Episode #157: The COMPLETE Guide to Probiotics Featuring Kiran Krishnan!

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90-day probiotic subscription today. Alright, everybody, welcome back to the Dylan Jamelli podcast. As you can see, as promised, I have my good friend, Kuron, Christian, and back with me. Now, I pivoted about 20, 30 minutes into our last interview and said, "Okay, I knew you were brilliant.

I knew what you had, but I didn't realize it was this good and this much."

“So what we decided to do now is do a series where we're going to focus on key components”

and aspects of everything related to the gut and the gut health. We're going to cover so many different topics, but we're going to do it very selectively so that everybody gets a true understanding and we're not skipping all over the place and trying to fit in everything we can in an hour to an hour and a half. So today, we're going to focus strictly on probiotics, every single thing that Kuron knows

about them.

We're going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, basically, the things that

we're seeing out there that people are getting into trouble with in terms of using what they don't understand or know, survival of the probiotic itself and other types of products you may want to take with your probiotics and which ones you might want to avoid. So we're going to cover all the bases. I've been working extremely close now with just Thrive and Kuron.

He's the Chief Science Officer. He is the man over there, but they are so focused on product development and making sure that everybody is getting taken care of in all aspects. We teach and everything that they produce that Kuron has had his hands on is, I mean, nothing short of gold.

So Kuron, welcome back my friend. Thanks for joining me today. It is such a pleasure to be here.

“Thank you so much for having me and I love the pivot you made because I think ultimately”

once people listen to the whole series, they're going to know everything they need to know about the gut and gut health. So I think it's brilliant. It's a great approach and I'm super excited to be part of it. Thank you.

I appreciate you taking time to do this with me. I know it's important to you and I'm really focusing on key aspects of health and total and the gut. Yes, we know.

I mean, that I don't like to say one is the most important, but if I had a tie for first,

it would certainly be there. So let's break this down first. I want to make this as simple as we can, but still getting deep into the science of it. So can you just say, what is a probiotic and what is the difference between a probiotic

“and a prebiotic and a postbiotic because it's very, very confusing?”

It is. Yeah. The names are so similar. So a probiotic is defined by the World Health Organization and this is the universally accepted definition from a scientific perspective.

It is a live microorganism when administered to the host in adequate amounts confer as a health benefit, which means that a few things. Right. So let's break down the definition. That is, a true probiotic has to be alive and functioning in the living state in the gut.

And so if it cannot survive through the gastric system, if it cannot survive past the small bowel from bile acids, pancreatic enzymes, all of the things that tend to kill microbes and get to the intestines, get to the site of action alive, then it's not classified as a probiotic. The other part of it is that when they say when administered in adequate amounts, meaning

one billion didn't work, but four billion does work, right?

So there is a effect there that is related to the dosing of that agent and then the third part is confers the health benefit to the host. So that has to be a measurable health benefit to the host. So that is a probiotic, a living organism that is shown to have a health benefit to the host.

“A prebiotic, you can think of that as food for microbes, right?”

So these are typically complex carbohydrates in nature you would find them in fruits and in vegetables and in certain starchy foods, things like cassava and you know, twice good potato and so on and you would find them in all kinds of fruits and vegetables, prebiotics are complex carbohydrates that cannot be absorbed and broken down by us, the human, which means it passes through the small bowel enters into the large bowel and specifically feeds

beneficial bacteria. Now a postbiotic is a dead bacteria that still has functionality or a component of a bacteria, right? So a number of years ago, so this is probably about 15 to 20 years ago that was some discoveries being made that you know what some microbes, even though they're dead, are so and you

specifically kill them, you administer them to the host, they give very similar effects for the live microorganism and so then they start, you know, researchers started playing around with the idea that maybe there are components on the outer cell structure or outer cell membrane of the microbe that actually does the signaling that does the work, which means a microbe doesn't have to be alive and just delivering either the dead microbe or

“the component of the microbe can create that benefit, right?”

So, but the key thing with that is that they tend to be a very specific benefits, very

specific effects. So, all three can be utilized and should be utilized in someone that's really trying to revamp and improve the resilience and the health of their gut, but they played different rules and they are distinguished. Got it, okay.

So, before I knew anything, my whole idea when I hear these is you take a prebiotic, before you take a probiotic, either during or sometime during your meal and a post after, and I completely wrong and off on that, I'm just going by the base of how it sounds, that's what I always thought prior. Yeah, generally that should be fine, you know, in most cases you don't have to consider

timing to be a big issue. Got it. Now, sometimes you do want to take the postbiotic, which is the dead vector or bacterial components, apart from the probiotic because they could interfere with each other's functionality. In cases they're synergistic and that should be the role of the company's brands doing the

“research and figuring that part out and telling you, okay, you should take it, you know,”

two hours apart or three hours apart or, you know, you could take them together. So, they should be able to tell you that generally the way you're thinking about it should be fine across the board. Okay. I personally take the prebiotic first thing in the morning.

