How To Guard Yourself Against Anxiety, Depression & Stress While Protecting Your Mind EPISODE (#469)

This episode is brought to you by Just Thrive.

She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire.

Fantastic.

And he's a serial entrepreneur.

A very smart cookie.

And now, Lauryn Evarts and Michael Bosstick are bringing you along for the ride.

Get ready for some major realness.

Welcome to The Skinny Confidential Him & Her.

Your brain knows what you need to do.

Already, you can do it automatically without thinking about it.

And the coping centers of your brain are active.

That's the key part of it.

So what happens when the coping centers of your brain are active, is that all the things that typically would stress you, the problems that you see on the horizon or that you're dealing with right now, all become clear.

For many years, psychiatrists have had their hands tied with using SSRIs and anti-anxiety meds.

And we feel that the reason that they haven't much had much luck with that is that, you know, really the problem isn't necessarily stemming from the brain.

The problem is actually stemming from the gut, because the gut is sending those signals up to the brain.

Hello, hello.

Welcome to The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Show.

Welcome back.

We have the founder of Just Thrive Probiotics, TTina Anderson, and one of the world's leading microbiologists, Kiran Krishnan.

Kiran and Ttina have been on the podcast, and it truly was one of our most downloaded episodes, because people are so interested in healing their gut.

Today, we brought them back on because we wanted to get more granular with them.

We also wanted to talk about mental health and brain health.

They are both so smart when it comes to probiotics, but today, we really zoned in on psychobiotics, okay?

So we're going to talk all about psychobiotics.

What is a psychobiotic?

How do you implement it into your day?

How do you make sure that you're getting all the benefits?

We go there with them.

Honestly, I learned so much this episode.

This is one of those episodes, like the Huberman episode, where I was taking notes.

Both of them are a wealth of knowledge, and it's just so nice to hear someone who's a practitioner and in the business of probiotics, but then also someone who knows all about the gut, the brain, inflammation, all the things.

We asked the questions that you're going to want to know about, and we even picked up some tips for baby delivery, which are wild.

So definitely listen to this episode.

Get your notepad out.

You are going to freak out.

With that, let's talk all things mental health, brain health, and gut health with the founder of Just Thrive and one of the world's leading microbiologists.

Get ready for this episode.

You're going to love it.

This is The Skinny Confidential Him & Her.

Psychobiotic, this is a new word.

How does this work in tandem with mental health?

So the really important thing to note about psychobiotics and the reason why they have the name that they do is because it's a probiotic strain that impacts your brain directly.

Right, so it works through the gut to impact your brain and it does it through a number of manners.

It does it first through controlling things like inflammatory responses in the gut that impact the brain.

Some of these psychobiotics like the ones we work with can also bind to receptors on the lining of your gut that send neurotransmitters directly to the brain to influence your brain wave function.

So if you think about what happens to you throughout your day, right, you wake up in the morning, cortisol levels are high.

That's normal, that's expected, and you should expect to have that.

But as you get started with your day, what you wanna do is get your brain under the right type of balance, the right brain wave function.

You wanna be in that alpha theta wave type of function so that you're really optimal in your ability to show up for the day.

Stress can very quickly start bringing you down, right?

And stress can very quickly start increasing inflammation throughout the day, making you less efficient, less functional throughout the day.

And it could be little things that stress you out.

It could be things like something you read, a tweet or something on social media or an email you got or a comment somebody made in your household itself that could set you off in the wrong process if your brain wave function and your inflammatory responses aren't corrected early on.

So this becomes an important thing to set your day straight, to utilize a psychobiotic like this that brings back balance to your mood and your brain wave function.

And how does this work in tandem with a probiotic?

Because I told you off air, I never want to overwhelm the audience.

So I just want to keep it like very kindergarten terms as you always do.

I know that you probably don't do that on your own, but for us, how does this work with the probiotic?

Yeah, so if you think of your conventional, your foundational probiotics, right?

Like the Just Thrive probiotics, that you think about when you're starting the digestive process throughout the day, right?

With your first meal.

You want to aid in that digestion.

You want to help your body work through the food, assimilate the nutrients better, start moving the bowels appropriately, start modulating the immune response in the gut.

So when you think about the first part of your digestive process during the day, that's when you take your probiotic, the Just Thrive health probiotic.

Then when you think about the psychobiotic, it's about starting off your day in the right manner, right?

So when you wake up in the morning, some people might meditate.

Some people might have rituals in the morning to get them off to a good start.

So you think about the psychobiotic when you first wake up, and then you think about the probiotic when you first start digesting.

So just so I understand this correctly, you would take your probiotic after you eat?

Yes, so the conventional, the probiotic, the foundational probiotic, you would take it after or during a meal.

You can do it at any time.

And you would take your psychobiotic before you eat?

Before you eat.

And you take two of each?

Yes.

Okay, during this pregnancy, I've taken Just Thrive every single day, my probiotic, but I've been taking it before I eat.

I didn't realize I needed to take it after.

Which is fine.

It doesn't matter.

So when we do our studies, right?

So the way we do the studies to account for that kind of variability in how people behave, we say take it with or around a meal.

That's our instructions, which means that some people take it before, some during, some after, and we always get the same results.

So it doesn't really matter that significantly, as long as you remember to take it somewhere around your meal.

You guys have obviously both been on the show before.

And if you guys haven't listened to those previous episodes, we'll link them in the show notes here.

You should definitely go back.

They're honestly some of our highest episodes.

People love them.

And we've talked a lot about the gut and the importance of gut health.

I mean, that's a recurring theme on this show.

What you were both saying previous to us being on air is how much the gut also affects mental health and mental health conditions.

That's also another theme on the show, but we haven't actually dove in deep into how mental health is directly correlated with gut health.

And I would love for you both to talk about it, Ttina.

I don't know if you want to take it or...

Yeah.

