233. Anders Corbett: On “Crafting” Your Gut Microbiome, Probiotics, Leaky Gut & Hormone Optimization

There's cyanobacteria for oxygen. Those are found in like Olympic swimmers. That's like how you can identify an Olympic swimmer is by the amount of cyanobacteria in their gut. Really? I think at the professional athlete level, they're all looking for ways to legally, without using a...

performance enhancement device, but to modify their biology. Anything that they can do to close that last gap. Before and after a stressful event, whether it's like a UFC fight, and it's usually saliva, stool, whatever they'll give me. And I measure how those bacteria change. And I'll try to correlate the changes I see in the profile to papers that have talked about this bacteria does X, Y, and Z. I know that there's enormity of connections between the gut microbiome and everything.

autoimmune to human performance to how our mood and emotions work but never did i understand that we can architect our own microbiome to serve the goals that we have for our health outcomes. There's a list of bacteria that I'm confident that I can isolate from a lot of different people. So I present someone with like a menu. Like, hey, this bacteria does this, this bacteria does that. Like, which ones do you think would be valuable for you?

There's a lot of people listening to this podcast. What benefit could they derive from working with Kraft microbiome to actually go in and re-architect the flora in their gut? There are changes in the gut that happen years before the symptoms develop. And one of the easiest things you can do is...

Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything, anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's podcast is... going to be a fascinating podcast. I mean, first of all, because I am deeply, deeply interested in this subject. I never in my entire lifetime knew that the gut microbiome not only could, I knew that it could.

It could serve you. It could degrade your performance. I know that there's enormous, there's enormity of connections between the gut microbiome and everything from autoimmune.

to human performance, to how our mood and emotions work, but never did I understand that we can architect our own microbiome to serve the goals that we have. for our health outcomes. And that is the most fascinating thing that we're gonna delve into today with our guest, Anders Corbet. Welcome to the podcast, my friend. Thank you for having me.

There's an interesting theme that runs through a lot of my podcasts. And I find that the most impactful, purpose-driven, passionate people, at some point in their life, they solve the problem. And I know that you were a professional athlete and you were a world-class rower. Yeah, at one point. Yeah, you were training at the Olympic facility. I think you placed ninth in the world competition. And so here you are. You have this background as a professional athlete.

You were folding shirts at one point at Brooks. Brooks Brothers. Brooks Brothers. I'm even repping it today. Oh, are you? Let's go, Brooks. Yeah, let's go, Brooks. And somehow you made it into a... at Harvard University. And now your work has me so intrigued and I am absolutely- fascinated by it. You know, we went to the UFC fights. Well, first of all, we're here in Dubai. And we went to the UFC fights and I was like,

My audience needs to know about this. I normally don't do this with podcasts. I want to read some tidbits from Anders' background and some of the accomplishments he's had. with the gut microbiome just to set the tone for the rest of this podcast. So listen to this. If you're not fascinated by the end of these 10 line items, then this is not the podcast for you, but this blew my mind.

Simply by altering the microbiome, he proved the concept first with livestock. Before it went into human trials, 25% weight gain. using 400 kilograms less feed consumption. He then, on himself, gained 25 pounds of muscle in one month using a specific probiotic formulation. He was then featured on ESPN's controversial...

Sports expose on poop doping and the microbiome performance, showing that you could alter the microbiome and significantly improve athletic performance. He worked with George Church, who's one of the world's... top genetic scientists using the gut microbiome to enhance performance. I worked at the National Science Foundation as a research fellow, Harvard Medical School as a genetics fellow.

He actually was able to target testosterone, growth hormone, strength, endurance, and recovery, not just gut health. And, you know, in 2012, he completed the World Rowing Championships, as we as we talked about. And, you know, many of his competitors have raised millions and millions of dollars. But he went this direct to consumer route. with these experimental probiotic formulations and has had astounding success. So first of all, I want to gain 25 pounds of muscle in one month.

So we're going to talk about that for sure. But tell me a little bit about your journey and how you go from folding shirts at Brooks Brothers to being a research fellow at Harvard University. I got done rowing and I realized I'd worked my body really hard, but I hadn't worked my brain. And at the World Championships, I realized that I was an amateur.

All the other people from the other countries were professionals. And I realized like, you know what? I don't want to put another four years in and try for the next Olympics. And so I moved to Boston with not really a plan. And I walked into Brooks Brothers. I got a job.

And then I joined a club at MIT called iGEM, which is an international genetically engineered machines team. And I had really, like, no lab experience. Really? Yeah, I just sat in the back. Because you're a very smart guy, man. I've pressed you on some of these topics. Yeah.

I consider myself pretty astute with the gut microbiome, but you've forgotten more than I'll ever know. Well, this was a cell-to-cell signaling. It was like my first interaction with synthetic biology. And it was run by this guy named Ron Weiss. The club was great. We competed at something called the World Jamboree. I was like a wallflower on it. But I got an email from the professor at MIT. He's like, hey, you should take this graduate course.

And so I just started showing up at this graduate course with no lab training. And I got put with these cool guys from the MIT Media Lab and bioengineers and a bunch of crazy people. stumbled into an internship as a biosafety officer intern. And the whole time I'm working at Brooks Brothers. And one day George Church walks into the Chestnut Hill Mall and I see him. And I just read his book, Regenesis. Yeah.

And I went out and I was like, hey, Mr. Churchill, big fan. And he said, put yourself in places you don't belong because that's where you learn the most. He just gave you the advice right out of the gate? Yeah, well, we had a little conversation. He's like, hey, son, put yourself in places you don't belong because that's what you're learning about. He's a wild, that guy's wild. Yeah. And totally focused on the science, just.

No, no, he's not. Yeah, and like he travels in the same clothes with just a laptop. Really? Yeah. You know, a lot of these brainiac scientists are, there's no fluff. It's all just, you know. intentionally focused on their craft. And like two weeks later, I still had my ID pass from being a biosafety officer intern. And I got through security and I brought some cookies and I...

I told the secretary, I'm one of Georgia's old students. I just want to come say hello. And she gets me a meeting that day within minutes. And I say, hey, I'm here. Can I have a job? At Harvard. At Harvard Medical, yeah, in the premier genetics lab in the world. And he walks right out of the office and says, get this guy a job. Really? Yeah, and the secretary introduces me to a postdoc.

CRISPR was new at the time. CRISPR is the gene technology. She trained me how to do gene editing on George's own stem cells. How to design primers, how to do transformations, how to do gels, which I was terrible at. She was always pissed at me about it. I couldn't run a gel to save my life. But how to do sequencing, how to work with all these different companies.

The lab is a part of it. And then the second postdoc I worked with heard that I had been a former elite athlete. And eventually we convinced Harvard to send us to the Rio Olympics to do a sport genomics study. And, well, first of all, what is a sports genomic study? But before you answer that, I want you to explain to me and my audience, like we're five-year-olds. Okay. How does your gut bacteria make your muscles stronger?

I mean, you know, because my first foray into really being fascinated by the gut microbiome was years ago, Dr. Perlmutter wrote a book called... the gut-brain connection he wrote another one called grain brain it was the first book that really drew my attention to how foundational the gut microbiome is and these trillions and trillions of bacteria and how they're actually not just digesting.

proteins and carbohydrates and nutrients, but they're actually signaling molecules. They create serotonin, dopamine, they drive behavior, they drive mood. You know, we know now that you're... Gut microbiome sort of gets what it wants. It has mechanisms to signal the brain to have sugar cravings and other things. And it's interesting because... We think we're in control of all of our choices, but very often we're not. The gut microbiome is in...

control of a lot of the choices that we make. But I've never thought about the gut microbiome, and this is what's so fascinating about your work. I've never thought about the gut microbiome as being something we can use or leverage to... improve our processing speed, our memory, our focus, our concentration. And the last thing I thought would be athletic performance. So talk a little bit about as if...

