Hello and welcome to another UK column interview. Well, we are what we eat and my name is Debbie Evans. And for those of you that don't know me, I'm a trained nurse and I'm joined today by our great friend, Cheryl Granger, who many of you will know, who's an independent pharmaceutical
training consultant. And I'm also joined by Doctor Sabine Hassan. And before I introduce Doctor Hassan, I just want to make a few points because Doctor Hassan is a gastroenterologist and she's based in the USA, so she's got up very early to speak to us. So thank you so much. And thank you also to our producer, Stephanie Sinclair for facilitating this interview as well. But before I start, I want to say that the guts, it's a huge subject.
So we'd already decided that we, we've really got such a big topic to discuss. This is going to be the first interview of two. And we hear much research at the moment, don't we, of the brain and the heart and other systems in the body. But how many of us really know that we've got 2 brains? Yes, really 2 brains. We've got an abdominal brain as well, and it's known as the enteric nervous system. And many of you might think, yeah, actually, you know what? That gut feeling, I get that gut
feeling. I go with my gut feeling. You might be worried sick, you might have butterflies in your tummy, or you might go with your gut. So your gut is connected to your brain in your head. And it's incredibly important in the bigger scheme of things because when we talk about the immune system, where is the immune system, What is it? Well, I think we're going to find out that a lot of it is in the guts.
We've got 10s of millions of microbes in our guts that Doctor Hassan is going to talk to us about because she has a wealth of experience in many areas that some of us might not quite trust as much as we did perhaps in the old days. Genomic sequencing, for example, laboratories, clinical trials. Doctor Hassan is expert in all of this. And yet she has literally sacrificed everything, literally everything in order to speak the truth.
And we're just delighted to be able to welcome to welcome you both. So first of all, Cheryl, welcome again. Thank you so much for agreeing to join us. Thanks, Debbie, and hello Sabine. It's lovely of you to join us today and we're looking forward immensely to what you have to tell us. We absolutely are. And Sabine, let me bring you on screen and say thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us. If you could just give us a little introduction as to who you are and why we're here
today. I'm a gastroenterologist by trade that started doing clinical trials. I actually got into GI doing my first year of fellowship and research and I kind of kept on with research and clinical trials over the last three decades to the point that when clinical trials became a capsule of poop and we didn't really understand the microbiome, I kind of stepped into the microbiome to understand it and doing clinical research. And essentially here we are today, thanks to the microbiome
telling the story. And my genetic sequencing lab, Progenobiome has been spearheading a lot of research and has published a lot of data on COVID, a lot of it that was censored, but I think it kind of demonstrated the corruption that of science and, and research right now and medicine really and why we're not advancing or finding cures. There is a big problem going on. So here we are. That's what I'm doing. Here we are indeed.
And and you found out a lot of solutions, which we're going to come onto and protocols that we're going to come onto. But I also want to tell people of your book. Let's talk SH exclamation mark T and that's really what it's all about and what we're talking about today. But Sabine, before we talk about what you found out, which is fascinating when it comes to in inverted commas, COVID, the guts is, is massive. I mean, basically it goes from
your teeth, doesn't it? Right down to your anus, your rectum. So which part of the guts? I know that we've got a diagram which we're going to be showing our viewers of the guts and it comes from, it comes from your book, actually. So which part of the guts will we be talking about today? I concentrate on feces in the colon. So that's the part of the gut that we're going to talk about is really the colon, because that's what I analyzed. I analyzed the microbiome, which
is really the feces. So not a very sexy topic, but a very important topic. And I think most people, you know, tend to, you know, notice things when it comes to that region and definitely has been the number one complaint in the GI doctor's office. So I think something that we, you know, forever, we're kind of like looking at the body, the colon, but we never really looked at the feces themselves to give us an idea on the disease.
And this is the path that I'm spearheading that I'm looking at and that I'm, you know, trying to find solutions essentially. And solutions is exactly what you, what you have found and we're fascinated to know about the gut microbiome. And at this point, I know Cheryl is champing at the bit literally to ask you some questions. So I'm going to throw across to Cheryl to start off all the questions about what you found out. A lot of people like you say they don't like talking about poo.