I take the probiotic before my heaviest meal. I don't really take a postbiotic, I guess, per se. I do have a couple of questions on you said that prebiotic is basically like a complex carbohydrate. So, would you recommend supplementing a prebiotic or can you get that through food or

how does that work because I see some prebiotic formulas, which I take, you know, with just drives, it's right love and I'm not a big carbohydrate guy as it is. So, can you kind of touch on that? Yeah. So I think, you know, most people should get a mix.

The benefit of getting prebiotics from food is that you get a little bit more diversity out of the prebiotics, right? So, for example, if you eat a banana that's not super ripe, so, you know, or you ate, say, a sweet potato or cassava or kiwis, you know, you're getting prebiotics from all these, but you're getting five, six, seven different versions of prebiotics.

The issue, though, is that the dosing isn't precise, right? Yeah. So, if you're trying to rebuild your gut, you want to know that you're getting the right amount of the pre of a prebiotic that is clinically validated to increase the good bacteria, decrease the bad bacteria, increase things like short chain fatty acids.

And so, I always think of it as this kind of, you know, dual system where there are certain

things in for my gut that I want to be precise about to ensure I'm achieving, at least the baseline effect. And then everything else, I just want to add in as like this beautiful rainbow of things because it got loves all the diversity, right? So, the way I think about prebiotics is I try to get two to three servings of prebiotics throughout my day from food, but I absolutely take two to three grams of a prebiotic

as a supplement because I know that the precise dosing and I know what the clinical

So, think of the supplementation as like the baseline effect that you need to get.

And then everything else is kind of icing on the cake. Something that you said that just kind of popped into my head was about taking the potential interference that you could have with the postbiotic mixing. Now, I've seen like three in one products and these ones that claim it's a pre post, pro all in one, is that not a good idea?

“It's absolutely not if they haven't researched it because they often interfere, right?”

So, for example, just tribe has a product called just calm. That is mostly a postbiotic, right? So, it's a bifurbactorm-longum, what's interesting about the strain is it is alive in the capsule, but it doesn't have to be alive for it to confer its function because the function of that strain in terms of lowering anxiety, lowering stress, improving mood comes

from this natural carbohydrate structure that it has on its outer membrane.

It's a structure called peptidoglycan, and then they have another carbohydrate layer.

They call it like a exo polysaccharide, right? So, this exo polysaccharide, and the peptidoglycan is what actually gets released from the bacteria, and then has this immunological effect to reduce cortisol, reduce stress, and reduce neuroinflammation. But that bacterial work, what it's live or dead, so it's mostly a postbiotic.

What's interesting, though, is if you mix that with any other probiotic, it knocks out its function. Okay. Right?

“And so, we know that, and that's why we didn't mix it together with the spores, we didn't”

mix it together with the prebiotic. We sold it separately, and we recommend to people take it a couple hours apart from your other probiotic for that very reason. So, I'd say the vast majority of the products on the market that are called sinbiotics, right, or they have pre-pro, and this, that and the other, they're not studying it.

They're not testing it to make sure they're compatible, and then they're just not knocking out each other's effect. I want to stay on the probiotic stuff, but I have a question because it dawned on me as you're talking about this, that you've mentioned carbohydrates now multiple times, that they're needed for gut health.

So, that being said, would you say that going too low a carb can be detrimental to gut health? Because it's, you keep bringing up carbohydrates in the prebiotic, then in the postbiotic. So, my mind is going up if we're just eliminating carbs that could have a potential negative effect on the gut.

“It does, yeah, and the studies showing this, right?”

So, people that go carnivore long term and so on, they will have a very negative effect on the gut over time. Got it.

The reality is, the vast majority of microbes in your gut, the 30, 40 trillion microbes in

the gut. The dominant food are carbohydrates and their plant-based carbohydrates. For the most part, it's fibers and starches and prebiotics. Now, that doesn't mean we need, you know, like processed carbs, right? Yeah, that's not going to help at all.

Any kind of carbohydrate that we break down and absorb and it raises are blood sugar, doesn't help the microbes at all, right? So, when we're talking about carbohydrates that are important for microbes who are really talking about fiber, prebiotics, resistance, starches, those kind of things, and the reason why those are all beneficial is because we can't break them down, it doesn't affect our

insulin, it doesn't give us any calories, but it does feed the microbiome, what it needs to, not only proliferate, but then convert those into very important substances. Thanks for covering that. I'm glad that you made it very clear, we're not talking about the bad refined carbs. I know how people like to twist and mix words, so thank you for doing that.