We're five years old. How does the gut microbiome improve athletic performance? How did you put on 25 pounds of muscle in a month? There was this crazy paper from, I think, 2016, February 2016. about how people in Malawi are famine victims. And it took their microbiome, it did a fecal transplant into mice, and it took the microbiome from a Westerner.

and put it in a different mouse. They fed the mice the same amount of food, the same amount of water, and the Malawian mice became malnourished, like lost weight, even though they were fed the same amount of calories. So you took the gut microbiome from someone who was... Malnourished. Yeah, someone else. Yeah, and fecal transported into the mouse. And then you have other gut microbiome. Yeah, from a westerner. From a westerner. Yeah. Same diet. Same diet. Okay.

Same water, same everything. And the Western mouse gets obese. Wow. Right? And they repeat this a lot of times. And the Malawian mice wouldn't grow. Right? They were stuck on a... a poor growth pathway or whatever it was called. And so they found the single bacteria and they gave it to the Malawian mouse. And then all of a sudden it returned to normal growth patterns. Wow. With a single bacteria.

So by taking the gut microbiome and sequencing the different types of bacteria and looking at different types of levels, it's almost like a dial.

You dial up certain bacteria, you get one result. You dial it down, you get a different result. So they dialed up the bacteria from the Westerners and all of a sudden these mice... recovered on the same time yeah they return to like normal and that's kind of what happens when you get poor sleep you have poor diet you know you're overweight like these growth hormone pathways in your body they don't function they get blocked right there's um

And so it's not really that well understood. But this lactobacillus roteri, a specific substrain of it, is able to remove those blocks and then your body can start. producing its own growth hormone. Yeah. You know, what's fascinating too is as I'm getting further and further down the road of the gut microbiome, you know, we know that antibiotics wipe out your gut microbiome and that you should take probiotics out. but when you start to look at

how we can actually go into the gut microbiome and specifically select different characteristics based on the bacteria. So for example, there are strains of bacteria that are broadly absent. in people that have eczema and psoriasis. There are certain strains of bacteria that are broadly absent in neurodevelopmental disorders like autism. And to me that's fascinating.

percentage into the degree to which these specific bacteria are correlated to very specific diseases, pathologies, is fascinating to me. Because, you know... I think very often in modern medicine we get it all wrong. We think that things go wrong for no reason, which is why we diagnose a lot of things as idiopathic, right, of unknown origin. But when you think about the gut microbiome, the different strains of bacteria as potentially being that root cause, this seems like something we could...

you know, we could address mass. There are a lot of papers that show like changes in the gut happen years before Parkinson's, changes in the gut happen years before you develop. some sort of, any sort of symptoms. It's like acromantia and cancer. They're finding these deficiencies in certain gut bacteria. Dr. Mark Hyman talks about this all the time. Much higher prevalence in... patients that have certain forms of cancer. And, you know, I think I'm fully bought in to that, you know, but...

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that you can so first of all you you take a stool sample right you culture that stool sample and you look at the terrain you look at the profile of the gut microbiome is that yeah Fair to say? Yeah. Okay. And then once you have that person's gut microbiome profile, where do you go from there? Do you say, well, what are the outcomes that you would like to have?

And then you target those bacteria? There's a list of bacteria that I'm confident that I can isolate from a lot of different people. So I present someone with a menu. Like, hey, this bacteria does this, this bacteria does that. Which ones do you think would be valuable for you?

Yeah. And for the record, you're working with LeBron James. I mean, this is not like this is not voodoo science. You know, he's not doing this in his basement and, you know, in his garage. I mean, and. It's, yeah. So go ahead. So you take the microbiome and you have a menu and they say, you know, I have focus and concentration issues. Yeah, I have a hard time.

focusing and concentrating. Let's pick a few things. Yeah, but just to be clear, like it's, we understand like the first tier interactions, like this bacteria, and it's just starting to be this bacteria lives in this part of the digestive tract and it makes B vitamins.

It makes B12 or something, right? And so there's a geography issue and then there's, you don't know if that B vitamin is consumed by another bacteria, right? We don't know like the downstream thing. So the philosophy is I just overload with that bacteria.

But you are seeing notable results. Yeah, on blood tests. And a lot of the clients, they do quarterly or monthly blood tests and they'll show like, hey, my B vitamins actually went up this month or my testosterone is up like 300 points or something. Really? It just sits at like 700 or 800 for months and months. After you've made this manipulation in the bacteria. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's unpack that. I would love to...

To the extent that you're willing to do so, share an actual story of an athlete that came to you or even somebody that had gut dysbiosis-related ailment. Maybe it was eczema, psoriasis.

maybe it was chronic gut issues with digestion, food allergies, food sensitivities. Let's take a real-life case that you've had and walk me through what you did from... understanding what their deficit was or their goal was to getting their gut bacteria to how you either manipulated or cultured their bacteria and then what the result was?

So I guess we can do two examples. Okay. Originally, all the bacteria sold direct to consumer were isolated from me. And so there was like strength, endurance, and complete. Okay. And so a friend of mine had a PICC line in for years and years. He had Lyme disease. He ended up... Oh, Lyme's awful. Yeah, horrible. And he got misdiagnosed and he lost a leg.

Crazy. Oh, my God. Yeah, so a PICC line with antibiotics for years, right? He's got no bacteria left. None. And he does blood tests, you know, every half a year, quarterly or whatever it is, and it was like too... It was a little low. What was a little? His testosterone. Oh, his testosterone, okay. And then I give him the Kraft strength, and then it sits at like 800 or 900.

been there for like four or five years. But when you say I give them the craft strength, so I want to unpack the sequence. There's two bacteria in craft strength. So you get the stool sample, you look at the gut microbiome profile. Yeah. I don't particularly find the... profile that useful. It's okay, it understands but it tells me what you ate yesterday.

Right. What I really like to do is before and after a stressful event, whether it's like a UFC fight or the world's strongest man or at the Olympics or an NBA basketball game or something.

And it's usually saliva, stool, whatever they'll give me. And I measure how those bacteria change before and after the stressful event. And I'll try to correlate the changes I see in the profile to... papers that have talked about this bacteria does X, Y, and Z. But in this person's case with the Lyme disease, it was just like a standard two bacteria, lactobacillus plantarum.

and then a substrain that came out of South Korea, and then a lactobacillus roteri, a substrain that has been shown to lower interleukin 17-alpha, and so your lead egg cells in your testes get larger. and then you produce your own testosterone. Wow.

Dude, I mean, there's not a man listening to this podcast right now. It's not like, where do I get that bacteria? Look at those big balls, yeah. Look at those huge balls, yeah. You can't say big balls on a podcast. No, okay. No, you can on The Ultimate Human. We're tough. So Lyme disease ravaged from antibiotics. Yeah, he's a great example of it. And get the bacteria and as you repopulate the gut is testosterone. Now...

The main challenges of wiping out the gut microbiome are way beyond just a decrease in testosterone. Lyme patients have crushing fatigue, they have muscle soreness, they have brain fog that you can't imagine. They have poor focus and concentration, disrupted sleep patterns. And I believe that the vast majority of this does tie back to the gut, meaning that between the virus and the co-infections, the parasitic co-infection and the bacterial co-infection, you have...

this myriad of consequences that very often modern medicine doesn't link back to the Lyme disease. No, no. And in your friend's case, it sounds very sad, he had an amputation. Yeah, for the misdiagnosis. For the misdiagnosis, you know, which is why medical error is still the third leading cause of death. Isn't that amazing? It's not that doctors, you know, I want to not...