You know, it's something you don't talk about. They associate bacteria with illness. They don't expect that, you know, because they have got a healthy diversity and number of bacteria in the gut that gives them health. They don't get that at all. So I think we need to go into that in more detail to explain to people that it's a good thing to have the right bacteria, the right type of bacteria in the right place at the right time.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think what we've learned from COVID, COVID, you know, was those were, you know, that was a time in, in, in my life anyways, that was extremely scary. I think for most people. And we there was a, there were a lot of unknowns, but I think there was also a light at the
end of the tunnel from COVID. And the light is really understand for me anyways, it was taking the courage to treat people and in treating people, in achieving improvement of survival of one person after another.
It was really a way to understand the microbiome better because through treatment, I got to see how a virus was in the stools, how a virus was eradicated in the stools with treatment, how the power of the microbiome allows some people to survive COVID and some people to not survive COVID.
And I think that was, you know, that was the light for me and also a lot of a lot of interesting, you know, facts on this for a lot of people in my opinion, because nobody really even thought to look at, wait a minute, my poop can like support me, can help me. If I have a solid poop, I can survive a virus. How does that make sense? Right? I, I'm having an infection in the lung. To this day, people are saying to me, well, you're a gastroenterologist, why are you
even treating a lung problem? And I have to laugh because these people are complete, are completely ignorant to the fact that the lungs are connected to the colon. So you cannot fix the lungs without, you know, having to deal with the colon to begin with and having to deal with altering the microbes in the colon to make sure that, you
know, half happens. I think we've all been educated to think that we go to a specialist for one particular problem and that's it. And the specialists don't look at the whole body, they look at just their specialism. And that has been a downfall because obviously we need to talk about complete body health. So tell us some more about this microbiome, tell us about the functions of it, tell about the balance that we have to have in it.
And then obviously the interconnections with immunity really I think is the important bit we need to know about. Well, I think we're going to end up finding out that immunity is in the gut. It starts in the gut, it is in the gut. It is those microbes imbalance that's going to be the future. The future is really looking at these microbes and saying you've got too much of these kinds that are not so good and you've got too little of these kinds that
are good. Maybe we need to up the good and drop the back. It's really, you know, the problem with this is that it's not a necessarily a product, it's not necessarily a consumer product, right? And it's really the art of medicine. It's how do you fix someone that has an imbalanced microbiome, right? And especially since the technology is really not there yet, right?
I mean, there's a lot of labs out there that are doing that, but they're not really validated and they've not really normalized their their samples to even know. And also there's no clinical data right on it. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. We're looking at the clinical data. We're looking at what does Alzheimer's look like? What does Parkinson's look like? What does autism look like,
right. You know, so I think ultimately, you know, the microbiome is a complex organ and it is an organ, it is where immunity starts. But at the same time, it's the wild, Wild West and it's a new frontier that we need to explore because there's so many things we don't know. And here's the other thing, we've, we've trusted animal studies to guide us in this field. However, the animal studies do
not reproduce human beings. And so, you know, that's another challenge that we have and every individual is different. So we can't even compare each other. One person that may think that they're healthy compared to another person is really, you know, not necessarily healthy, right? So, you know, they may have the same microbiome, but the OR not necessarily the same microbiome, but the same relative abundance of microbes. One person could be healthy with those microbes and another
person could be unhealthy. So those are the challenges that you know are in the field in my opinion. I think a lot of people don't understand that we've got about 5 lbs of body weight of bacteria living with us and we couldn't exist without them being there. And therefore it's very important to look after this quite a large body of microorganisms. And so we kind of outnumber the number of bacterial cells we've got compared with our own body
cells about 12:50. So hopefully people know that it's a big, big help. It's a big, big organ as you've just called it. So we need to understand that this is very important to us. I do because I've read your book, Sabine, and it's absolutely fascinating. It's really easy to read. It's for ordinary people. There's there's no language that you won't understand.