I'm sure that you're obviously used to that as well and you're a great teacher so you cover the base. So we'll say about the rest of that for our next episode where we get into the gut kind of diet premise, so to speak, but I want to get back to the probiotics that I think. So if we're looking at a pro, a pre and a post, is there one that's more important out

of all the three, or do you absolutely need three, what's the recommendation there? Yeah, if someone was only going to pick one, I would say find the right probiotic because the right probiotic can provide you more prebiotic like effects from the foods that you eat, so it can enhance the fermentable capability of the microbes that are already existing in the gut.

And then some of these probiotics will also give you postbiotic like effect by increasing the growth of certain microbes within your gut microbiome. So I would think about the prebiotics as like general good food for the microbiome, but you also want to make sure that you're utilizing the food properly, and that's the job of the probiotic.

Think about the postbiotic as like signaling molecules within your gut, right? Because they do very specific signaling, but you also need a healthy microbiome so that the signals can actually translate to beneficial effects. So in both cases, the probiotic becomes a critically important core of all of it, right?

second most important would be the prebiotic, and then the third would be the postbiotic,

but that would be specific for very, you know, very specific conditions and issues. So given the fact that we know Leaky gut is such a massive problem and probably damn near everybody, has it or has had it, and there's some things that are just unavoidable, but there are ways to take care of it. Would you say that the probiotic is the first and/or best step into ensuring that we're

“minimizing the damage, and that's the path to actually carrying or treating it?”

Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, a prebiotic can be very useful for Leaky gut assuming your body can or you've got can utilize the prebiotic appropriately, but one thing we know, and we published studies on this showing that the right kind of probiotic can alleviate that Leaky gut

quite significantly in about 30 days.

So that's very hard to do with the postbiotic or a prebiotic. In fact, if you did all three, it'd be a very profound effect, but I would say if I were to pick one for Leaky gut, it'd be the right probiotic. Yeah, because I've had pretty high level experts that have come on here and kind of scared people telling them it could take years to fix Leaky gut, and some that I'm not going to

name names, but even acted like you couldn't fix it at all, which we know is ridiculous. So, if things are done right and you're using the right kind of products, and obviously

“I preface this by saying you're eating the right kind of foods and taking care of yourself,”

you could be the road to recovering a Leaky gut in 30 days if you have the right kind of probiotic to help. Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely, you know, the thing that takes longer, so think about, you know, let's give

an analogy so people can understand it, right? So let's say you've had a wall that is acting like a dam, and you're trying to block water. Now, let's say the wall has had a bunch of leaks, and then the water continuously leaks, and on the other side of the wall, you've got erosion happening, right, as a result

of the leaking. Now, you can fix the leaks relatively quickly, like you can go and plug it up with all the mortar and stuff, but it's going to take a little while to fix and the erosion that is occurred, right? The dam is, so that's the part that takes longer with Leaky gut, is that with the right

probiotic, prebiotic, and other lifestyle changes, you can make significant improvement in the level of leakiness in a 30 day, 45 day period, but then all of the downstream damage that the leakiness has done over the last several years, that's going to take a little bit longer to improve. This is one of the reasons why we tell people that, you know, don't expect like profound

changes in your outcome in a short amount of time, know that you can make significant progress in a short amount of time, but with the probiotic, I say at least go 90 days, right, because the effects that you're seeing, the leakiness that they're experiencing, and all that, has taken years to happen, right, and they're not going to completely reverse all the symptoms and all the downstream effects of it overnight, they want to give it time, but know that

you can make a significant improvement in a short amount of time, but stick with it so that you can get all of the benefits of it. Okay, sweet. So, you know, I'm sure you've done this, probably not to the extent that I have, but

“you'll go look back in time and think what the hell was I think, and what, what was going”

on in my head at the time, so I'm going to be honest with you, and I'll, you'll know where I'm going with this, so I'd say, I don't know, probably less than 10 years ago, but a good while back, I just started taking whatever probiotic and thought, well, I'm doing what I need to do, everybody's saying, to take these digestive enzymes, and I had zero clue.