So we know that the gut is dictating so much of our overall health.

And one of the things is it's producing really important neurotransmitters.

So serotonin, 90% of our serotonin is produced in our gut.

GABA is produced in our gut.

Dopamine is produced in our gut.

So all these important neurotransmitters are produced in our gut.

So now you take the psychobiotic, which is now literally the definition of a psychobiotic is friendly bacteria that is helping support the gut-brain access.

And so now we have these psychobiotics that are helping support that communication between the gut and the brain.

So there's a huge connection between the gut and the brain.

That's why we have like butterflies in our stomach and why when we're nervous, we have to go to the bathroom.

There is a direct communication.

And so now there's evidence that, very clear evidence, that there are communications going from the gut to the brain, signals going from the gut to the brain, and then signals going from the brain down to the gut.

For many years, psychiatrists have had their hands tied with using SSRIs and anti-anxiety meds.

And we feel that the reason that they haven't had much luck with that is that really the problem isn't necessarily stemming from the brain.

The problem is actually stemming from the gut because the gut is sending those signals up to the brain.

And this is why we're seeing such profound results when people are starting to support their gut health in general and then adding more of this particular psychobiotic strain to their gut.

This is fascinating and it makes a ton of sense, again, based on the conversations we've had previously.

Maybe we've not had luck as a people, as a society, as a culture, diagnosing many of these disorders because we're looking in the wrong place.

Not to say that there's not maybe brain issues, but if we're not looking at all, it sounds like we've been paying very little attention to the gut.

Then we're obviously set up for failure to begin with because we're not even going to the root of what could be the problem.

Yeah, absolutely.

And when we look at the conditions that affect the brain, right?

So, especially when you're looking at babies that are being born today.

So, when we consider things like spectrum disorders, attention deficit disorders, the epidemic of those conditions increasing year over year, is that because there's something changing about our brains as humans or is it because we're diminishing our gut year over year, right?

It's the same thing that drives increased allergies.

It's the same thing that drives increased asthma in kids.

So, it all stems from diminishing the gut microbiome that has this profound effect on everything, including the brain.

And we know that.

So, we know the research is super clear, right?

Real change occurring in the brain does stem from the gut and stems from dysfunction of the gut.

Even the most basic things like how your body responds to stress is controlled in the gut.

And whether or not you have a healthy gut will determine how negative the stress can be impacting your body, right?

So, that's a big part of it.

Let me ask you this, because of what you do, can you look at someone and tell if they need a psychobiotic or a probiotic?

And if you can, what does that look like?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So, to personalize this a little bit more, when I first met Ttina, I was like, Ttina needs a psychobiotic, right?

No way.

Yes.

You wouldn't recognize her.

She's a much more calm, very collected person.

When we first met, many years ago, Ttina was a very anxious, kind of nervous person.

She's going to dump that ball in.

I'm literally roofing my husband as we speak with psychobiotics.

Keep going.

I'm opening it.

I'm roofing it.

I'm putting it in his margarita, a half rim assault with a little psychobiotic.

Absolutely.

In my defense, I was starting a new business and had three children and have three children.

Yes.

You had all good reasons.

But really, when you really look at it, right?

We're not necessarily talking about people who are on the severe end of depression, anxiety, and all that, right?

That's actually quite rare to see people that are hospitalized, can't leave the house because of the depression, anxiety.

What you tend to have are people that are functioning day to day with generalized anxiety disorder or some degree of depression, right?

Now, what tends to happen is because there's a stigma of being treated for those conditions, so most people don't go to see a doctor for it.

In most cases, if you go to see a doctor for it, you may not have successful treatment anyway, so people self-medicate, right?

We self-medicate through drinking and other behaviors that we use to try to stimulate dopamine.

Dopamine counteracts those negative effects.

What we're doing is we get addicted to things, we get obsessed about things because we're trying to stoke dopamine.

It might be food, it might be sex, it might be going out, it might be validation on social media, right?

There are so many ways we try to stoke dopamine, but all of that is to self-medicate because we're not appropriately dealing with stress.

Now the big problem with this is stress is the number one driver of health conditions globally.

If you look at first world countries, right, 2015 publication in the Frontiers of Immunology, which is a meta-analysis paper, which means they reviewed hundreds of other studies on the topic, they concluded that the number one driver of morbidity and mortality worldwide was stress and stress-induced endotoxemia, which is leaky gut, right?

So then when you boil that down, you go, okay, so stress is really harmful to the body and we could talk about how it does that, right?

But then what is causing us to have this profound level of stress?

Yes, we have exposure to lots of different things.

We have distraction from media and all that all over the place.

But life right now is not anywhere close to being as stressful as it used to be.

I always say this to people and there's an incredible book, I don't know if you've read it, I think it's Hans Rowling maybe, or maybe somebody, but it's called Factfulness.

And it basically uses facts to point out how much the world has gotten better.

Totally.

I think if you watch the news, people think that the world's way worse than it's ever been.

But if you actually read this book Factfulness, and again, this is not like someone's opinion, they basically use facts of death and lifespan and attack and all sorts.

And it shows that we've actually progressively gotten better and better as a world over the years.

Absolutely, we have.

And that's even just in the modern era, right?

But if you look at how humans survive through the course of human evolution, stuff was way worse back then.

You didn't have to worry about somebody coming in and like chopping your head off and taking your house.

Exactly.

I mean, listen, terrible things happen, but that was like a regular thing.

Like someone comes over the hill and they just kill and pillage your whole family.

Totally.

And or you might be out foraging and get eaten by a predator, right?

We were in those kind of dangers.

Or you cut your thumb and like next thing you know it's infected and your whole arm's gone or you're dead.

Totally.

Yeah.

I mean, like you step on a on a thorn and that could kill you, right?

Because of infection.

So at the end of the day, what's super interesting when you look at the human condition is the reason why the human species survive.

