of toxins and all that, you’re going to start to have more energy and you’re going to have a better mood. We see that a lot too. People, the vagus nerve, and the gut-brain access, we see a lot of people telling us they were suffering from some mental health disorders and they start to have a better mood, start to feel calmer.
From a lot of things that people don’t see, their immune system just being supported that much more, it’s been huge. I have a friend who’s a dentist who’s a big fan, and she’s like, “I just get sick less often. I used to be sick all the time. My hands are in people’s mouths all the time.” That’s the best part, is like side effects include more energy, better weight management, better mood. It’s amazing. It’s so different than when you’re dealing with a pharmaceutical.
Then, of course, the prebiotic is so great because you take that same garden analogy, and it’s basically going and feeding the good bacteria. What’s so unique about ours is it’s called a precision prebiotic because it’s only targeting the beneficial bacteria. That’s really, really important and like Kiran mentioned, it’s growing those, it’s helping with building up those keystone strains that really equate to overall health and helping with diversity, the butyrate production, all of those really great important things for overall health.
I’ve heard a lot of feedback from people about weight management with a prebiotic too, which is great, more feelings of feeling full rather than being hungry. That seems to be a really nice benefit of the prebiotic as well. Then the IgG, I feel like I’ve seen a little bit of different reactions with that. I feel like a lot of people just know it’s really great for them really, we know that it’s helping strengthen that gut barrier, which is so important for overall health, and then just some people telling us more regularity, a lot more of what they see with the probiotics. Again, supporting your immune system.
Ari: Got you. Where’s the best place to get these probiotics?
Tina: Just on our website, justthrivehealth.com.
Ari: We will have links on the webpage for this. If you’re on the website at the energyblueprint.com/podcast and you’re listening to this episode, which we’ll have at the energyblueprint.com/justthrive. There will be direct links to the different products there as well. Thank you guys so much. This has been wonderful. This has been super fascinating. Thank you for the products that you’ve created there. They are just wonderful. As I said, I’m especially blown away with that one study, 90 days, massive reduction in visceral fat. That’s incredible.
Kiran: We call that metabolic reprogramming because we’re changing how your body responds to food at the cellular level. It’s super exciting. The thing is, you can get that kind of effect between the probiotic and prebiotic that Tina mentioned, that’s exactly what we use in the study. Overall, one of the messages I try to give people is the kind of changes we’re making in your gut from the probiotic, prebiotic, and then with a significant amount of assistance with the IgG are the kinds of changes that then it help get better response to all the other things that you do.
If people are making better diet choices, if they’re trying to improve aspects of their lifestyle, they’re trying to sleep better, they’re trying to eat better exercise more, all of those things have benefits but all of those benefits actually boil down to how your gut microbiome translates those effects. You can eat really well but it’s not about what you eat as much as what you can absorb.
That old saying of you are what you eat is actually you are what you absorb. If you make the difficult and good food choices but your gut is so dysfunctional that you can’t digest it and assimilate those nutrients, then you’re not getting all of the benefit from it. Same thing with exercise. Same thing with more sleep. The gut plays an important role in ensuring all of those behaviors actually give you the capital that you should be getting out of them. This becomes fundamental nutrition. We call it foundational food because our ancestors would be getting a lot of this kind of stuff in their normal diet, which we just don’t.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to be able to talk about this. It’s always a pleasure to be able to share this information and empower people.
Ari: Yes, thank you guys so much. This was wonderful. Thank you for the work you do. I think it’s really important and fascinating stuff and I think a phenomenal product. Again, for everybody listening, you can get the products at either our website, we’ll have links to it, or you can go to justthrive.com. Tina, I know you had a little bit of special news for people that you just told me about.
Tina: Yes. Actually, it’s justthrivehealth.com. Just to clarify. I just want to make sure that’s clear. Then we have a 15% coupon code on TEB. If you just use TEB, you’ll get 15% off.
Ari: Wonderful, justthrive.com, and then TEB stands for The Energy Blueprint, by the way, and 15% off. Thank you guys so much. I’m going to be trying out some of these products myself. I look forward to that very much. Thank you again.
Kiran: Thank you.
Show Notes
The latest science on the gut’s role in human health (03:30)
The gut-brain connection (27:37)
Just Thrive Probiotics (30:36)
Colonizing vs non-colonizing probiotics and their role in gut health (38:00)
IgG supplementation (52:38)
Links
Tina has been super generous and offers a 15% discount on your first purchase of Just Thrive Probiotics. Use the code TEB upon checkout.
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