I turned the bottle around and you're talking to a guy that, you know, heavy researcher, heavy into wellness, and I just said, I don't know what this shit is. I'm just kidding. I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's doing what it's supposed to do. It, my point is, one, know what you're taking before you take it, and two, it's tricky,

because that you'd look at the back of a bottle of a good probiotic, and it's not like a bottle that you'd see that says magnesium, vitamin D3, and a bunch of things that you know what they are. These are strange words, you can't pronounce half of them, and it's confusing to know what they even are, and most people unless they're educated, you know, strictly into

what you study, they don't know what they're reading at all. So could you break down a little bit what to look for, and, you know, with the sport-based compare a sport probiotic to a regular one, because I, again, I got turned on to sport probiotics several years ago, and I just, it was my mentor, and I kind of just took his word for it. Now I know it was the right thing to do, because it was kind of a obscure back then, and

most were going into a refrigerator, and this one wasn't.

reading? What is this like strange terminology on the back? Yeah, you know, what you're actually looking at when you look at the labels, you're looking at the genus and the species of various organisms that they thrown into the product. The genus in the species tells you, for example, lactobacillus acidophilus or bacillus subtillus.

So the genus is a, is a, is a, the group that the micro belongs to, and then the species is the very specific version of that micro, from that group.

“What's really important to note is that for, for any really effective probiotic, you should”

see a third thing, which is a strain ID, right?

So, for example, lactobacillus acidophilus DDS1 is a very specific strain ID or bacillus subtillus 8258. That's a very specific strain ID. Now, why is that strain ID important? Well, because there's lots of different kinds of bacillus subtillus, right?

So that's like saying homo sapiens sapiens, that is how we characterize us, humans, right? Where we're homo sapiens is our genus and then sapiens is the species. So we're homo sapiens sapiens, but that doesn't tell you whether that homo sapiens sapiens is Dylan or myself, right, or somebody else, and we're different people. We have different functionalities.

We do different things. And so we need to get to that very specific name or what we call strain ID of the microbes. So first step, when you turn around and you look at the bottle, there's just a bunch of bacteria with no strain IDs already, you know that, okay, I got to be a little cautious. Because they don't even know what these microbes are and what they actually do, right?

Because for example, I gave you that example earlier of that Bifro back term long ago, the one that's in Jesscom, that fights against anxiety and depression. So that particular product has eight different published papers on that strain showing dramatic reduction in anxiety, in stress, improvement in mood disorders, all kinds of stuff. And all of those benefits come from one gene in that bacteria, right?

So that bacteria is called Bifro back term longum. So that's the genus in species, 1714 is a strain ID. There's lots of different Bifro back term longum, that don't have the one gene that makes it the 1714, which means that all of those other longum don't do any of that stuff, right? So one gene difference can completely change the functionality of the bacteria, right?

So it's more complicated than we thought. So when you look at this product and you go, all right, there's no strain IDs. That's first kind of red flag, like, okay, maybe they don't know what's in the product. The second thing is that if the company is making the big claims of how many strains and how much of the CFU count, right?

We all see like the 25 billion, 30 billion, see if you 50 billion.

“If that is the main part of their claim, then you have to be cautious as well.”

Because what they've done is they formulated a product to hit a number, and that number is completely arbitrary. There's no such thing as you need 40 billion to be effective. You need 50 billion to be effective, or that more is actually better. All that is kind of marketing smoke screen, right, because in fact, you could take a single

strain, like a Bifrobacchum Longham 1714, at 2 billion CFUs, it would be far more effective than another product with 15 strains and 20 billion CFUs, just because it's the right strain and it does the right thing, right? It's like if your toilet is broken, you want a homo sapiensapian who's a plumber, right? It doesn't matter if you bring 1500 painters there, they're not going to be able to figure

out if it's the toilet. And so we need to get very specific because microbes do very specific things. So what I want people to know is that a few of the red flags, again, to review to think about, if there's no strain ID already, that's a red flag. If the claim on the bottles are how many CFUs and how many strains are making a big

deal of having 15 strains and 50 billion CFUs, that's another red flag, because that's

marketing people that have thrown strains together with no rationale behind it at all, right? So those are the two big lookouts for people. And if the product has to be in the fridge, that's another big lookout. If the product's talking about some very special capsules and things like that, that is another lookout as well, because that means they're trying to engineer the whole delivery

system to get these products to survive. And as we talked about before, a true probiotic has to be alive microorganism, right? And so those are some of the lookouts that people should think about.

“And then ultimately, the only way you know that a probiotic formula is going to do anything”

at all and not actually cause a problem in your system, and we could talk about what kind of problem, you know, kind of erroneous probiotic formulas can create, but the only way

So the other thing to look for, this is another red flag, lots of companies do this. They call it a studied probiotic clinical research, they'll say, but what that means is one or two of the strains in their formula has studies on it. But there's no studies on the combination. And we know that microbes can knock each other's function out and compete and do all of that.

So when you're looking through the company's websites, they go clinically research probiotic. And then the clinicals that they're referencing are our research on the single strains, then you know that's another red flag as well. Wow. So it's heavily complicated and easy to take advantage of somebody because I mean,

I look at something like that and it says 100 billion CFUs are whatever on it.