One of the key reasons is because we have this powerful flight of fight response, right?

The flight of fight response is there to protect us.

It's a stress response.

It's there for us to identify things that could potentially harm us.

And then it gets our body ready to fight it or flee from it.

So that flight of fight response is the same exact response, whether you read a bad email that triggers you in the morning, or there's a tiger waiting around the corner, right?

Biologically, it's the same thing.

Wait, stay there for a second.

So what you're saying is just the human, the response to any stressor, what happens chemically or emotionally in the body is the same as if you're in a real actual tiger attacking you danger compared to like, I just read some bad email or lost a job or lost some money or whatever.

It's the same response in the body.

The body doesn't know how to distinguish between them.

When Michael gets stressed out, like he'll get stressed over stuff that I don't get stressed over, which he says I need to be more stressed.

You get stressed about stuff that I don't get stressed over too.

You're not immune to stress.

But I say to him, I go, there's no saber tooth tiger.

Lauryn wanted to film me today getting out of this cold plunge.

And I said no, and you would act like the world was ending for her.

I wanted to film him in the cold plunge to show people what it was.

You didn't have content for the morning.

You needed to take more Just Calm.

I'm just going to keep grilling you right now.

Because anyways, but I think this is important to stay on because what you're saying is there's an actual danger.

You're actually physically in danger of something attacking you.

Your body responds to that.

But the response that's taking place in your body is the same if you get a bad email or your boss says something, whatever it is, girlfriend breaks up with you, whatever.

And the body does not know how to distinguish between an actual attack compared to a perceived attack.

Totally, yeah.

Because if you think about throughout human evolution, right?

Most stress response was related to survival, right?

We didn't have these kind of peripheral, nuanced things that really caused the stress.

So everything was related to survival.

So when we think about it that way, what the body is doing is it's gearing you up to survive whatever that stressor is.

So here's what happens when you get stressed, right?

So when you experience an external stressor, whether it's a tiger lurking in the grasses or it's a bad email, the first part of your brain that perceives the stress is the hypothalamus.

The hypothalamus then sends out a hormone that triggers your pituitary gland.

Then the pituitary gland sends out another hormone that triggers your adrenals.

Then the adrenals release the well-known stress hormone, cortisol.

So now the whole point of this whole process, that's called the HPA activation, right?

The whole point of this process is to upregulate your sympathetic nervous system so that your body can rush blood to your heart, your brain, and your muscles, and then it de-prioritizes everything else, right?

Digestion, immune response, repair, recovery, all that stuff is de-prioritized.

Because it's getting you in a position to be able to flee.

Exactly.

It wants a fight, right?

It wants you perfused with blood in your brain and your heart so that you can function optimally.

It also wants your respiratory rate to go up.

It wants your heart rate to go up.

It wants you to be visually acute, auditorily acute.

And it's trying to get blood to all these regions.

Now, the way it gets blood to your brain and the way it gets blood to your heart in places like that, is by using inflammation.

Because inflammation drives perfusion of blood, right?

So what the sympathetic nervous system is doing is it's activating immune cells in your brain and your central nervous system to release inflammatory signals so blood rushes to the area, right?

So now when you're in this state, you are physically ready to fight something or run away from something, but you're in this inflamed, activated state, your brain is inflamed, your heart's inflamed, you cannot digest, your immune system is suppressed, you cannot assimilate nutrients, and you cannot repair.

You also are not in a state to rest, relax, or sleep, but it's okay because you're trying to survive, right?

Now, what's supposed to happen is once a danger is gone and you flee from it, or you fought whatever is there that was causing your danger, you're supposed to be able to come down from that and go back into your parasympathetic rested state.

The big difference between how we evolved, where we would go through these cycles of flight or fight, come down from it, go back and recover, is that today, we can't come down from the flight or fight response.

We're just staying in it and staying in it.

Exactly.

Which means we can't digest, we can't process, we can't all of these things.

Also, even I noticed if you wake up in the middle of the night, the go-to for me for a while, I don't do this anymore, would be to pick up my phone and scroll through my phone to try to go back to sleep, which is so counter, like what was I even thinking?

But the screens, I think, is such a big part of that.

You had mentioned earlier that you knew Ttina needed a psychobiotic.

Can you just quickly list off some things though, besides inflammation, that you can tell that people need a psychobiotic?

Yeah, look at somebody who is in a meditative state, right?

You see a kind of calm and relaxation in their eyes, versus somebody that's in that beta wave or just kind of tense and their mind is racing a million miles an hour.

You see it in their eyes.

You see a twitching in the eyes.

You see an intensity in the face, right?

Then you also see this kind of nervous response to things.

There's a shuddering in the voice.

There's a quivering in the voice, if you will.

And then a lot of times, a lot of this expresses on people's skin as well.

So you see redness of the skin.

Some people break out in acne.

Some people can lose their hair.

You can develop things like alopecia from stress response and inflammation, right?

Then digestion becomes compromised quite a bit.

So a lot of people with really poor stress response tend to have IBS-like symptoms, right?

So when you look at a non-gut dysfunctional adult population, right?

Anyone that doesn't respond to being diagnosed by a gut issue, about 18 percent of those adults tend to have anxiety and stress.

When you look at an IBS population, it's almost 52 percent, right?

So they're more than two and a half times likely to have both gut and anxious anxiety type of issues.

So that's one of the key things.

So when you meet a lot of people that have a lot of digestion issues, a lot of bloating, indigestion, intolerances of food, a lot of times that's a gut brain dysfunction.

Ttina, you were a human guinea pig on yourself.

What did you notice before that you noticed happened differently after you took the psychobiotic?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I started noticing it just by taking the probiotic alone because we know that the probiotic is also affecting.

We know that, like I said, 90% of our serotonin is produced in our gut.

So we really, I started noticing improvements just with the probiotic alone.