It sounds so harsh, like doctors are intentionally doing things or they're making mistakes. It just shows you, even as far as we are advanced in modern medicine today, the paucity of understanding of true human physiology. We're really just scratching the surface. That's one of my biggest motivations is I see this technological advancement, but I don't see the human advancing. And I thought this would be a good product to get us off our phones.

So after repopulating his gut bacteria, how did you decide what to give him? Mainly it was I didn't want to hurt the guy. He's been through a lot. I'm like, I would give him the most benign bacteria. It's like lactobacillus strains, right? It's in yogurts. Which were wiped out, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. It's in yogurts and kefir, but it's a very specific type of bacteria that has very specific function. And so I imagine these bacteria is like factories.

that just go into your body and turn on as a factory. And you know they turn on by doing something called RNA sequencing. So you know which genes in the bacteria are actually turned on in the body versus in the... in the dormant state. Right. And we know that our genes don't necessarily determine our destiny. I mean, our genes are sort of the blueprint. Yeah.

where they say that your genetics load the gun, but your lifestyle pulls the trigger, right? And so in this case, you culture these strains of bacteria. He starts to take the probiotic. Testosterone recovers incredibly. How about the other myriad of consequences he was dealing with? The myriad of other symptoms. I guess later that year, you know, I'm friends with the guy. We go run a flat mile together, you know. He was able to return to athleticism, which is nice. And...

You know, he's a family man and he's happily married and all that stuff. Yeah. You know, he's just living a normal life. I look up to him a lot. He's really highly educated. I've been a venture capitalist for like 15 years. Yeah. You know, just like had struggled. So this changed his life. Yeah. Yeah. And I love the concept of you take my gut bacteria, culture and...

So if I did a course of antibiotics, let's say, and you had my bacteria banked, when I'm done with the course of antibiotics, you could give me back my own bacteria. Yeah, that's a really big deal, and I do that for a lot of people. And a lot of people, they'll have surgery and I'll do exactly that. They take the box and then they get their own bacteria back to them. I mean, that's fascinating to me because, you know, we're trying...

I mean, there are lots of good pre-pro and post-biotics that are out there. I mean, there are some that I really trust and I recommend to a lot of my community. But I always say that, you know, no matter what anyone tells you, there's... no better hormone bacteria than one the body produces on its own. So if you could take my bacteria, bank them.

And then if I did a course of antibiotics, repopulate my own gut with my own bacteria, there's no better targeted way to restore the gut microbiome than that. And there's even like weird papers that are published about like... the bacteria you get at birth and the birth canal through the breast milk seems to have like seniority over the other bacteria. So you can like take that bacteria and it'll organize everyone else. Like time to get in line. Wow.

The first performance bacteria actually was from a World War I veteran. And he was in the trenches and everyone in the trench like... died or got super sick from dysentery, except this one guy. He was healthy. He was fine. No problem. And so after the war, they've tried to figure out what happened. And so they isolated an E. coli strain. Fascinating that he even had the impetus to do that back then.

It was a scientist almost 100 years ago, more than 100 years ago. That's what I mean, yeah. And it's still sold today. You can still buy it. Wow. It's called Mutaflor. And you can buy it and it's still the same isolate of that same bacteria from that World War I veteran. Wow. And to this day, it helps constipation, helps diarrhea, it helps all sorts of digestive issues for travelers.

It's a great product. So where do you see this technology that you've developed going? I mean, eventually, do you see it as like literally like a menu?

you could come in and say, here are the challenges that I have. I have poor focus and concentration. I don't sleep well. I've got intermittent diarrhea and constipation. I mean, my gut's constantly bothering me. I get cramping. I get bloating. And you could dial up or dial down certain bacterial strains and repopulate the flora in a way that would address those symptoms. Yeah, I'm trying to... Well, it's...

I have a foundational model for someone that's not doing that well. And then I go up different levels depending on how customized you want to be. Tell me what exists today. So today, if I send this tool sample in, what are the possibilities that I could get back for that? And I'd love to see this. Yeah, it's on the web. Because I want to go through the menu myself. Yeah. Because I've got some.

things i'd like to get well it's um it's on the website and under the about us page there's like the studies we can what bacteria and what study are cited on there. And for the most part, I can isolate those from people. And there's anywhere from bone density to serotonin, dopamine. There's androgen bacteria and cyanobacteria for oxygen. Those are found in like Olympic swimmers, you know, uniquely. That's like how you can identify an Olympic swimmer is by...

the amount of cyanobacteria in the ground. Really? Yeah. You can identify a lot of different sports. So if you actually just saw nothing other than somebody's gut microbiome profile, you could say, this person's a professional athlete. Elite level. At the Olympic, you know. level. With other sports, professional basketball is a little more challenging, but I did saliva sampling with UFC fighters and the world's strongest man.

At the World's Strongest Man, I did four tests before, during, and after the competition. And I could tell which athletes had competed two weeks earlier based on the amount of bacteria that eats lactate inside of them. because there was still food for that bacteria. And that means that it hadn't cleared their body. Like the lactate was still being consumed by the, it's a bacteria called villanella.

And the lactate is obviously what's produced when you're in extreme competition. Yeah, there's some controversy on lactate and exercise and things like that. I'm not an expert on that. But at least every athlete that competed in Europe's Strongest Man two weeks earlier had elevated levels of that bacteria. Wow. And you could be like, that person is tired. Right. And then with the UFC fighters, we did saliva sampling again four times, but the most interesting difference was...

four hours before the fight and then within five minutes after the fight. As soon as they're done, press. Get to the locker room and take a saliva sample. Yeah, a bunch of blood and saliva all mixed up. Are they actually willing to sit down and do a blood draw right after a fight?

You know, when this guy named Forrest Griffin tells him to do it. Yeah, yeah. They do it. I love Forrest. Yeah. Shout out to Forrest Griffin. He's like, you're doing this right now. It's like the last thing on my mind. I've just gotten kicked and punched in the face and like...

Maybe I won, maybe I lost, but you're like, hey, can I get some blood in? That was a wild week, yeah. So you sample these, but I want to get back to the practical applications for my audience that's listening. Because all of us... have something that we're... Yeah. Well, I'm just talking about this stuff because that's how I get data to isolate new bacteria. Okay. I love the stressful event, measuring that. Yeah. And then that informs me...

What is happening to a body that goes through that? What bacteria, what food is available? What populations go up or down? So I want to go back to this concept of... targeting the gut microbiome again because I really am fascinated by this. Yeah. And we got a menu. And we got a menu, which I'm going to read because I'm also fascinated by this. But talk to me like about what you did for...

What would have been his interest in altering his gut microbiome? Because things seem to be going pretty well for him right now. I'm happy to talk about it. But it's been, he sent me a, you know, I got connected through mutual friends, sent me a sample in the mail, and I worked with his trainer mostly of understanding how he is. recovering mostly. And through work with other NBA players, it's quite a challenging season for travel and sleep is like a big issue for these guys.