And what I love about the way that you've written it and, and, and in other interviews, you've said that actually you are a gardener because the guts is like a big garden and it tends, it should have beautiful flowers in it and it should be flourishing. But sadly, some of those fields and gardens end up as weeds, which is why the microbiome is so important. But when we, when you first heard of COVID, and I say that in inverted commas, you were seeing patients as normal, right?
And you were, they were coming into your surgery and they were poorly. And that's when you started to realize that there was much more to this than met the eye. What were your findings when you were seeing patients? Because some of them were coming in and they were pretty sick, weren't they? Yeah. So, you know, I stepped into the front line really not really thinking in that carefully, right?
I just, you know, you step into, you know, you step into the front line as a physician, like you're stepping into a fire, you know, and you're just trying to like throw water onto the fire and helping the neighbors to remove, you know, to stop houses from burning. Really, that's what it was for me. I just went in with complete faith and I just went in with, you know, I'm just going to do this and I'm going to do the research and I'm going to see
what I see. And if I don't see anything, then at least I'll have tried, right? So I didn't really think thoroughly of what I was going to find and what was going to happen. I was, to be quite honest, you know, I think the pandemic for me was really witnessing miracles because when you see one person that should have died and doesn't die on your shift, you go, wait, what's going on here, right? And then you have another one and another one.
And then they're hypoxic and they're, you know, oxygen is a 70. And then you realize, wait, you're giving the treatment that you believe is the treatment that's improving the gut and killing the virus and somehow these people are surviving. How did that happen, right? And so when you look back, you know, so the first instinct and I, I always said that, you know, from the beginning, during the pandemic, we should have just turned off the fire.
We should have like used as many hoses, as many buckets and just turned off the fire and then said, OK, let's look back and see what has helped, right. And so in retrospect, when you look back and which is what I did, you see the power of the microbiome. You see the power of bifidobacteria. You see that when you treat COVID, the one thing that you notice is you have a virus in the stools and then you treat it and the virus disappears.
And then you notice the bacteria that you were, you know, that put those people at risk of catching COVID to begin with, you know, start growing back after treatment, you know, a long time after treatment. But you see that that tendencies, right? You see what happened, you know, with the treatment, what happened after the treatment long term you, you notice like what how do people go to being long haulers? You know, long haulers we published is loss of biferative bacteria.
It's a microbiome dysbiosis, and I think a lot of people have discovered that and have talked about it. But also vaccine injury is loss of biferative bacteria. We showed that the vaccines affect the microbiome and kills the bifidal bacteria. Is that what's happening when people keep getting COVID, COVID, COVID after vaccination because they've killed their bifidal bacteria every time after a shot? You know, how many of your friends have had the shot and said, you know, I noticed that I
got COVID a week after. Are they immunosuppressed now and therefore the virus comes in? You know, there's so much to this that I think the the pandemic really, you know, gave opened our eyes to that is important. Sabine, you mentioned bifidobacteria. Could you explain to everybody what, because I know it's a really big, it's a big agenda for you and it's been groundbreaking what you found out. But can you tell people in layman's terms how important it is?
So bifidobacteria is the bacteria that is in your probiotics. It's that industry of I think it's probably up to a trillion dollar industry of probiotics by now. So probi, that bacteria is very present in newborns and it basically disappears with the aging process. So essentially you're born with a lot of microbes and you die of a lot of good microbes and you die with very little. So there was a thought that possibly this bacteria could be, you know, significant in health,
right? And thus the billion, the trillion dollar industry of probiotics. When you look at the microbiome of people that have disease, when you look at Crohn's disease, when you look at all sort of colitis, when you look at invasive cancer, Lyme patients, those people have 0 biferro bacteria. So you have to ask yourself, is the beginning of the disease the loss of biferro bacteria? And is this why it's a chain reaction, right? Everything in life is action
leads to a reaction. You know, you eat hamburger that where the cow was full of antibiotics and vaccinated galore. And then you get sick with Clostridium difficile. You know that bacteria starts secreting toxins, gives you diarrhea, and then eventually what happens is you need an antibiotic to kill that bacteria, but then you're killing off the whole microbiome. So a microbe doesn't just sit on an island. A microbe, you know, starts the chain reaction, where action leads to a reaction.