I mean, that's doing half the battle.

It's taking care of the LPS, which is the toxins that are found in our gut.

It seeps into the bloodstream and starts causing this inflammatory response.

But with the psychobiotic, it was like game changing for me.

I mean, I started, I took mine at night just because I was afraid that, you know, I don't know, I just thought I would take it at night.

It was, I mean, I slept really well.

The next day I woke up feeling just calmer.

It's like it takes that edge off.

We've seen countless testimonials already.

We've just seen so many great stories from people.

One of our employees has had just a game changing response to the product.

We've had people call in where, you know, they just, it takes that edge off.

And that has been the difference.

And that's what I think the key is with this is it's getting to the root cause of it.

What we have focused on at Just Thrive has always been getting to the root cause of an issue.

It's not putting a, this is not, you know, a symptom covering up.

This is getting to the root cause of what's going on.

And it is in our gut.

And we've seen it with, you know, so many of our customers already.

But it's been, Psychobiotic is game changing.

And that's why we launched it actually under a new sub brand.

If you notice, it's Jute by Just Thrive.

And it's because this is so critical.

We wanted this to, you know, our probiotic is our flagship product.

It is by far our most popular product.

But since we've launched this, it's been game changing.

Because unfortunately, it's so relevant right now.

I mean, we see it with our kids.

We see it, which, you know, as a mother of three children, it breaks my heart to see all these young kids having so many anxiety disorders and so many other mental health disorders.

And then our young adults, our older adults, I mean, people are just, it's just so relevant right now with everything that's going on.

And it's been great.

I mean, it's been great to have something that's really impacting people.

I think also one thing that I like about Just Thrive is I know when I'm taking it, it's going, the survivability, we always talk about this, is actually going to the gut.

There's so many shitty bullshit products out there that are actually not doing the work.

Like, it's just advertising.

And I think that you guys have done a really good job of making sure that it's clinically proven.

What makes your psychobiotic different than other psychobiotics?

Because I know the probiotic is incredibly different because I've done my own research on it.

Yeah, one of the important things to point out, it's one of the few psychobiotics that are out there.

It's a field that's developed quite significantly in the last decade, right?

But we're one of the first to commercialize the psychobiotic.

And the reason why we're comfortable commercializing it right now and telling people how much it can be helpful is because we've completed over eight published clinical trials on it, right?

So it's not just testimonials.

It's not, you know, all those things are important, but we have some really good science on it.

And a lot of the science comes from a research institute called the APC, which is in Cork, Ireland, which is one of the number one research institutes for the microbiome research in the world.

And here's what's so interesting about how it works.

This is a unique strain.

It's called bifurobacterium longum, and it has this exopolysaccharide covering on it.

The exopolysaccharide is made out of a compound called peptidoglycan.

So there are some species in your gut that make this interesting peptidoglycan.

And, Lauryn, you're pregnant.

Your baby is developing, right?

One of arguably the most important aspects of baby's development is the development of the baby's brain.

And so what's so interesting when you think about how the baby's brain develops in utero, mom's gut bacteria actually release peptidoglycan.

So it's a bacterial byproduct, goes through your circulation.

On the placenta, there are receptors and transporters for bacterial peptidoglycan that take peptidoglycan to the baby's brain where there are receptors for it, and it binds the baby's brain's receptor.

That stimulates brain development in the baby.

It stimulates the development of the blood-brain barrier, the synaptic regions in the brain.

All of this really important brain development is in some way controlled by bacterial byproducts in your gut.

And it's that same bacterial byproducts that actually shut down that fight-or-flight response once you've gone through it and once the danger is already away from you, right?

When you have gut bacteria that have the peptidoglycan, that's the key ingredient that actually brings you back down from that fight-or-flight response.

Since I have you here, I'm just going to ask you this.

I have read multiple studies, and I would love to know your opinion, about when you have your baby vaginally, you should not give the baby a bath for as long as possible because of all of...

What's the word?

I want to say vagina juice.

The vaginal flora, yeah.

Tell us a little bit about that and why it's good or bad for the gut of the baby.

It's really important.

At the terminal end of your digestive tract is bifidobacteria.

Bifidobacteria populates the very end of your digestive tract.

In your vaginal tract, it's predominantly lactobacilli.

The two genuses of bacteria that initially colonize the baby's gut are bifidobacteria and lactobacilli.

The bifidobacteria, the baby is going to get exposed to from your fecal matter.

Because what's going to happen when you're pushing if you do a vaginal birth is you're probably going to poop a little bit, right?

I am not going to do that on record.

Something's going to come out.

And it's the proximity to the vaginal canal to the anus is so close that the baby will get that initial exposure to bifidobacteria and then the lactobacilli from the vaginal canal.

And the important thing there is that those two organisms will predominate in the beginning.

In part, the lactobacilli will start eating away some of the oxygen in the baby's gut and make it anaerobic and that will allow for the bifidobacteria to really take hold and start changing the baby's gut environment, getting it ready for things like food and other bacteria to settle in.

What tends to happen if the baby's C-section or doesn't get enough exposure to mom's vaginal juice, the first bacteria that take hold in the baby's gut are the bacteria from the doctors and the nurses in the room.

We're talking about streptococcus and staphylococcus and so on.

Babies that don't get enough vaginal exposure tend to have much higher incidence rate of allergies, asthma, obesity, anxiety, all of these problems.

So the vagina juice is pretty painful.

That explains Michael.

Michael didn't get any vagina juice.

He came out as a C-section.

Oh my God.

Yeah, but I came and I started absorbing.

Explains the stress.

Yes, it's never too late.

He went to U of A.

Listen, I've been trying to tell Lauryn for years.

I've just been trying to get healthy this whole time.

Exactly.

You got to do it at some point in life, right?

It's never too late to get that exposure again.

But yes, that's why it's critically important.