And there are big differences in off-season versus in-season microbiome content. And so for him, it's specifically for recovery. You know, it's safe to say he wanted the best gut microbiome. Again, what's fascinating to me is you can go into someone who is a professional athlete because I think at the professional athlete level, they're all looking for ways to legally, you know, without enhancing.

using a performance enhancement device, but to modify their biology, whether it's through red light or hyperbarics or sleep or eating very clean foods. anything that they can do to close that last gap. This is just a tool, right? Yeah, yeah, to close that last gap. Right. So when you, and most of us are not looking for that elite level of performance, so I want to bring this back down to.

what this means to working folks. There's two types of these bacteria, the bacteria that can impact day of performance and then also day-to-day maintenance levels of your body. And what is it specifically doing? Is it reducing the lactate threshold? Is it improving, you know, oxidative phosphorylation? I mean, is it enhancing...

mitochondrial function, what is it that's having the impact on performance? Based on a number of papers, the villanella bacteria sits between the blood and gut barrier and it pulls the lactate out of the blood. and consumes it in the gut and excretes another metabolite. Which is pretty cool, right? And so overloading that over time I think would help recovery.

No, it would help recovery here, actually. Because, you know, performance degrades as you get into that lactate threshold. You know, the longer you can maintain... aerobic respiration, right? We know that there's aerobic and anaerobic respiration. So, you know, as you get anaerobic, you know, your muscles start to burn, you know, hydrogen ions build up. There's all kinds of things that are going on. that are...

that are actually causing a degradation in performance. So highly conditioned athletes, higher VO2 max, better circulation, shuttling oxygen and carbon dioxide back and forth from the lung to the tissue is what really makes...

the difference between someone who can perform well athletically and someone who can't. But what's interesting and fascinating to me is I've never inserted the gut microbiome into that. To think how could the gut microbiome... push you further either extend how long you can stay in aerobic respiration um or help you recover from anaerobic respiration faster by consuming these byproducts of those processes yeah you know lactate pyruvate

these metabolic byproducts that are degrading performance. So in my biological mind, if you have these byproducts that are degrading performance and there are bacteria that- consume those byproducts, you have an increase in performance. You just described my whole business. Did I really? That's awesome. I get 15% of everything from here.

forward um this menu is pretty fascinating um so these are these are strains that are clinically proven to enhance certain areas of performance um i won't go through a lot of these names but bacteria one let's just call it found in the gut of elite athletes and acts as an energy source

for the body, increasing your ability to gain muscle mass, improve exercise performance, and exert anti-fatigue effects. There is another strain that increases your ability to gain muscle mass more effectively and improve digestion. a separate one that increases your ability to gain muscle mass, improve exercise performance. I just read that one. Enhance your gut barrier.

and improve digestive system and gut function the gut barrier is another massive we know that um leaky gut this sort of single cell layer that lines the inside of our our gut and keeps our outside environment separate from our inside environment. I mean, a lot of people don't realize that's only a single cell layer. And the gut microbiome influencing that cell layer to prevent leaky gut, which has its whole set of...

downstream consequences, inflammation, calling the immune system, all kinds of things. Boosting oral health, relieving irritable bowel syndrome, and improving cholesterol when combined with other... And then this one is an all-around strain that promotes gut and immune health, reduces cholesterol, relieves irritable bowel syndrome, reduces allergy symptoms.

prevents and treats vaginal infections. I mean, that's, I don't have a vagina, but all the other ones I want to do. Relieves symptoms of digestive disorder and promote overall gut health. Boost oral health, relieve irritable bowel syndrome. improve cholesterol, treat constipation, reduce inflammation, improve the immune system, improving... Yeah, and there's more and more papers published every day.

More and more published every day. This is incredible. So jumping out of the elite athlete, and I love how you're called Kraft Microbiome.

because you're sort of crafting the microbiome. So it's a great, great marketing tool there. But the average person listening to this podcast, if they were to close their eyes and say, Here's my wish list. And it started with things like gut dysbiosis because the vast majority of people do have something that they would love to fix about their gut. Maybe it's gas, maybe it's bloating, diarrhea, constipation.

irritability, cramping, bloating, inflammation. Where did they start? What would a stool sample arriving to your lab look like? before it turned into a probiotic for them? So I take about as much stool or saliva that covers a penny. Each of those bacteria has a different growth condition.

So meaning some bacteria like to grow with oxygen, some like without oxygen, some like because these things are alive, they need to eat. So I need to put different ingredients to, you know, kind of farm these bacteria. And so once I dilute the bacteria and make these growth plates, colonies will grow on the growth plates. Little tiny single cells are, you know, not, you know, but...

Enough of that is a single isolate of bacteria. I take that bacteria, I do genomic sequencing of it to identify the strain, the substrain, and then any interesting... genomic sequences within it. Once I have that ID verified, I put it in a media jar or a bioreactor with the same growth conditions that how I found it originally. And then it grows...

large quantities. I freeze dry the bacteria. It's like a goo at that point. So it turns into freeze dried bacteria. This is their bacteria. It came from them. Yeah, it came from them. That's great. And then I save some of it and then I put the rest in these capsules and then ship it to you. Okay, but you have it banked. Yeah, I do. So you can continue to grow that bacteria. Because, you know, I have a number of professional athletes and folks that I...

I work with. Several of them, just to give you one example, I have a very well-known athlete that had to have some dental work done. Because of the extensive dental work, they put him on a very powerful course of antibiotics. He actually did develop a jaw infection, which required another course of antibiotics. And there was noticeable degradation in performance. Yeah.

after this massive event. Pretty amazing, right? Yeah. Yeah. And we struggled for a while. We fixed it now, but we struggled for a while to repopulate his gut. I mean, I... tried all kinds of things, 38 Terra, BioComplete 3. My standard mechanisms for re-inoculating the gut, it took much longer than we originally anticipated. But if you had an-

It doesn't even need to be an athlete. I want to actually just stop talking about elite athletes because most people are not looking to close that last two-tenths of a mile in performance. But, you know, just average mom and dad, you know, goes and gets them...

dental worked on or for whatever reason, goes on a massive course of antibiotics, wipes out their gut bacteria. Where would you start with someone like that? I would try to find something called a Bifidobacterium infantis, which... By most indications, it's the first bacteria that inhabits your gut. And it's one I was talking about earlier that seems to have seniority over the other bacteria to tell them what to do to organize. And that seems to settle down a lot of people's guts.

Wow. You know, just kind of just settle things, you know, get them, you know, like just stable. And then from there, after a few months, try to like build it up from there. If you want protein to build lean muscle, but without the caloric impact or need to cut. you need perfect amino. It's pure essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in a precise form and ratio that allows for near 100% utilization in building lean muscle and no caloric impact. So we build

protein six times as much as whey, but without the excess body fat we normally get during bulking. This is the new era of protein supplementation, and it's real. If you want to build lean muscle without having to cut, you need Perfect Amino. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. So when you look at people that have severe gut dysbiosis, there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that have been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome.

Ulcerative colitis, diverticulitis, Crohn's disease. Right. A lot of inflammation. Yeah, they're all inflammation. Itis is inflammation. And in those, if they're listening to this podcast right now... What benefit could they derive from working with Kraft Microbiome to actually go in and re-architect the flora in their gut? The goal for me always is just to start small.

And just start with, does this help you or not? Because you should be able to feel better within a few days. Really, just within a few days? Usually, that's usually the feedback I get. you know, things are quiet. I'm sleeping better. I'm feeling better. You know, I'm, um, and so, you know, I like to, I'm very cautious. And so I like people to say they're feeling better and then.

we can start isolating new and different types of bacteria for their own goals. I like the consumer to kind of drive the... Oh, the consumer does too. I mean, there's nothing, you know... I don't want to tell people, you need this, you need that. I'm like, no, hey, what's important to you? And what you're doing in the lab is taking their goal...