So that's but that's really what I. Think the bifidobacteria. Can you say a little bit more about that? What is that achieving in the body when it's in balance and it's actually, you know, doing what it's supposed to do? Well, I think we're at the beginning of all that, right? I think we're just right now we're studying that it's absent in certain diseases.
We're studying how to increase it, how to sustain it, how to, because if you notice a lot of because people would have a disease and would take these probiotics and say, Oh well, you know, that would fix the disease. Why is that not happening, right? Why is it that people can take probiotics and not fix their Crohn's disease or their Lyme disease? Because the probiotic doesn't either one reach the colon 2
it's probably not real. In other words, there's no probiotic, there's no bifida bacteria in that probiotic three, it's probably dead, right? You these microbes are very sensitive. So if you grow them in a lab and then you put them in a capsule and you expose them to air, remember, you know most of the microbiome lives in the colon, which is not exposed to oxygen, right? So it's living in an anaerobic format, right Form. So what is that?
What are you doing when you're exposing all that to the air, right? All those microbes to the air. So, and then the other thing is how does it reach, how does a probiotic reach from the stomach all the way to the small bowel to the cecum, right? So, you know, it's, it's a complex science. It's not one that I can say, you know, I never put myself in the rabbit hole of saying what it does, what it doesn't do. I just discussed my research that I've done that validates others.
In the field, because unfortunately the microbiome is really about validation. It's about I did a research now prove me wrong. And if somebody proves me right, then that research is valid, verified and reproducible. So you'll notice, like I talk a lot of of things and I do a lot of, you know, hypothesis, they're not necessarily right until somebody else proves me right.
And that's a danger as a scientist and as a physician, in my opinion, to say with certainty, this is what this microbe does and this, and you should take this because this way, because it, it improves this disease. I think it's a mistake. You know, all we can say in science and research is, you know what I mean? In my case with COVID, I, you know, I've treated thousands and I've lost no one. OK, So that's a step in the right direction to show, well, there's something there, right?
Maybe my protocols, maybe my way of treating COVID was the way. And maybe we should kind of, you know, reproduce those ways, right? It's the same thing with Alzheimer's. I treated a case of Alzheimer's where the patient improved his memory and all I did was give him the stools of his wife into his colon and all of a sudden he could remember his daughter's date of birth. So something happened when I changed the microbiome of that patient for that one case. Now, can I say fecal transplant
is the answer to Alzheimer's? No, absolutely not, because this is an N of one. That N of 1 needs to be reproduced and then that N of one, you know, may not be reproduced in all the Alzheimer's patients. Maybe Alzheimer's is a microbiome disorder in some, maybe it's a neurological disorder in others. Maybe it's the pathway between the brain and the gut.
Maybe it's the stem cells. Maybe it's the, you know, you know, any, any of the components that are linked up with the brain, you know, from the blood to the nerves to the lymphatics to everything. So, you know, to get back to, you know, what was said before, you know, the body is a complex organ that is all connected. So I don't think, I think a lot of the answers today you're going to have from me is probably we don't know. And you know, we can guess, but
we don't know. I think that's very fair actually. And I think that's what a hypothesis is about. And I know that you have submitted hypothesis and they've been pretty much refused. But perhaps we can we'll go on to that and we'll also go on I think to talk about fecal transplant because I'm sure people's ears are pricked up and they thought what fecal transplant. So we will, we will come back
and talk about that. But one thing that I did want to say very quickly was you brought up the subject there of probiotics, because now that we've, we've told people what bifidobacteria is, many people watching are going to be saying, well, we want to increase hours. We'll, we'll give it a go. What do we have? And of course, I know that you did your own little study, didn't you, on probiotics and you just went to your grocery store and you analysed what was
in your grocery store. And I think it's a very sobering reality for people that are watching now that are maybe thinking about doing their supermarket shop and they're going to pick up a load of probiotics. What did you find in your study? I had killed my bifida bacteria and I was drinking a a liter of kefir every day and I couldn't find bifida bacteria in my gut from that leader of kefir.