So if part of your birth plan and your doctors will listen to you is not to wipe and wash the baby off right away, right?

And if for some reason it ends up being a C-section, what you really want to do is get some sterile gauze impacted in the vaginal canal so that you pick up the vaginal juices and then wipe the baby down after birth.

Okay.

You need to add that to my birth plan in case it's a C-section.

I need you to stick your hand at my vag.

Get the juice.

No, I'm not joking.

You think I'm being funny.

I'm dead serious.

Yeah, I know you are.

So I'm dead serious.

So my question is, I was going to go as long as we possibly can to not give the baby a bath.

But additionally, on top of that, I also, with Zaza, we were giving her a bath every night.

Now I'm kind of like, I don't really think that's needed when they're so little.

Not for a baby, no.

Most adults don't need that.

See, Michael, I don't bathe.

Yeah.

I know that too.

So with babies, I would say, my kids, we did maybe twice a week bathing.

And even then, it's light on the soap, warm water is perfectly fine.

And if your baby's out, you live in Texas, so it's a great place to be out most of the year.

So if your baby's out and he or she gets dirt on him or her, that's a good thing.

So you want that exposure to natural dirt, natural environment.

You don't necessarily want to clean that off.

You certainly don't want to be doing the sterile wipes and all that, baby.

And I can do a little bit of the Just Thrive probiotic on my finger and have the baby lick it, right?

I've been doing that with Zaza.

Absolutely.

Okay, can you do that with a psychobiotic as well?

You can, although your baby probably doesn't need that at this early stage.

It's super important for you, though, because think about all the postpartum stress and hormone issues and all that.

So that mood balancing, brainwave balancing is going to be really critically important.

A postpartum, I got such bad depression and anxiety and I obviously wasn't taking a psychobiotic.

So you think it's like one of the most important things to do after you have a baby?

Absolutely.

Throughout your life, but certainly after a baby, your body's going through a lot of that fourth trimester confusion around hormone balancing and all that.

That's a great time to really have that kind of support.

You know, we were talking about something earlier, we were talking about how the world is actually getting better.

But I guarantee if you ask the majority of people listening to the show, if you just pulled them on the street, hey, do you think the world's better or worse?

The majority of them would say worse.

And there's probably a lot of people listening right now that are screaming, saying, yeah, it's worse, especially if you go to younger generations.

I hate to like age people.

But when I was growing up and I think probably similar for you guys, you'd be hard pressed to turn on the news daily and be berated by just constant streams of bad news.

Nowadays, I think you'd be hard pressed to turn on any kind of news or social channel and find good news.

It's a constant beratement of bad news.

Not to say that there's not bad things in the world.

It's just when you're doubling down on that information all day long and companies realize that's what people pay attention to, so that's all they're going to serve you, you start to actually change people's perception.

And you start to make them think, oh my God, this world is a terrible place to live in, because that's all they see.

Have you seen, based on the studies you guys have conducted, any correlation to jump in greater mental disorder or greater anxiety, or is it a steady curve?

And maybe you can even speak on with COVID and the pandemic, if you've seen different weird things happening from that.

Yeah, we definitely saw an increase in anxiety and depressive type of disorders with COVID, but it was already bad before COVID.

That's what's so scary is that all of a sudden, all this fear and isolation just caused so much more.

And I think the biggest thing that COVID did was, you know, translate it even more into children.

And I think that's what's so hard, is that you're seeing...

When I said younger generation, sorry to clarify, is that I don't remember my childhood being exposed to this much bad information.

When I say bad, I mean scary information.

Like we knew stuff was going on, but it wasn't a constant beratement of like, hey, this is the world's ending, right?

I feel like the children of today's age, that's all they see, right?

Yeah, it goes back to the saying of perception is reality, right?

So the perceptions you're getting are your reality, even though that's not actually true.

One simple example of that, we live in Chicago.

So I get a lot of people, depending on the news media that they follow and watch constantly, they think Chicago is basically a war zone.

They're like, wow, you live in Chicago?

Is it safe?

We're like, well, yes, there's trouble in a certain small area of the south side of the city.

Everything else is perfectly fine, perfectly safe.

But it depends on what you see and what you watch all the time.

It really gives you a completely different perception, and then that becomes your reality.

And today with kids, especially kids who have gone through this pandemic and have been home and there's fear around, what is this virus and this epidemic that's sweeping through?

People are getting sick, family members are getting sick.

You think about all that and you think about the things that are normal to kids, like just going out and playing, right?

How that is a dangerous thing to do.

Those simple normal functions become dangerous in their mind.

That wires them neurologically to think it's a dangerous world out there, right?

The normal instinctual things they want to do, just run out in the backyard and play with their friends.

You can't do that, right?

You can't do that because now we're living in a dangerous world.

So we are absolutely seeing, and we work with a lot of clinicians.

We work with somewhere around 20,000 clinicians as well.

We're seeing an epidemic of anxiety and depression, and then like this dysmorphic disorder where people's perception of the world themselves and all that are really getting altered.

Ttina, you were going to say the differences between pre and post COVID.

What have you seen working on this brand?

What's been great is just seeing the impact that we've had.

We know that people taking the probiotic are just, we always say it's like 60% of helping us with our mental health.

We know because of all the reasons I stated already.

So that was great.

But then by launching the psychobiotic, we see people giving it to their kids or teenagers that are just going through really hard times and just being able to handle stressors more.

And we know that these psychobiotics are actually changing our brainwave activity, putting us more into that flow state.

So not only is it helping with stress and anxiety, it's helping with cognition.

So being able to memorize things better, being able to do presentations better at school and exams and different things like that.

So we know that people are just having really, really a hard time after COVID.

And we've seen it through everywhere we go.

Are there certain mental conditions or disorders that you see correlating to the gut more than others?

Meaning like, is it bipolar?

Is it depression?