Yeah. And sort of selecting the bacteria. That's the thing that's so fascinating to me is that we're now, because we know that, for example, we, you know, we... our gut bacteria will methylate tryptophan, an amino acid, into the neurotransmitter serotonin, or phenylalanine and tyrosine into the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Dopamine is the main driver of behavior. Serotonin is one of the main drivers of mood. So you could see that if these conversions are off, you have issues with mood and behavior. Now, I've always looked at genetic methylation, you know, the deficiencies.

And that's the bleeding edge of the microbiome right now. Finding out which bacteria help turn on or turn off specific genes in your human DNA. So if I could add targeted supplementation... for the deficiencies that these people have to targeted probiotics, that to me would be the holy grail. There's research published now about that exact thing. But you're already doing it. That's the fascinating thing. You've had success in these areas. And so I, you know...

Take this test. I tell you what my goals are. You get my bacteria. And now you're trying to select these certain strains to improve my cognitive function or what have you. Let's actually talk about... some of those conditions, diverticulitis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, all of these conditions mainly all have the common theme of inflammation in the gut. Where do you start with someone that has...

one of those conditions. You sequence the microbiome and then you're targeting the bacteria that will help them reduce inflammation. Yeah, just the most benign and most, you know... quieting bacteria I can. And that's usually a bifidobacterium, like one of the animalis or infantis or whatever it is. Just the most benign bacteria I can from them. And the sole focus would just be reducing inflammation.

Okay. That's the sole, that would all be my total focus. I wouldn't try to, you know, get like... turn you into a D1 athlete right off the bat. No, that's not their goal. I mean, they want to be out of pain. They don't want their day to be centered around their gut. And it's one of those quiet things that just...

you know, it's in the back of their mind all the time. You know, when your gut is sort of determining your choices, you're not determining your own choices. And I have hundreds of clients like this. You know, their day is centered around... the condition that they're dealing with, right? You know, like they're literally when they get to a public event, they're thinking, okay, where's the restroom? I need to be able to access this.

I call and talk to all my clients right now. I'm sure that will change. I ask certain questions like people that tell me they have allergies, I know I can't give them lactobacillus. I know that causes problems for whatever reason.

You know, I also ask, can you eat garlic and onions? And like, no, I can't eat garlic or onions. So that will like change a whole bunch of different bacteria that I get them. And I'm not sure why this is the case. Yeah. But I know if I... Because we know that correlation. Yeah, it's like, no, you know...

Okay, now I go. And usually the bifidobacteriums are the best choice just because of all the numerous symptoms that they've talked about. Dude, I'm super excited about this. I'm going to take like 10 of my VIP clients. We're VIP. And we're going to select this group and we're going to take their primary concern, challenge, you know, symptom, ailment, whatever you want to call it.

And we're going to do a little sub-study of our own. I would love it. Because trust me, I would have no shortage of volunteers. In fact, if you want to be, send a message to my team at info at theultimatehuman.com. Let's go. Because I really like to do these. real world trials, if you will, and see if we can address their primary challenge and achieve their primary goal. Because I know that... The clients I have, for example, that have eczema and psoriasis. A lot of what we do is focused on...

They've got microbiome, but we're not as selective. And there's a little bit of guesswork there because you're throwing the strains in there, not knowing what they have an overgrowth of, what they have an undergrowth of. and which populations they really need to target, whereas you can actually target those specific populations. That's what I find fascinating. And eventually we get there.

But we're getting there, you know, it's like spaghetti against a wall, you know, to see what sticks. You're getting there by putting enough in that eventually the gut returns to... It's homeostatic. There's a few customers who are like, I don't care what it is, just give it to me. I'm one of those. Are you sure? Most of my VIP community is like that too. Does this work or not?

I don't know. Well, I mean, there's very, you know, this is the low-risk proposition. Right, it's your own bacteria. It came from you. Exactly. That's what I love. You know, I have a... saying I say all the time, more of what God gave us, less of what man makes us. So if we can actually go into our God-given strains of our own bacteria to solve the challenges. And by the way, this isn't voodoo science. I mean, they have mapped.

very specific bacteria, eczema and psoriasis, for example, there is a very strong correlation between deficiencies and certain strains. You're aware of that, right? Yeah. And which strains are those? I can't tell you off the top of my head, but I know the papers exist. Yeah, and so could we, and this is particularly troublesome when I get really, really young children that are suffering from this, because there's nothing worse than being a mother or father.

and your child is suffering from this skin condition, and the only option you have are steroids, the corticosteroids and anti-inflammatories, and you're stuck in this really... It's like the rock and the hard place decision because you want to help your child. The only thing that gives them some relief is something that you know is borrowing from their future. And you know there are going to be further consequences. You just want to help them right now.

You know, it's why we stick an iPad in front of our kid to calm them down because we're in a public place. And I really want to offer some hope to them that this may be... The answer may lie in sequencing the gut microbiome and targeted probiotics to give them a lifetime of relief, permanent remission. Yeah, the two important technologies here are the storage of the...

complete biome so as the technology improves we can always go back to the original sample and isolate more and more and more from that original sample. So as our skill increases that original sample becomes more and more valuable. Now tell me that you're using AI. I've done it for some evaluations of large groups of people that I'm testing to see patterns that I can't see. Yes, exactly.

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clean energy, sharper focus, and better recovery. You can try it risk-free with the Ultimate15 code at checkout for 15% off. Just put in Ultimate15 at checkout, you'll receive 15% off, and your sales will thank you. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. So let's touch on that one for a moment. So eczema psoriasis. We know that there are deficient bacterial strains. If you were to get a stool sample from one of these children...

what would be the next step? So my process would be to do deep into the research to try to find some sort of metabolite or groups of metabolites that may be overproduced in the gut. underproduced, and it'd be my intention to either find bacteria that... It's a lot harder to get rid of the bad bacteria, but what we can do is outcompete the bad bacteria.

And so that would be my goal is to find the metabolites that may be causing the eczema or the psoriasis and either have them consumed or overproduce. the beneficial metabolism. Yeah, because we know that it's not a complete guessing game. I mean, there's quality data on the missing strains. And, you know, I think what you just touched on, I want to make sure it doesn't get missed, is that...

You say I'll compete because we know in a healthy gut microbiome, there are always pathogenic flora. We have healthy parasites. Every single person has shigella and like salmonella. Exactly. All sorts of crazy stuff. We all have... SIBO going on just not at a level that's symptomatic, right? So we all have- There's bacteria on your skin everywhere inside of you. Exactly, but homeostasis is where you have a proliferation of the healthy bacteria.

And it's not just that they're there to do their role, it's there to also suppress the negative effects from some of these other bacteria. And we know that things like highly processed foods, refined sugars... Grains, genetically modified foods, foods that have pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, things like that actually do wipe out and sometimes benefit.

And so the idea that we could actually repopulate the gut with the beneficial bacteria and let that do the policing, right? Let the body's normal homeostatic biophysiological process keep these... these strains in check. Variety is good. And there's like a collapse in our Western stomachs about the variety of bacteria that we have. It's just continually going down and down and down every year. The more...

highly processed foods we eat, the more we live in a sterile environment, the more like all these things are just killing our bacteria. Yes, I totally agree. And so your next step would be, again, back to the eczema and psoriasis, we would try to... find the deficient bacteria, repopulate those, and specifically isolate the strains that we know are pro-inflammatory.

use beneficial bacteria to restore those. Yeah, to try to out-compete those pro-inflammatory bacteria. Geography is starting to be an important issue too, like where in the digestive tract they live. and also try to produce as many anti-inflammatory metabolites as possible. Can you give me some stories without names or identifying people, non-athletic stories where you actually had someone with...

a condition related to the gut, it could be irritable bowel syndrome, diverticulitis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, one of these conditions in the gut and you saw miraculous... Yeah, there was this... actress that's had two or three fecal transplants in her life. Advisable or not, I don't want to say. I can't say. But to this day... or maybe not to this day, but she'd been dealing with these issues. And I took the sample, I evaluated it, I produced a report, and then it turned out...