So I tested the kefir in my fridge and basically noticed there was no bifida bacteria even though it's said on the label bifida bacteria. So I was curious because here I am telling all my patients to drink kefir. Of course it's not going to improve, you know, their microbiome if mine didn't even improve. So I went to my grocery store in Malibu and picked up a whole bunch of yogurts and a whole bunch of drinks that said bifido
bacteria in them. And then out of the drinks, out of the 26 drinks, only three of them had bifido bacteria. And it was shocking because here I am telling patients, well, go get Heifer and improve. Go pick up a drink that has bifido bacteria. It was shocking to find out that actually so many drinks didn't have bifidobacteria.
It was also shocking to find out that out of the drinks that didn't have bifidobacteria, not only did the drinks not have bifidobacteria, but even the probiotics that say bifidobacteria didn't have bifidobacteria in there. 16 out of 17 probiotics on the market have 0 bifidobacteria. It's just a gimmick. They don't put bifidobacteria in
there. So consumer beware because that's the problem you are thinking you're taking on some by some probiotics or some drinks that is improving your gut and it's not necessarily improving your gut. Well, the next question, and I know that if our audience could see us, they'll know that Cheryl and I are both. We've got our hands up because we want to ask so many
questions. And before I throw to Cheryl for another question, can I just ask you then for people that are watching, if we go to our supermarkets and we're picking up probiotics that have no bifido bacteria in them, complete waste of money, what can we do to make sure that we are increasing our bifido bacteria? I mean, I've heard sauerkraut mentioned. Is there anything, what do you put in your diet, for example, to increase your bifido bacteria?
So the first thing that I put in my diet are vitamins. So, you know, don't underestimate the power of vitamins. Vitamin C, vitamin D increases the bifido bacteria, Zinc increases the firm acuities. So you know, vitamin CD and zinc. That's why all my protocols throughout the pandemic had this formula, you know, was very important. It it was really, I cannot emphasize how important it was, especially as that was the key vitamin that I gave all my
patients. So, and the problem is even in the vitamins, there's a lot of, you know, I ended up making my own vitamins during the pandemic because I didn't trust what was out there. And they're just vitamins for our research, you know what I mean? But unfortunately, if you look at the majority of vitamins products out there, there's a lot of fillers in them that actually make them obsolete. They don't even help.
So you could have a person taking vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, and it didn't improve them. Then I would go back and say, well, probably your vitamin had a lot of, you know, stuff in them that basically was not good, you know, for your microbiome. OK, so that's 1-2. And This is why you kind of like see a doctor, do a research. You know, there's a lot of doctors that I've trained over the pandemic on the Biome squad
that I've, you know, helped out. So, you know, anybody that wants to know a doctor in the area, we've trained a lot of doctors on how, you know, to treat, etcetera. Saying that the grocery stores now know, or at least the the companies that make these probiotics and make these probiotic drinks now know that there is someone watching, right? And what we've learned from the pandemic is word of mouth PR. So when something works, it goes
viral, right? Like you saw ivermectin went viral because it worked because people couldn't breathe. They were short of breath, they took it and then all of a sudden their chest opened up. What was the mechanism of that? You know by what? Why did this happen? Because actually they increased the biferative bacteria with ivermectin, but ivermectin only does short term increase of biferative bacteria. There's no data on it increasing
bifidal bacteria long term. So how do you increase your bifidal bacteria when you've lost it? You go back to a normal to your diet that if you were healthy before go back to what you were eating, increase fermented foods, vitamins, decrease the stress, decrease the. I actually tell all my patients one glass of wine helps the
bifidal bacteria. However, more than that doesn't, but as you're building your bifida bacteria, it's probably not a good idea to drink because you're trying to increase those microbes drugs. You got to be careful what drugs you're taking. If there's some drugs that you're taking that are suppressing the microbiome foods, if there's, you know, meat that you're taking that's suppressing your microbiome, you know everything. You have to be kind of a detective and it's not easy.