Is there something that you see from your studies that this is running rampant because of poor gut bio?

Or even borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, any kind of disorder.

Anyone that is more prominent from the gut microbiome.

Yeah, the most common are things like generalized anxiety disorder.

That's that feeling of anxiousness throughout the day.

And then it steps into major depressive disorders as well.

And they're both connected in some way.

What's scary about it is, within that spectrum of generalized anxiety and major depressive disorders, which is super common now, you also have these things called sickness behaviors.

It's a whole subcategory of things that people experience when they have anxiety and depression.

Sickness behaviors are things like anedonia, which is the inability to feel happy.

Things that used to make you excited in the past don't make you excited anymore.

Psychomotor slowness, so like your ability to think, your ability to respond to things.

You're literally moving slower, thinking slower.

Anorexia is another subclass of that.

People get this lethargicness throughout the day.

All of these things are the things that are caked on on top of the anxiety and depression that people are feeling.

That's the most common stuff.

When you think about bipolarism, multiple personality disorders and all, those are the fringes.

Those are very, very minute compared to the generalized anxiety disorder and the major depressive disorders.

One of the best tips that both of you gave me was something that I think is so relevant to the audience.

One of them was, get a dog.

Yes.

My daughter now kisses my dog.

I'm like, make out with him, suck his tongue, French kiss him, whatever you want because it's so good for the gut.

I'm always like, give him a kiss on his black giles.

Give him a kiss right on his lips.

And then you guys also told me about how back when Michael and I were little, our parents were probably cleaning with Windex, which is like horrific for the gut.

What are some like little tips like that that people can do?

Because now we changed all our cleaning products to natural because of you guys.

I love when my daughter's outside.

I love when her feet are in the dirt.

I love when she's playing with the dog.

What are some little tips that we can do to improve our mental health?

Besides taking a probiotic and a psychobiotic.

Little tiny tips.

Yes, there's a number of them.

I think the one that you just mentioned is doing things naturally in the household.

There was a study that came out that households that use those antibacterial cleaning products and antibacterial soaps actually had children with a higher incidence of autism, autoimmune issues, allergies.

We really want to stay away from a lot of those antibacterial products because our bacteria is really good for us.

I mean, less than 1% of our bacteria is actually harmful, but we all focus on bacteria as being bad.

We want bacteria.

So just use soap and water like we've probably talked to you about before and just trying to have cleaner cosmetics and things like that, those types of products.

Yeah, and that's the home biotic, right?

And then here's a couple of the home biotics.

We've got to take care of your homes buying.

You better go trademark that, home biotics.

Is the lawyer listening?

So a couple of the tips.

So when it comes to mental health especially, what is extremely important is that everybody in the home is participating in it, right?

So there was this fascinating study out of Johns Hopkins University, it was published just a couple of years ago, where they looked at individuals that were given a prescription for an antibiotic at a hospital.

And prior to starting the antibiotic, they took gut samples to look at their microbiome and mapped out their microbiome.

Then they took samples while they were taking the course of antibiotics and then upwards of six months after the course of antibiotics.

What they found, of course, was that while they were taking the antibiotics, the gut microbiome got totally disrupted, and then that disruption was observed upwards of six months after stopping the antibiotics.

So here's the surprising thing about that study.

They also followed the microbiome of individuals that lived in the same household, and they saw very similar disruption in their microbiomes, even though they did not take the antibiotic.

So one individual in the household taking something that disrupts the microbiome that causes dysbiosis, right, which is now an imbalance of the right type of bacteria in the gut, which can lead to mood issues, stress issues, anxiety issues, that microbiome can actually influence the microbiome of the rest of the people in the house.

So we all live within this biome cloud, within our offices, within our homes, and places where we spend a lot of time.

If one person in the household is trying to improve their mental health, trying to improve their stress response, and they're doing all the things, taking the right products, making the right decisions, they have two or three other people in the house that don't care and are doing more toxic things.

They're dragging them down.

So if I meditate, Michael needs to meditate every day.

Or he could take a psychobiotic, but he probably should meditate to a certain degree, right?

So talking about meditation.

So meditation, those that do it in even a sparing way and don't do it very well, puts you into this alpha wave state, right?

And the alpha wave state is a good state because it brings down inflammation.

It calms the central nervous system.

But where you really see benefits from meditation is if you can get to the theta wave, right?

The theta wave is that true flow state.

The beauty of this is one of our studies that we published shows that when you take a psychobiotic, it actually puts your brain into theta waves.

So it's meditation in a bottle.

So if you're trying to meditate, add that to it.

It's really going to be profoundly impactful.

That is crazy.

I have been meditating every single morning this whole pregnancy for 25 minutes.

And I've made it like it's a non-negotiable.

And I just this week got to the theta state.

I know what you're talking about.

It took me though, it took me like nine months, 10 months to get to this state.

But it's like you're not asleep, you're not awake, but your brain is awake.

It's weird.

Yeah, you're in a flow state.

So what happens is that frontal cortex gets dampened a little bit so that you're not in that executive mind where you're nitpicking on everything and over analyzing everything, right?

You're in what they call the flow state where your brain knows what you need to do.

Already you can do it automatically without thinking about it.

And the coping centers of your brain are active.

That's the key part of it, right?

So what happens when the coping centers of your brain are active is that all the things that typically would stress you, right?

The problems that you see on the horizon or that you're dealing with right now, all become clear.

And the solutions to things become clear.

Or if there is no solution, you have ability to let it go.

And that's the state we all want to achieve.

And it's so hard to do it.

It's addicting too, though.

I had it happen like three times in the last week and every single time I meditate.

Because not every meditation is the same, you know?

So sometimes you come out and you're like, and then sometimes you come out and you're like, wait, now that I've been in that theta state, I want it more.

So I need to up my psychobiotics and maybe up my meditation.

Sorry, Michael, the 45 minutes.