I just need to continually reduce the inflammation in her body. And so I just made extra powerful inflammation-reducing bacteria. So you took her bacteria, cultured and grew it, and you expanded the flora. that actually helps to reduce inflammation. And what was the consequence, the outcome for her? She had been losing her hair, she had been losing weight, and I know these actresses want to be skinny, but it was getting a little crazy. And because of the reduce...

inflammation, you know, her hair started to grow back. She was, you know, got some movie roles, you know, things like that. Wow. Right. She just felt better. Ah, right. Which was the number one issue. Okay. For. How about anything in the realm of one of these gut dysbiosis conditions like an ulcerative colitis or diverticulitis or Crohn's? Have you had experience in... Manipulating the gut bacteria with positive outcomes there? It's in a side life. I did all the- Side life.

In his side life. Sounds so shady. I did all the training to become a Pilates instructor. Did you really? I did. Dude, I've done two days of Pilates, and I couldn't move when I got up this morning. And all I did was the core. Stretch thing. It was great. It was great. So when I was done rowing, my body was a little broken. Yeah.

And so Pilates helped me put back together. So I did all the training. I didn't do all the teaching, so I'm not certified. But the teachers warned you, like, hey, if a client comes in and it becomes your job to fix them. you're never going to make that customer happy. And so I've taken that approach too with the company. I can try to help, but I'm not sure I can fix everything.

You know, like, is this something, how long have you been working on this? You know, what's your doctor saying? You know, how can I be supplemental to what you're doing? But have you had a supplemental role in helping people?

reduce their symptoms or put these things into remission do you have cases where you can say hey this person had xyz condition post you know targeted Microbiome, okay. That's very exciting. I don't want to pay you. You're like not giving yourself enough credit here. I'm trying to give you some credit. Because, you know, I really believe that this is...

a massive frontier for modern medicine because there's so little focus. There's a lot of focus on the microbiome, but there's so little focus on the individuality. of people's microbiome and actually taking their microbiome to culture and expand it to address the conditions that they have. I mean, obviously on that list of... You know, that wish list, whatever you want to call it. You know, a lot of those things on there, I mean, check the box and probably 70% of my audience has...

one of those that they would love to have addressed. And the idea that you're addressing it by using their own bacterial strains to me is... Really fascinating. Yeah, it's a wild world. It's wild. So you have had success. But I'm also very cautious not to... go against the FDA. I'm not intended to treat, cure, prevent any disease. And I don't want you to make a medical claim, but the fact that you have been and I'm...

I try to be cautious about that too, but people need information. And it's sad how frightened we are sometimes to speak about- successes that we've had. Maybe we don't want to use the term cure or treat or prevent. Like for example, someone has high glucose, they wake up, their glucose is at 200 or something outrageous. And to solve that problem...

It was first doing oral sequencing to finding out and then which bacteria are actually living in there and then finding papers showing that you're 70% likely to be pre-diabetic or... diabetic from a peer-reviewed paper if you're missing these bacteria. Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Right, and then so the process was like, okay, how do I actually develop a product for this problem? And so it's like isolate the bacteria they're missing first from...

me to try it if it helps them. And then eventually maybe if I can keep trying to, because sometimes bacteria don't want to grow, no matter if it shows up in the sequencing, sometimes it doesn't want to grow. But then making like a mouthwash, like, hey, let's try... signaling to the brain about 10 minutes before you eat your meal.

swish this bacteria around in your mouth and spit it out. That didn't work. But then finding a bacteria that actually consumes glucose and loading the person up, like take this 90 minutes before a meal, it eats glucose and let's... I was wearing these glucose mantis for a while and I would go to Wendy's every day and eat the same meal.

Oh, dude, you're killing me. It was horrible. It was horrible. But I'd go to Wendy's every day, eat the same meal. I'd take the bacteria and I'd trial it. Yeah. Right until my glucose wasn't spiking crazy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, I tracked it. I guess for a few weeks where the glucose pre-supplement would spike to like 120, 140, something like that. And then post taking the bacteria gets up to like 115, 120. I'm like, oh, now I've handed off to the client.

and now his glucose doesn't spike. Yeah, see, this is just fascinating. See, now we're getting somewhere, okay? This is what I was after, all right? And I understand we got to dance around the FDA, but we're going to get some specific answers here. Because I think... if you're able to eventually get enough data to crack this code, the gut microbiome is so foundational, it's 70% in my opinion. I mean, there's a reason why.

70% of your immune system is right outside of your gut. Because that's where all the action is. There is also, in my opinion, an enormous body of data that says that the first domino to fall... in the sequence of multiple chronic diseases is gut dysbiosis. So what happens is we have severe gut disruption, whether it was antibiotics or whether it was an infection or whether it was just...

poor food over a prolonged period of time, wiping out our gut microbiome. And that was the first domino to fall. And now 50 dominoes later, they've got their first autoimmune disease. 50 dominoes after that, they've got their second autoimmune disease. We know that early onset Alzheimer's, dementia,

Early onset cognitive decline. That's everybody's greatest fear. We know now that that doesn't start when you're 75 years old. It starts when you're 35 or 40 or 45 years old. And so the possibility to intervene. from a preventive standpoint the possibility to um address i won't say treat or cure but to address

ailments that you're suffering from now that we know have strong evidence or linked back to the gut microbiome. This is the whole reason why I brought you on this podcast because I don't have... the wherewithal, the knowledge myself to know specifically how we do it. But I do have a keen appreciation that if we figure that out, that is...

potentially the panacea. In fact, you know, this woman that just passed away at 118 years old. Oh, you saw the paper. Yeah, I saw the paper. Can you talk about that for a second? Yeah. Yeah, because that's validating about everything that you've talked about on this podcast. Yeah, right. What was unique? about her? I believe she had a high percentage of bifidobacterium, which is a genus inside of her, a genus of bacteria. And she had it relative to someone, you know, at a...

midlife age or something like that. They said a 35-year-old. Isn't that wild? At 118. So you can't just overlook that. And I believe, too, that when... when we look at Blue Zone studies, a lot of the data was regional, meaning if you took a centenarian from Sardinia that was eating that, you know, genre of foods and what have you. But if you had 50 years earlier, put that person in a different area of the world, they would have had a different outcome. Yeah. Because

their gut microbiome had adapted to that geographic location and those types of foods. And it was very adept at breaking them down, you know. creating energy from those. And, you know, we're such a nomad world. I mean, I did 14 cities in 18 days, right? And I'm very intentional about what I eat, but I couldn't control it to that extent. No, no.