It is not easy to grow what you have killed. So the best advice is to stop the killing. Why I was so adamant and why I was so strong, you know, why I was such a voice during the pandemic with these vaccines is because I was noticing they were killing the bifida bacteria. And what? And it's fine in those people that basically survived and, you know, they have a resilient microbiome and they bounce back and their bifida bacteria comes
back after the vaccine. But it's not OK for those people that do not bounce back where they constantly stay. And believe me, I'm treating a lot of those patients. And, you know, it's like a flat line. You're trying to resuscitate them. It's not easy to resuscitate what has been killed. So you got to be careful and you got to stop the killing to begin with. And you got to stop drugs that
are killing. You know, when you think about a drug like hydroxychloroquine that was like deemed, you know, you know, it was great for like people that were severe COVID 0 bifidal bacteria, people with arthritis and people that have already killed their gut, you know, that's a great drug for those people. But for people that are healthy, that's not a great drug because it kills your microbiome. So, you know, same thing with antibiotics.
Antibiotics are good for someone over pneumonia that's in the hospital that's dying or or an infection that requires an antibiotic, but it's not necessarily good for that young kid with a strong, resilient gut. Now you're giving him an antibiotic and you're risking dropping his bed for the bacteria and him not coming back up again. That's really what the problem is. I think the confusion for people is that we, our food isn't as good as it was. Our diet isn't as good as it was.
You know, you've been drinking all that Kaffir for all that time, and then obviously it's not been doing you any good at all, really. It's not solving your problem. So you're blind, don't you? You don't know what you're taking, No. You're absolutely blind, and unfortunately that's what's happening. And it's the blind leading the blind, right?
Because here you're blind. And then another person trying to sell their product, an influencer is selling a product and now they're in the limelight selling this product and they don't even know it hurts them. I mean, how many influencers have I treated that were using their own products that they were, you know, raising awareness on? And actually that product ended up killing their guts and then
they killed the guts of others. So I think, you know, we have, I think people need to be vigilant. I think we need to stop the influence of healthcare. We really need to bring it back to the doctor's office. We really need to have that doctor patient relationship. And we need to educate our doctors to understand the microbiome better, to step out of the guidelines. We need to encourage our doctors to step out of those guidelines,
to be brave, to innovate. You know, we've lost our medical field and, and when you lose your doctors, good luck when you're the patient, right? Because who are you going to go when you have a doctor that's scared of giving you a safe drug? So what we saw during the pandemic is a bunch of scared doctors afraid to defy the government, as if the government is the doctor, right?
So I mean, at some point we all got to keep our hats on to realize who we are, what degrees we trained for, you know, I would never, you know, trust a plumber on, you know, on a colonoscopy just because he deals with the same thing. I deal poop, right? So I think we have to be, you know, we the people need to stand up for what's happening. Yes, you're right, we're blinded. But here's the wake up call now that says we need to demand of
our agencies to have clean food. We need to demand of our agencies to test these yogurts. We need to demand of our government to test these products. If it says bifidobacteria, it needs to have bifidobacteria. I'm not the government. That's not my job. My job was to do the research. I showcased something that's really important. 16 out of 17 probiotics on the market have fake labels. 23 out of 26 products with probiotics on the market have fake labels. They're, they're fake.
There's no bifid or bacteria in there. It's up to the government. It's up to the agencies to step it up and say, you know, we're going to start testing the products, stop testing the paperwork. You know, I've been in the clinical trial business for years and almost 3 decades or three decades. And I got to tell you, you know, the one thing the FDA always looks at is the paperwork. Stop looking at the paperwork. Hire an independent lab to test the product.
You know, how do I know what's in that product? The FDA needs to know they have the the right formula. They need to test that and they need to retest it what's in once it's in the market, because here's the problem. A lot of products do great in the research and clinical trials and then they get to the market and it's a substandard product and we're having complications. What happened from the clinical trials to the market? Did the product change?