Michael's going to die.

So how can our audience seamlessly integrate this product into their day?

I don't want to overwhelm them because I know we talk about all different kinds of products.

We try to really, really choose the products that we take and that we love and that we actually use.

How can they do this every day?

Well, I think the key, what you said is exactly the way we are.

I mean, we are very, very particular about what we bring to market.

I mean, our whole mission is to only bring products that are missing and needed in the market and that are heavily backed by research and science.

I mean, when we started this years ago, we were like, we wanted to up level the view of supplements out there and the perception of supplements and have science behind them.

So know that if there's something that someone's taking from Just Thrive, it's something that's missing and needed and heavily, heavily researched.

We're never going to be a supplement company that has 200 SKUs.

That's not who we want to be.

We want to really make an impact on people's lives.

And we've seen what we've done with the probiotic.

We've seen game changing results that people have had.

And now with the psychobiotic, we're seeing the same thing.

And that's why it's so important.

And the easiest way to integrate it is just, like Kiran said, taking it at the start of your day and just having, getting more into that theta wave state, whether you want to take it while you're meditating, whether just, it's just, it's been shown to be able to handle stress better.

I mean, we know we're not going to get away from stressors.

Every day we're faced with stressors and the perception of stress.

But we need to know how to handle it better and have our, our guts and our mind be able to handle it better.

And that's what the psychobiotic has done and what we're, you know, what we're seeing with people.

I have a weird question.

Yeah.

What about the capsules that protect the inside of the pill?

How important is that to look at?

It depends on the strains, right?

So some strains are super sensitive and they're not going to survive through the gastric system or even the upper part of the intestines.

So you need to have some sort of special capsule delivery in order to try to get the strain to the right space.

But in our view, if you have to do all of that kind of engineering to try to make the strain work, then it's probably not designed to be a probiotic, right?

We're trying to achieve natural health with using nature itself, right?

If we have to take nature and re-engineer it and go, I got to put it in some new space age delayed release capsule, there are companies that wrapped it in seaweed and do all kinds of crazy stuff, that's not natural, right?

So nature probably didn't intend for that microbe to be a probiotic.

So we use things that naturally will survive through the gastric system.

And if someone's probiotic shopping or psychobiotic shopping, and let's say they don't have access to this product, what are things that they should look for that are huge red flags?

One of them, you guys told me that I had no idea about, and that was I thought you had to put my probiotic in the refrigerator, and you guys educated me.

What are those other red flags where you're like, uh-uh, that's bullshit marketing?

Yeah.

So number one, if a probiotic has too many strains in it, you know it's one of those kitchen sink products, right?

Because there's really no good scientific rationale to having 15, 20, 25 strains in the product.

It just doesn't make any sense scientifically, and you also don't know what's doing what in the product, right?

If you're using research, you want to understand what strain is doing what function in the body.

That way you can optimize it, you can change the dose, you can improve the delivery in some way or the other.

So that's one thing.

If it has too many strains.

The other thing is if it calls out on the front of the bottle the dose that's in the product.

If it says 50 billion or 100 billion on the front of the bottle, which a lot of retail probiotics do, right away you know that they formulated the product with the idea of the dose in mind before anything else, right?

They're just trying to achieve a number, which in their mind conveys a potency, but it really doesn't.

There's no studies behind 50 billion being better than 20 billion or 20 billion being better than 10 billion.

It's really about the strain, right?

Most good probiotic studies are done with single strains at 2 to 5 billion CFUs.

So you really don't need the 50, 100, 200 billion.

So if they're calling that out right in the very front of the label, then you know that all they did was went into a meeting and go, how do we get 100 billion into this product at six bucks?

And I've been in those meetings, right?

I've been consulting for the industry for years as a scientific advisor.

I've been in those meetings where they're going, we want 50 billion and 13 strains and go, why?

They go, well, our competitor on the shelf has 30 billion and 10 strains, so we want a little bit better.

Like, but that's meaningless, right?

It doesn't mean anything.

The other thing is look for studies on the actual product.

And I know that's hard for people because most people don't know how to navigate through studies and so on.

But I think when you go to a probiotics website, the company should be calling out in front, maybe even linking to studies that they've actually done on the product so that you can see that some science has gone into it.

I'm going to say something, Ttina, that I know that you guys aren't allowed to say, but I can say it because I know it works.

If I take an antibiotic, okay, and I used to have to take antibiotics a lot because this is just a little tangent.

I used to have to take antibiotics a lot because I used to get UTIs a lot.

And the thing that got rid of my UTIs, this is like a spiral down the rabbit hole, but is woo lube because woo lube has coconut oil in it.

And the coconut oil is antibacterial, you know all about it, it's antibacterial, right?

And it takes away anything.

I don't ever get UTIs anymore because of it.

But I used to get UTIs.

If I did not take a Just Thrive probiotic, when I was taking my antibiotic, I'd get a yeast infection.

And I know that companies aren't allowed to say that, but I had to take a probiotic with the antibiotic or I was fucked.

Why is that?

So here's what happens when you take an antibiotic, right?

And antibiotics, in some cases, you need them, obviously.

But here's what happens.

When you take an antibiotic, within the first two and a half hours, over 90% of all the bacteria in your gut get killed off, right?

Now, they'll grow back.

The problem is, if you look at the gut environment, the thing that really regulates who should be there and at what levels is the pH of the gut, right?

The level of acidity in the gut, whether it's your intestines, your stomach, your large or small intestine, doesn't matter, the pH regulates things.

The way the pH regulates things is because acid is made by lactic acid bacteria in the gut.

The more lactic acid bacteria you have, the more acidic your gut is overall, and it controls pathogens and yeast from being able to grow efficiently because yeast and pathogens don't like a very acidic environment.

What happens is when you take a course of antibiotics, the first antibiotic, the first dose you take knocks everything down, including all the lactic acid producing bacteria.