I'm immediately going, okay, sweet. This is what I need. I mean, and most people will do that because it is too confusing and I'm not going to take the time to look up every single ingredient on the back of those. It just looks like foreign language.

“Yeah, so why would one then need to be refrigerated as opposed to one that wouldn't?”

What's the difference and why is it? I mean, you kind of touched on why it would be negative to refrigerated. But break that down a little bit more so people have an understanding because honestly, for years people said, well, doesn't need refrigerated, it can't be good. Yeah, totally.

Now, here's where the refrigeration part came in and this is actually kind of a industry thing to protect brands from being sued, right? So, okay, what happened was, you know, all these brands are calling out how many CFUs they have on the product, right?

So, let's say you formulate a product and you go, okay, we have 30 billion CFUs.

And that's the claim you're making on the label and you're making it and you're marketing and so on. But you put the product on the shelf and those strains are so weak that they're dying in the capsule sitting at 70 degrees, 75 degrees, right, they're that sensitive. And then what was happening is that class action lawyers were picking up these products,

testing them and going, hey, it says 30 billion CFUs, but there's only three billion when I tested. So then they're suing brands, right, for false advertising. So one of the ways in which brands have overcome that is they're going, well, if we put them in the refrigerator and they remain dormant because microbes will remain dormant

in the refrigerator, right? And then when you take them out, they can start growing again. This is why food doesn't spoil in the refrigerator the same way does it at room temperature.

“And so companies started telling the stores that you have to put the product in the refrigerator.”

But they made it, they couldn't tell them, of course, put in the refrigerator so we didn't go at food. They said, put in the refrigerator because that's going to enhance the efficacy because you're going to deliver more live bacteria.

But the big question I had when I first started this is if these strains cannot live

at 70 degrees in the room temperature, it's 98.6 degrees in the body, how are they going to live there? And so that is like a complete misnomer that if this thing has to be refrigerated, there's no way it's surviving in functioning in the body, if it's that sensitive, right? Now the spores, this brings up the question of what makes spores different.

So spores are these very unique kind of microbes. They're commensal microbes, they live in the gut naturally and then they transit through often because they go back out into the environment. And the thing is when they get to the distal end of your colon because they're leaving the gut, they know that outside can have harsh environments, right?

It can be dry, this UV radiation, all of these types of things that can kill microbes. So they're going to a spore state. They actually cover themselves with a thick protein, calcified coating, like an armor, like a piece of armor, and then they can go out into the natural environment and then exist there indefinitely, you know, for literally thousands of years, they can just exist that

way. Then we swallow them again and then they get into the system and then the moment they hit the intestines, they break out of this protein covered shell and then they go to work for you and they're like a regular old live vegetative microbe. So the spores have a unique capability of being able to survive in room temperature or in

hotter temperatures than that through UV radiation and all that too. Okay. So spores the way to go that in your view. Generally it is, yeah, I mean, that's, you know, it's going to be a safe bed, but again,

“not all spores are created equal, so you need to make sure that you have the right species”

and the right strain ID and that there's been studies on the finished product. So if a company again is calling out one of the strains and then showing studies on one of the strains and not the other ones and not the combination really most importantly, then you know that they're not really validating that the product, the formula works. Why is it that most strains don't have that survivability?

Why is it that they can't make it all the way to your gut intact in a live? You know, in part because nature did not design them necessarily to leave the body and

So to give you an idea, like some strains, for example, do really well when they are all

“by themselves in, say, a fermentation capacity, right?”

So you take, for example, a lactobacilli and you're fermenting milk with it. It's a monoculture, so does well as a monoculture, meaning there aren't a bunch of competitive bacteria. It's doing it under very controlled temperatures and controlled pressures. All of that is like makes it ideal for that strain.

It's not robust enough to start throwing in other strains, heating the temperature up, making it more acidic, it doesn't have the cell membrane structure to deal with that. Now, you know, I think everyone's heard of it back here, I call it the lactobacilli acid ofacidophilus.

Acidophilus is lover of acid, right?

So it's acid and fillus, the prefix and suffix there. So they found a version that actually does better under more acidic conditions because it can survive. So different microbes have different stability and different capabilities of dealing with temperature dealing with pH dealing with level of dryness and all that.

It's based on their physiology. Okay, all right, so we've got that down. Now, I have another question and this kind of pertains to the post-biotic because you were talking about it in just calm and how it's to having this effect on anxiety and stress. And so are you saying, and we kind of got into this on the podcast that we did, are you

saying that there is a connection then between something in our gut that's factoring into our stress, our anxiety and these kind of mental health struggles, the correlation there

“can be treated with some of these bacteria and strains?”