Did the transportation change? Did the temperature change of these products? You know, is that why these products are no longer working? You know what, what we saw with, you know, we're, we're stepping into the microbiome world right now and fecal transplant, as we said before, fecal transplant, when we do fecal transplant as gastroenterologists for C diff, a condition called C diff and we take fresh poop from a family member or sibling or a stool bank that we trust and it's
fresh. That patient has 92 to 99% success in resolving Clostridium difficile bacteria that causes diarrhea. OK. When we saw the pharmaceutical product, even though they showed some great data, well, guess what, the data on the front line of medicine using those products are not as great as my fresh poop. Something is happening,
something's changing. So, you know, we need to evaluate better and we need to make sure that these products that are out there are actually doing what they're supposed to do in the FDA needs to test these products. Obviously people have turned to different things. You're talking about Ivermectin is a fermented product anyway, so that perhaps is is one of the advantages of it.
But you've got things like your vitamins, as long as you get the right ones that are obviously made in the right way, how is that helping? How is that helping the bifidobacteria? Does it make it multiply more or what? What effect does it have? What we noticed is the vitamin C, for example, we published that paper, increased bifidobacteria within 24 hours. The vitamin C increased the bifida bacteria. So that's what we noticed. Now does it increase it long term? Do you have to keep at it
forever? Those are the studies we're still doing and looking at all that. So we have about, you know, 1600 patients that have been on vitamin, on a vitamin product that we were testing to see what is that doing to the microbiome long term, Short term, does it increase? You know, I've, I have patients that I tested, you know, basically that I tested before and after vaccination, before and after vitamin C. And those patients, I continue to follow them and continue to
follow their stools. So it's interesting to see, you know, there's something to this, but it's still at the beginning, you know, where there's only, you know, there's only a few of us doctors and scientists that progena Biome. You know, we need to, we need funding. We need, you know, all these stool samples are extremely expensive. You know, I don't stop myself
from looking at things. So if somebody tells me, hey, cumin, for example, cumin improves inflammation, then I'll be the first one to say, you know what, let me test the stools before and after. In fact, we're doing cumin. You know, I'm the first one to test if somebody tells me, hey, this, this product is I, I'm working on a product right now with a gentleman, which is going to be a new drug with a gentleman from Switzerland and it's going to be a new product
for ALS and cancer. And let me tell you, it's unbelievable what it's doing to the bifidobacteria. So I'm very excited for this guy about this product because when it comes out, when it starts in the clinical trials, we'll have the data not only about the clinical trial, the efficacy, because right now actually that product is in the phase three clinical trial. So there are pharmaceutical companies that are doing it the right way.
They're totally legit and they're trying to help patients along the way and they're righteous, you know, and usually those are companies that are owned by physicians because they, they have a code of ethics for the most part. And so, you know, this, this compound was in a phase three trial and what we noticed is it actually increases the bifida
bacteria by 20%. So this is something that I can put, you know, my company behind because I say, hey, you know what, I tested this product, then it does what it's supposed to do. Listen, there's a lot of products in the market that actually increase the bifidobacteria and none of them that I can say on this podcast or say publicly because unfortunately it's not my job, right? The data needs to be written first before it gets talked about.
And so that's, that's the way it's always been and that's the way it will be. This is such a big subject because the gut is a very big organ and we're not talking enough about what we're eating and where it's going because what goes in has got to come out. So we're going to be talking very much about your experiences with COVID and your protocols and your work in the Senate in Part 2 of this interview and just before we finish Part 1.
And I did did warn everybody, this is a big, big subject before we go to your last word on on this particular part of our interview. I just want to come back a little bit on the fecal transplants because people will be thinking really, really, Doctor Hassan, you're taking fresh poop from a family member in, in a like in a test tube or in a syringe, and you're literally implanting it in somebody else's colon in order to grow back that beautiful garden of microbes. And I get that.
And I think my question will be after the injection with mRNA and spike proteins etcetera, how would that affect because I know that people are very wary about blood transfusions and about whether things are being body products, bodily fluids are being checked equally. I would say, will people be worrying now if they want to go down the fecal transplant route as to how safe that is in 2024? I don't know. Those are the This is one of those things that I don't know.