Your circadian rhythms and all that stuff is gut microbiome driven. But if we could keep the consistency in the gut microbiome, our ability to adapt to different environments and actually... metabolizing different types of food. I think that to me is one of the secrets to longevity. But you're right, she had-

very specific strains that were in excess, especially for her age. And these were taken, the studies were done about a year before she died or something like that. So near the end of life, right? Yeah, so near the end of life and still... Still crushing it. Yeah, still crushing it, largely because of her gut microbiome. Let's go to a big fear that grips a lot of people, which is Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia.

neuroinflammatory conditions that cause different forms of cognitive decline, right? They interrupt the communication of our, you know... in our brain so that we appear to be losing our memory or we get disoriented or we get confused i mean that's everybody's biggest fear yeah and most of us have either had a friend or a family member and we've seen this

And what could somebody do now to mitigate the risk of, because you did talk earlier about Parkinson's. Yeah, for a lot of these neurodegenerative issues.

there are changes in the gut that happen years before the symptoms develop. And one of the easiest things you can do is get your microbiome sequenced over time because it's a dynamic system like you talked about. And you can monitor those changes and how they can determine if you're...

potentially going to develop Parkinson's or not, are ratios of separate types of two different or three or four different types of bacteria. How is this ratio of this bacteria to that bacteria? And how is that ratio changing over time? how does that increase your risk factor for these type of... So at a minimum, if I knew that I either had a genetic predisposition, which there are to some of these conditions, they're not a genetic inheritance of the disease, but they're a genetic...

predisposition to the disease. So if I knew I was in that risk category or I had cognitive decline, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's that ran in my family. what would you be doing right now? If you're listening to this podcast and that's one of your concerns, what would you be doing right now? You send the bacteria into your lab and start culturing the bacteria that combat.

those neuroinflammatory conditions. And we know what they are. And so at a minimum, this would be a good risk mitigation tool. Yeah, at least have an understanding of what's going on over time. A single test is going to be okay, but it's... It's the overtime testing that will determine a lot of risk factors. And then saving your original young bacteria is really important. So as these ratios of your bacteria change and you get older, you can always go back to that young bacteria.

that we have in storage. So if you're in your 30s, 40s, or 50s, you either have the genetic predisposition to one of these conditions or it runs in your family, which is one of the things I don't like to... I don't like a lot of these familial characteristics in disease because it makes people feel like... There's nothing I can do, right? When Parkinson's runs in my family, I'm just going to get Parkinson's. Not true. You know, Alzheimer's runs in my family.

I'm just predestined to get part of Alzheimer's. That's why I like my product as a catalyst for change. Yeah. Like a user driven, like people are aware of these things. Yeah. Right. And it's like, oh no, like with this product, I can. start the change that can happen. So right now I can send my stool and saliva sample in and I can, you know, look at my...

and I can at least begin to re-inoculate bacteria that are known to be the antithesis of those conditions. Correct, that can happen today. That's amazing. So in a perfect world, where do you see Kraft microbiome going? Where's Kraft microbiome going to be in five years based on what you're doing now?

Well, next year, the dream. Say it, just say it. The dream is the application, like an app on your phone that you plug in. that says, I have a meeting today, I want to run a mile, and I have dinner tonight. And then you have a box next to it and the app spits out, oh, take probiotic number one, three, and six. And you have the box of like all your different bacteria, like take this one at this time, take that at that time, you know, to like show the...

I love that. Yeah, so that's next year. Yeah. We do that now with, you know, certain, you know, just certain supplementation. We take focus pills and nootropics and, you know, nicotine and caffeine. So we do try to manipulate, you know, ourselves for certain actions. But the fact that we could do it with, you know... Bacteria that produce neurotransmitters. At one point, a customer wanted to get super... He's like, I need something for golf.

And so I'm like, I don't know. There's somebody with no problems in their life, right? By the time that their biggest concern is their golf game. A lot of people love golf. A lot of people love golf. I know, but I want to be that dude. A lot of things would go on my list. Before I got to my golf swing. So I'm like, I grew up, I played a little golf. I don't play that much now. I'm like, oh, so you need to be calm.

You need to be relaxed. You need to do X, Y, and Z. So I made these bacteria for dopamine, for serotonin, that produce this stuff. I give it to the guy. His golf game gets a little better, but what really changes him is it helps him sleep at night. Right?

And so sometimes you make this concoction, like you take this, but it doesn't do what you want, but then it has a benefit for something else. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, that's why the gut microbiome is so fascinating. We don't realize that, you know... Just saying that, oh, that produces neurotransmitters. Yeah, but neurotransmitters are the foundation of mood. Yeah. They're the foundation of behavior. Yeah.

They're the foundation of our emotional state. Yeah. And aberrations in those things get us diagnosed with mood disorders and mental illnesses when the truth is these are deficiencies. that are expressing themselves as these conditions. And the next thing you know, you're on an SSRI or- Which causes all sorts of microbiome problems.

the fact that we could get out of the chemical synthetic pharmaceutical realm and get into the bacterial realm, which is, you know, instead of saying, I, you know, have... a mood disorder, and I hate these words, but a mood disorder because I have a deficiency in the neurotransmitter serotonin. So I'm just going to take a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Instead of doing that to say, I'm going to take the bacterial strain that gives me the...

proper level of serotonin so I can just have normal mood without intervention. Like that to me is what's so fascinating about this. I mean like I'm going to follow your work. First of all, I'm doing the test and I'll... I'll let everybody know how it goes. But I would love to select eight or 10 of my VIP clients or from my VIP community and see what challenges they are currently facing.

that we know map to the gut microbiome. What are the risks that they want to mitigate in the future? Maybe they have Alzheimer's or dementia or cognitive client in their family. Maybe they have an autistic loved one. Which is also being correlated to inflammation in the gut. Yeah, there are two specific bacteria in there too, correlated to inflammation in the gut. Interestingly, the FDA just approved folinic acid.

Really? I didn't know that. Yeah, they just approved folinic acid, prescription strength folinic acid, which is essentially the methylated form of folic acid or folate as one of the frontline... prescriptions that a physician could write for neurodevelopmental disorders. I know you're huge into that. I'm huge into that. And I was so excited to see that happen. It was like a eureka moment for me because finally...

Something that is not chemically or synthetically altering our natural biology to fix a symptom. You have anything to do with that? And finally, something that is not altering our physiology to get the result that we want, it's going back to our physiology.

and saying, could this deficiency cause this symptom? And instead of going after the symptom, let's go after the deficiency. And that's why I think that, you know, whatever you want to call it, my work, my passion. which is restoring healthy physiology to get the outcomes that we want. You know, autism, I don't need to tell you about autism rates in the United States.

statistics are scary you know one in 5 000 to one in 32 uh children and that is expected to double double again in the next in the next five years i mean the rate the parabolic rate at which it's increasing and And yet we can't say this causes this. Vaccines cause autism. Acetaminophen during pregnancy causes autism. We haven't-

We haven't reached that. We know that there is correlations. The reason why I believe that these are correlated is because of their impact on the microbiome. I don't have the specific peer-reviewed randomized clinical trial to prove it. Maybe you do. That would vindicate me. Well, it reminds me of a paper about supercentarians and how the microbiome ages over time. And they tracked people...

I forget how long, but they had age groups. It was something like 30,000 people they took samples from. All different ages from 20 to 80. And they identified specific bacteria that decrease as you age.

And so that's part of the storage. That's one of the bacteria I isolate is these young bacteria. But what also was found in the paper was the amount of oxygen tolerance in the gut goes down as you age. And what that means is the... the bacteria that, you know, they're not oxygen tolerant, but they're fed by the... they increase relative to the number of pharmaceuticals you're on. Meaning you are degrading the capacity for normopathic bacterial function the more you...