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the gut brain access is one of the best explanations and discoveries around why we actually suffer from mental disorders, right? So this is boring, you know, genetic mutations that create like really bad schizophrenia and things like that.

We're talking about more your conventional anxiety, depression that huge percentages of population that deal with brain fog, you know, certain degrees of cognitive dysfunction so memory loss and all that. Those types of issues are truly a gut brain issue, not just a brain issue. This is why the strategy, the pharmaceutical strategy of dealing with things like depression

and anxiety, especially depression, we're going after just a brain with things like SSRIs, right? Selective serotonin, re-optic inhibitors, they haven't worked, right? Their SSRIs have very little impact better than their placebo. And so in fact, in many cases, it can make people worse over time because the issue is not

just in the brain, it's absolutely in the gut and the brain and unless you deal with the gut, you really can't alleviate that issue in the brain that you're experiencing. The brain is translating the chemistry, right? Which is what gives you the feelings, the anxiety, the depression, and all that. But the chemistry is between the gut and the brain.

Mm-hmm. Okay, I want to ask you one more question because that makes perfect sense and that correlation then we talked about that, we're going to do that on a separate episode to that whole gut brain connection. But you know how you said that nature didn't intend for the bacteria to be pulled out and

that's why it didn't survive. Do you think that because nature also didn't intend for the types of foods that we're eating that's creating the problems and so we had to figure out a way to counteract in this fight against things that aren't supposed to occur naturally, which has created this added need because I have to think that the gut problems and things that are going

on are more related to, I don't know, maybe you could go back to industrial revolution time or when things started to change in the way that things were produced and made.

“Is that sound right to you or am I just kind of all over the place?”

No, you're 100% correct about that. I would say that the, and this is not hyperbole, you know, I think this is very defensible. I would say that probably the biggest driver of chronic conditions today, all the things that we see as prevalent as we see it has been the change in the food system and not only the introduction of high-processed foods and all that and hyperchloric foods, but the elimination

of fiber from the food, right, and so our microbes aren't being fed. Like when you look at eating ultra-processed foods, I've actually been doing this a little

bit in the lecture to doctors that there's two parts to the story that, and we never

talk about the one other part, right? So, now I'll give you an example of this actually that was in a very interesting study. So, when you eat ultra-processed foods, we all know it's bad for you.

They're too insulin-genic, they're creating insulin spikes and creating insulin resistance

“and there's no nutrition when we think about it from our perspective, right?”

Meaning there's no great vitamins, minerals, all that stuff that we're supposed to get from food.

So, as a result, they're bad for you, but the second part of it that we're forgetting is

the other reason they're really bad for you, and in some cases this may be more of the reason they're bad for you is that they have nothing in them that feeds the microbiome. Yeah, right? And if you don't feed the microbiome, that becomes the biggest driver of your chronic disease risk, right?

You lose diversity, you start losing keystone species, you've got becomes leaky, you start getting chronic low-grade inflammation. Now, here's one study that kind of demonstrated this, and it's a little bit surprising. So there was a study published by the American College of Gastroenterology, and this was on people with very high sensitivity to pollutants, right?

And I'm not remembering if they were fully celiac yet or they were on the road to developing full celiac, but they were at a very high sensitivity to pollutant, pollutant was very inflammatory to them and damaging to the gut. When those individuals and they took hundreds of hundreds of individuals in the study, when they went on a gluten-free diet, right, in the first two years of being on a gluten-free

diet, their mortality risk went up, their heart disease risk went up, and other risk of chronic conditions went way up, right? And you go, wait a minute. So their gluten sensitive, gluten is creating leaky gut dysfunction in them. How is it coming off of gluten, increase their mortality rate, increase their cardiovascular

disease risk and all that? The reason is that in the U.S., more than 85 of our fiber intake, the little fiber that we bring in comes from wheat, right? And when these people cut out wheat, they're essentially cutting out fiber. So what this study really showed, what the impact was on your health, if you go for a couple

years having a fiber-free diet. And the absence of fiber was more impactful to these individuals in terms of their health

“than the presence of gluten, which we know is inflammatory and all that, right?”

So that's the part we often forget when we think about poor diets and all that, is that we've eliminated components that our microbiome needs from our industrialized farming practices and so on. Man, I already can't wait to get into the diet stuff with you, because I just want to dig into this fiber thing.

It's driving me crazy, and I seen the battles that you're having, too, and I temper myself with going in, and I'm not a keyboard warrior because I despise it, which I'm struggling to not go in and like, get into it when people make a comment to you, but I have to hold back because I don't want to be what I despise, but it's like, oh, so I can't wait to get into that with you.