I don't know if the M RNA stays in the stools. I don't know if the M RNA stays alive for that long. I I don't know, you know, that those are a that's a good question. We don't know. I think we, we will know from like these products that are on the market already and their success rate and seeing well, why aren't they as successful as before the pandemic? You know, what has changed, right?
If eco transplant, you know, doesn't work as well using a family member or fresh donor, then one wonders maybe there is something in the, the stools. We are developing a stool assay to look for spike protein. I think that's important. We are, you know, and, and here's the thing, you know, when we process these tools, you know, I mean, some of us use the lab, you know, from University of Minnesota or a fecal bank that's available for doctors and also, and, and those are
processed very well. You know, my, my lab, we do from families and we have patients, you know, that want to know who their donors are. So we do very extensive testing. We test for COVID in the stools. That's what we're developing this spike protein assay to look for, for spike in the stools before we transplant because we want to make sure we transplant a quality microbiome and not just poop, right? Because otherwise anybody could do that in their kitchen
counter. But if you do that in your kitchen counter and you're implanting a microbe that's toxic, you're pretty much could kill yourself, right? So you know, there is a process of sterility within the poop, right? I mean, it's not just like we're taking fresh poop and we're just planting it.
It doesn't work like that, although we do make it seem like we're just taking stools, putting it in a blender, you know, like the South Park episode that you all saw where you know, they take the poop, they put it in a blender, blend it and put it in the colon. You know, it does appear like this is how we do it. But you know, there is more to that and it is kind of a, you know, semi sterile procedure. I always joke because you know, my staff in my lab, they
everything is sterile. You know, when we do these transplantation and, and I always joke because I go, you realize we're sterile when we're dealing with poop, right? But you know, here it is. Here's the thing, it is an organ. It's an organ. You have to start thinking of it as an organ. It's like a kidney, it's like a heart.
Why wouldn't you do a transplant if you have a gut that if you have a microbiome that's out of whack completely and you have a disease, why wouldn't you take a healthy organ and implant it into human? We actually are publishing data that's going to be coming about what's in the poop. So you know, it's not only poop that you're transplanting.
So it's important for people to understand, you know, you've got blood vessel, you've got blood in the stools, you know, so you've got to do the proper work up to make sure that it's the bacteria that you're transplanting and not the poop, right? So, you know, that's an important concept that when we talk about, and I think it was named in a way, it was called fecal transplant.
But I think it should have been, you know, and Doctor Alex Kurud says that it should have been called, you know, microbiotic transplant because it is the microbiome that we're transplanting, not the poop. So, you know, the poop is with the fibers and the food and the blood and all that. So but we just are taking the stools. Well, I want to thank you for that because I, I know for sure in the UK, our government is very keen to have our, our poo.
We, most of the population have been sent bowel tests and they're very, very keen to have that. So perhaps we can talk about that in, in Part 2. But to you for your words, and I am super, super grateful for your time. I just want to give Cheryl the opportunity to come back before we go to your last word.
Cheryl, is there anything you would like to add to this before we end this interview and head for Part 2 I. Just hope that what we've said so far as welcome people up to how important your guts are and in particular your colon and in particular the microbiome within it and whatever they learn about themselves to try and improve that, they should do it because it's a main part of continuing with health. So hopefully we've got that message across.
Yeah, and and thank you. Thank you, Cheryl for joining us. And if you like what the UK column are doing and if you found this interview helpful, please share our work and please share Doctor Hassan's work. All of the details of where to find her and details of her book will be in the article that will be directly beneath this interview. So on that note, Doctor Hassan, for the end of Part 1, I would like to thank you enormously for joining us. And to give you the last word,
thank you again. Well, thank you, thank you for having me. And I think the last World is the last word would be hope for peace and microbiome and save the Biff. That's my that's my mission. That's my path to for increase awareness on bifidobacteria and make sure that we still have it in this planet.