Now, you're not producing enough acid in your gut.

The pH of your gut goes up.

It's less acidic, more basic now.

Now, does yeast and the opportunistic bacteria have a chance of growing faster than the lactic acid producing bacteria?

Then the second dose you take knocks everything back down again, and then the pH goes up again and becomes more basic.

Then the environment keeps changing with every single dose.

Then by the time you're done with the full course, you've actually created an environment that's actually more suitable for the yeast and for opportunistic organisms.

Now, what's interesting about the spores is they are stable in that antibacterial environment.

When the spores are in the gut, they will continue making the lactic acid even when all the other bugs are knocked down so that they maintain acidity in the environment so that the good bacteria can grow back faster than anything that's opportunistic.

Can you blatantly say that everyone should take a probiotic who's on an antibiotic?

Is that something we can say?

Yes.

Absolutely.

Do not take an antibiotic, you guys, without taking a probiotic or things are going to get yeasty.

And a spore-based probiotic, because most probiotics would actually be killed by the presence of an antibiotic.

But we have studied this, and we know that the spores actually survive the presence of an antibiotic.

You know, some of the harshest antibiotics that are out there.

We did a study on liver encephalitis patients, and so it's crazy.

We know we need to be taking a spore-based probiotic if you're on an antibiotic, and then weeks following months even following taking one.

I know what I want to call this episode, how not to get a yeast infection.

It'll get a lot of downloads.

And manage stress.

In parentheses, and manage stress.

So for people that have been trying everything to manage stress, maybe to deal with depression, anxiety, all these things, and they haven't found that solution, we can confidently say that if they try this, there's a good chance that it could help, for sure help with the issues.

So we've talked about the probiotic for years now.

Just started talking about this.

Everyone can find it in the same place, justthrivehealth.com.

Yep, justthrivehealth.com.

To end this off, I would love for you each to recommend quickly two foods that people could eat to improve their gut and brain health.

Maybe they don't have access to Just Thrive.

So I think asparagus is a great one because it's a prebiotic, so it's feeding your beneficial bacteria.

I also am a huge fan of fermented foods, even though I don't feel like fermented foods replace a probiotic, but they're still super beneficial.

Like sauerkraut and those types of things are still beneficial to your gut, even though they're not replacing a probiotic.

They're still going to, they're very nutrient dense and they're going to give you some other benefits as well.

So asparagus is a great source of like prebiotic fibers as well.

What is yours?

Okay, so a couple of things.

So I think you can consume healthy fish, right?

Because omega fatty acids will help bring down inflammation and inflammation is a big driver of what helps perpetuate stress, mood issues and all that.

So that can be really beneficial.

From an herb standpoint using holy basil, adding holy basil to almost anything will really help balance mood.

In fact, the holy basil is called tulsi in India, right?

So tulsi is an herb, it's a spice.

I grew up in India and so it's a very common thing for the people that work, the laborers throughout the day.

Tulsi grows wild all over the place.

So they actually just grab it from the ground and chew on it all day as they're working to balance their mood because they live very stressed lives.

So adding tulsi, holy basil to almost any food, any salad that you eat.

That's amazing that you grew up in India.

That's a whole other podcast.

It is, yes.

I grew up till I was 14.

That's a whole other world, right?

So that presents a whole kinds of other stressors.

But the food there is so healthy compared to here.

It is, yeah.

It's really all local.

It's organic.

I mean, of course, there's no label for organic because everything is just organic automatically, right?

But we also ate off the land, right?

We ate often on banana leaves with your hands.

And it's like a zero affluent thing.

Like we go to weddings in India.

Your average wedding is 2,000 people because you invite about 400 and everyone brings friends and family with them.

So you prepare for four or five times the number of people.

And the way we eat at weddings even is everyone sits on the ground next to each other.

Good for your gut.

Good for the gut.

Everyone's got your own banana leaf, right?

And then they come through with the different dishes and they put a dollop of each dish on the leaf.

You eat with hands.

And then at the end of it, you throw all the banana leaves in a big pile out back and cows and all come and they eat the banana leaves and there's zero waste.

That is genius.

I would love to go to India if you're wondering.

I'd love to go there too, actually.

It's amazing.

I'm just happy that my daughter's wedding, it's like 700 people, isn't so bad with 2,000.
700's a lot too.

Ours was 50.

To be honest, Lauren, the way you do the dishes, I might invest in a couple of banana leaves.

Honestly, the way that I do the dishes is probably good for the gut.

The way I don't shower every second is good for the gut.

A lot of things I do are good for the gut.

It's good for you.

You're in the household with me.

I don't know.

You might be the one bringing the stressor into the household.

Can we do a code for the audience?

Yes, Skinny.

Code Skinny.

I would recommend because I know you guys have not a lot of products, but you do have a medley of them.

I would recommend getting the Just Thrive Probiotic and JustCom.

Those are the ones we discussed on this episode.

Those are the ones that I have tried that I like.

Can we do like a giveaway of a bunch of Just Thrive products to the audience?

Absolutely, we'd love to do that.

Okay, all you guys have to do is tell us your favorite fact from this episode on My Latest Post at Lauryn Bosstick and follow...

Just Thrive Health on Instagram.

So code Skinny.

Code Skinny.

And at Just Thrive Health.

Yep.

You both are amazing.

Thank you both for making the trip again.

Thank you guys.

It was a pleasure.

And you guys go listen to part one of this because it's really good.

And two.

There's two parts.

We'll link them out.

Thank you guys.

Thank you.

Do you want to win a big, big goodie box from Just Thrive?

All the things will be in there.

Everything you could ever want and need.

All you have to do is tell us your favorite part of this episode on my latest Instagram at Lauryn Bosstick and follow at Just Thrive Health on Instagram.

As always, make sure you've rated and reviewed the podcast.

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