Absolutely knew that in the mortality space. The more pharmaceuticals you were on, the easier it was to predict your life expectancy. Yeah, and it's now correlated or related, directly related to... your microbiome and how much inflammation, how much oxygen tolerant you are inside the gut. Yeah, I think that's just so fascinating to me. And now that we are beginning to map... causal relationships between certain bacterial deficiencies and well-known disease processes, not the least of which...

you know, acromantia and cancer, for example, should wake everybody up to the absolute importance and the necessity for healthy microbiome. And that our modern day lifestyle... is the polar opposite of what we need to have a healthy gut microbiome and you know i always talk about this theory i talked about earlier in the podcast of the one domino that falls that causes all the other dominoes to fall yeah and

very often the first domino to fall is dysbiosis. In fact, there are a lot of, you know, when pathogens invade us, bacteria, parasites, viruses, even heavy metals. and mold and mycotoxin, the vast majority of what they are impacting is the microbiome. And then the microbiome deficiency is giving us the symptoms. Totally, yeah. Okay.

Right. Like oftentimes for myself, like, you know, before you get sick or have a cold or something, you'll have some diarrhea or something beforehand, like a few days beforehand. And that was found during COVID too. They could track Google searches. on diarrhea before the COVID would show up in the sewage samples that they were testing. Yeah, so like a few days before, like searches for diarrhea or gut dysbiosis or whatever would spike a few days before actually the...

the virus would show up in the sewage or before cases were gone. Yeah, you know, interestingly, WHOOP noticed certain trends in their WHOOP data, which I found really fascinating, you know, like respiratory rates. starting to increase substantially in the days before they became symptomatic. So they were infected, but while the viral load was rising...

before the patient even knew that they had it, they noticed this massive correlation between respiratory rates and the onset of COVID to the point where it actually became predictive. But again... If you're listening to this podcast, if someone wants to take the next step, I feel like everyone could benefit from...

sending a stool or saliva sample into your lab. First of all, could you handle that kind of? I can handle that volume now. You can now, okay. Recently, yes, I can handle the volume. Okay, so sending in a stool and a saliva sample, having their... microbiome sequenced and at least getting on a basic probiotic.

coming from their own flora. Yeah, starting with one or two. Starting with one or two. Yeah. Addressing the deficiencies in bacteria that we know have major impacts on mood, major impacts on emotion, major impacts on inflammation. Yeah. Don't buy yourself a consequence down the road. And I like that idea better than, I mean, I know some phenomenal probiotic manufacturing companies. But again, this is the one size fits all, but it's all we have right now.

Yeah. And I utilize them a lot. And there are some phenomenal products out there. Like we were talking about before, like the World War I. Yeah, yeah. There's tons of great companies out there. Well, I want some of his. If you've got it lying around the lab, I want some of his back there. Okay, good. Yeah, I got it in, guys. And then I'll start reselling it.

You should, yeah. We can sell Gary Brekka's own. But no, I think for the vast- From Gary for the world. I like it. Let's trademark that today. So- I think that you send in a stool and saliva sample, you get this profile, you culture those bacteria and you begin to-

re-inoculate what is the worst thing that can happen your inflammation goes down your mood improves you see that your cognitive function begins to improve that brain fog starts to lift yeah and potentially you are mitigating the downstream risk of neurocognitive decline, which is what none of us want. I mean, this woman that passed away at 118 years old, I saw some of the interviews with her and-

Fascinating to me how cognizant she was at 116 and 117 years old. I mean, very, very, very good grasp of where she was, what was going on in the world, her environment, you know. She wasn't living in the past. She wasn't aloof. She wasn't despondent. And, you know, if the very things that create thought, neurotransmitters, are made in the gut.

and that those are made in a factory that is run by bacteria. Yeah. There's a linear correlation between these. Yeah. So would you recommend that everyone at least start their stool? Yeah, just store it and get the test done. And begin to take your own probiotics. That's fascinating. Take your own. One is...

What is one question I haven't asked you that you think everyone needs to know about the gut microbiome and or could be solved by what you're doing in your lab today? One question you haven't asked. I guess where I think it's all going. Yeah. Where is it all going? Where is it all going? You and I talked a little bit about this the other day, but like the Virome. Did we talked about this? Yeah. And how there's a really crazy paper and...

Bacteria have viruses just like humans have viruses, but these viruses only attack the bacteria. Hold on, bacteria have viruses, what do you mean? Like... Bacteria carry viruses. No, no, like there's a virus that will only go after lactobacillus. Oh, right, right. Yeah, and that's called like a phage. And so this crazy study... bacteria infected by a phage makes mice and makes flies smarter. Increases memory, increases, right?

No one knows why this is the case, but in the flies they have a longer memory and in the mice they can solve the maze quicker. Early stuff. But that's really interesting to me. Why is that happening? I know it sounds a little scary, but those viruses have no effect on us. They're only dangerous to the lactobacillus. But then the lactobacillus has an effect on us.

Yeah. You know, and so again, we're getting back to that first domino that fell. Yeah. And soon it will be possible to model. I'm getting too technical. No, go ahead. Get technical for a second. Soon it'll be possible to model. Through AI. Yeah. Yeah. Through all the metabolites produced. by one bacteria eaten by another, downstream effects, like be able to create a digital twin of all the bacteria and be able to model the food you eat and all the metabolites.

this many grams of B vitamins or whatever are produced, which I think will be really cool. I think that'll be really cool too. Well, Andrews, this is amazing. I have a group of...

folks the community that i'm building called the vip community so when the podcast is over we're going to go into this uh vip community because they're the community that i let know ahead of time who's coming on the podcast okay and so they've looked into your background they have a Series of questions for you. If you're interested in becoming a VIP, just go over to TheUltimateHuman.com forward slash VIP. Sign up to be one of my VIPs. You can cancel at any time.

I have a 10-month course on becoming the ultimate human in there. I do lots of live Q&As. I do private podcasts. I've written... guides on mold detoxification, heavy metal detoxification, whole food diet, travel tips, sleep, morning routines, even exercise. And there's just a... amazing community of like-minded human beings in there. So head over to theultimatehuman.com forward slash VIP and just sign up to be one of my VIPs and I'll see you in there.

I end all my podcasts by asking all my guests the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question. Okay. And that is, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I'm still very athlete driven. I still want to compete at an elite level and as many different sports as I can. How old are you now?

38. Oh, you're not out. I'm an old man. Hey, dude. I mean, Tom Brady, you know, Cristiano Ronaldo. I mean, there's a lot. A week ago, I raced at the Heather Charles, the world's largest rowing regatta. Oh, you did? Yeah. Oh, right on. Did pretty well. We got eighth in our category. Okay. And is it age? I was in the alumni event. Okay. So former college and national team athletes, yeah. But that's awesome.

You know, I want to be able to do that every year and I want to win that thing. Yeah. Every year. Yeah. You know, like one of my favorite things is, it sounds crazy, but just being able to like work out with my family and my sons. And my oldest son was over here in Dubai with me. And the rest of my family. He was very nice. Yeah, Cole's great. But not just being in the same industry together.

building businesses together but be but to have a shared part of your lifestyle because he you know he's uh very athletic so is my my other son so are both of my daughters and But to be able to just, you know, he's 23 years old, and to be able to just go and just rock a gym session with him, do a hits cardio workout. Like it's, I sat down last night and I was telling my friend Umar Kamani, I was like.

this is the best that life gets. We had a great day with business meetings, and then my son and I and a bunch of... of our buddies we just went to the gym we had a trainer run us through this uh crazy crossfit style you know wad workout and then at the end we did these

30-second interval sprints. And just to be able to do that with him, I'm like, this is as good as life gets. And I want that for everybody because when you have your health and you're pain-free and you're mobile... For as long as possible. For as long as your relationships deepen. It really is so true. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm excited to talk to you in the VIP group. And for the rest of you guys, until next time, that's just science.