I know we have a little bit of time left, so I want to cover two more things real quick with you. The first one, briefly, when I found just thrive, I really dug in because I have been approached and talked to so many different places with probiotics, and it just was let down after let down.

But I am not a give up guy. I know somebody out there, so one of the things that I found with them was something called HU36 that stood out to me because I looked at it and I thought, okay, this is different. I don't see this.

And then I started to read, but I still don't fully comprehend and I want it, but it's a standout. I'm very clear of that.

“Could you just say what that is and why it's on the rare side and what the benefit is?”

Yeah, it is an amazing strain, right?

So this strain is called bacillus indicus HU36. And what it does? It doesn't number of things. The thing that it does that is almost superhero like, is it produces a huge variety of caratnoids at the side of absorption in our gut forests, right?

So caratnoids are really, really important compounds like say, asses ant and lutein, lycopene, alpha-caratene, beta-caratene, right? Things we've all heard about why you eating carrots is good for your eyes and why eating beats can be very healthy. It's all the colored components of fruits and vegetables.

And these things are very powerful antioxidants. They're really important for mitochondrial function, really important for a skin or brain or eyes and everything else.

The problem is humans are really bad at absorbing caratnoids from our diet, right?

So we absorbed less than 10% of caratnoids from our diet. In fact, there was a study done on pure beta-caratene as a supplement and they found that less than 10% of it was absorbed. And now this became an interesting study, it was called the European Color Spore Consortium Study.

There were 80 different research institutes involved in this and this was going on from

And what they were doing is they were trying to figure out how animals in the animal kingdom

that express a lot of color on their skin, where are they getting their caratnoids from, right? How the orange band around shrimp, or the pink color that salmon have, or even the pink coats of the flamingos, right?

“And everyone knows the flamingos eat brine shrimp and that's how you get the pink color.”

But what's in the brine shrimp because the brine shrimp aren't pink, right? So all of it is driven by microbes that they have in their gut. And the microbes produce such high levels of caratnoids that you could see it on the skin of the animals. And then the hypothesis was maybe humans also needed microbes because it was really bad

at absorbing caratnoids and that's where this strain was discovered.

So this thing goes in and becomes a caratnoid factory in your gut for you.

If you were to take supplemental beta-caratene, acesanthene, zazanthene, lycopene, luteene, alpha-caratene, if you took six or seven of them, it would cost you about $350 a month and you'd absorb 10% of it, right? This strain is sitting there producing clinically relevant levels of these caratnoids for you at right at the side of absorption.

Oh, and there's one more study we did I should mention this, I did it in dermatology study. So we know that caratnoids are very important for protecting the skin, right? It protects it from UV radiation, all the oxidative stress, skin cancers, and all these crazy things that can happen.

“And then also from blue light irradiation from our screens, right?”

And so we did a study to see if taking HU36 can increase skin caratnoid levels in a measurable way and we saw in 30 days a significant increase in skin caratnoid levels just by taking the HU36. So it is an absolute caratnoid factory in your gut for you. Okay, all right, I love it.

Thank you for breaking that down because I read quite a bit, but it wasn't super clear to me and I like to look for things that are special and may have something stand out. So super, super informative. One last question for you, and this is on where it gets a little tricky because they're again, this is down to marketing and product placement and different offerings.

If you had to say something else that you would recommend or a few things to take with your probiotics, I started to take a couple things daily gut detox.

I adjusted bitter things that I had never taken, honestly, never did any of them at all.

I was always very fearful of doing any kind of detox whatsoever and I never really thought to take anything else other than the probiotic or the prebiotic in the post. Can you maybe discuss those if you think I'm taking the right things or what you recommend

“as add on and what kind of benefits you can also get alongside?”

Yeah, so the daily gut detox is a really, really great one. I used that all the time, I especially use it when I travel now, that the term says detox, but don't think of it as a detoxifying type of process, right? Which can be harsh on the system and it can create more problems. What it actually is, are there are IGG immunoglobulins that actually come from a bovine

source. So it comes from cows and it's a huge array of immunoglobulins from cows that can bind to lots of different things. These immunoglobulins can bind to like mold for example or viruses or dysfunctional bacteria or toxins from the environment. So taking that on a daily basis, what you're doing is you're reducing the toxicogenic

load for your microbiome, right? Because inevitably we're bringing in toxins, right? Every food we eat, everything we drink, this toxins coming in. And as a result of that, the microbiome has to deal with those toxins. So what you're doing and the microbiome and your liver, both of those are kind of dealing

with the toxins. So what you're doing is kind of lending a helping hand to that by binding a lot of those things up through the immunoglobulins and then taking them out through defecation. Now it's important to note that immunoglobulins are not a general binder, like you think of, that just grabs everything.

These are antibodies that have very specific targets. So the antibodies specifically bind to an alpha toxin from mold for example or specifically to a type of virus, specifically to a type of bacteria that's dysfunctional and then it takes it out of the system. So it's a way of, you know, in this toxic world that we inevitably live in, to lend a hand

to our microbiome, to our immune system, to our liver, to bring down the toxicogenic load so they have less to deal with. Got it. Okay, sweet. When I saw that, I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, is this going to be something

that, like you said, that I should take for travel, is it going to boost my immune system? And I actually, Dr. Sean Drake brought it to me. So amazing. Yes, when I got sick and I was actually in the emergency room, I couldn't stop throwing

at the emergency room and he brought that over to me to start taking. And you know, it was one of those things that was a real big help to me and then as I would have it, then I met you guys and it was just, you know, God's timing man, you know, how it worked. So, what about the digestive bidders, that's the other one that I'm taking, what is that

for people that are listening because I have a special offer for everybody too. I've been taking it almost three months, not quite and it's a staple for me. And I'll tell you how I take it and then you tell me if I'm doing it right. So I take every big meal like I said, I take one of the probiotics and two of the bidders when I have a big meal.

Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly how you take it. You want to take the bidders about, you know, let's say 10 to 15 minutes before the meal. If you remember, if not, take it with the first bite of food.

No problem. Now, bidders aren't impacting the microbiome in any significant way directly, but what

“they do, which is so critical is a turn on all of the digestive switches in your gut, right?”

So about 50% of all the digestive switches that is turning on the hydrochloric acid, turning on the bile production, turning on the bile reabsorption, turning on the pain. All of these things that need to happen for your body to properly utilize the food require activation by bitter compounds. And we have no bidders in our food, right?

It is again, this goes back to the food issue and why the food change. We have completely cultivated bitter compounds out of our food. And as a result, when we eat, we're not activating up to 50 of the digestive signals, which is not surprising that people get bloated and distended and have all these GI issues, because you're not breaking down the food properly, right?

And then the partially broken down components of food linger in the gut for too long, and then they can purify, and they can become, you know, turning into toxic toxicogenic compounds and the bowels aren't moving appropriately and all that, all of those things require signaling from bidders. And so digestion, think bidders, you need them, we all need them because we're not eating

bitter compounds. Absolutely. All right. So, they don't taste bitter, by the way, it's just a capsule that you take. So, if anybody's worried about that, now I actually drink them with apple cider vinegar,

because I have a shot before, so that I get my bitter in there with it, but yeah, they actually, I've noticed this is a significant difference, because I only have one or two meals a day, so they're bigger and, you know, not that I have bad digestion, but sometimes when you do that, it hit you wrong certain days. And I feel a heck of a lot better ever since I started taking them, so the impact is there

for sure. For sure, it's very important for the digestive system, excellent. So, that's episode one.

This was amazing, so thank you for coming.

I'm so jacked to talk about the food stuff, but I wanted to do this first, because I think

“this is the most confusing, and it's kind of like, foundationally, what you need to start”

with first before we get into everything else. So I really appreciate your breakdown and the ease and which you do it and the calm voice that you have. It's just easy to listen to, man, so I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, my friend.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a absolute passion of mine to share this information with people, because gut health is whole health, right? So without your gut, you really can't achieve really strong outcomes, and you can't be there for your family and friends and your career and all of that.

So it impacts everything, and so if I can share some, get some people to make some changes

and improve their health, it's an amazing blessing for me.

So thank you so much for making it happen. You're stuck with me now, man, I've got you here with me, you're signed onto this invisible imaginary contract with me for this series. I love it, I'm in, I'm in, 100%. All right, so my friends that just thrive, they have a special for everybody, and I would

highly encourage you to take advantage of this because it is an absolute steel. When you start a 90 day subscription to the probiotic, which should be doing anyway, you're going to get 90 days free of the digestive bitter, so that's $90 free, and it's a no brainer to me.

“You should be taking the probiotic anyway, so sign up for 90 days, get locked in, get the”

bitters for free. Very simple. I'm going to put the link down in the description. All you got to do is click on it and go in and get what you need. It's just thrivehealth.com/dillon, sign up, get taken care of, get that added bonus.

You'll never want to stop taking them.

So, Cron, my man, thank you so much for the time today. We'll look forward to part two, well, it's a part three for us, but part two in our new series, what we get into the entire way to properly get gut health through your diet. So I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Thank you, my friend. That wraps up another one, everybody. Stay tuned for part two coming soon, dillon, gemeli, and Cron, Christian, sign it off.