The Skinny Confidential with Tina & Kiran EPISODE (#396)

And the thing I try to tell people is you can't take enough vitamin C, zinc, vitamin D, as important as those are, you can't take enough of those to overcome a dysfunctional gut because that cripples your immune system.

Hello, hello, hello. We have an episode for you today. I was taking notes in this episode.

We had the opportunity to interview a microbiologist and the founder of Just Thrive together so we could get the 411 on the gut.

Yes, many of you may be familiar. We had Tina Anderson, the founder of Just Thrive on the show, I think it was about a year ago. Time flies.

Anyways, and we said we would have her back and we bring Kiran on and talk all about the gut and really go in depth all about gut health and protecting the gut and what we can do to boost our immune system. So this episode is definitely that. We go deep.

Yeah, I think this is a very sciency episode, but it was very digestible. I learned a lot about things that I'm doing in my own home that are not supporting a healthy gut. And I even got Michael to change some of his ways, ways that were very hard to change because you grew up in a household that maybe didn't do the best to support the gut.

Well, listen, all I had to do or learn was where the majority of our dust comes from. And I'll leave it for the audience to hear in the episode in the household, because as soon as I learned that, I said, okay, we got to make some changes around here.

Honestly, I think your mom might have used too much Windex.

I don't know. I turned out pretty okay. You could have maybe used a little more.

I don't know. Let's let the audience decide.

I'm going to tell on you to my mom and you're going to get in trouble with her.

I want to tell you, I probably am going to get in trouble with her.

Mom, can you come over here?

I do want to tell you that this episode has tons of tangible takeaways that you can apply to your own life to support your gut. So you're going to love it. A little side note, my Skinny Confidential Pink Cheeky Flirty Dreamy Humidifier has launched.

You have to go stalk my Instagram at Lauryn Bosstick. It is going to plump the fuck out of your skin. It's so magical.

Your nightstand has never looked cuter and your skin has never been more bouncy. Michael's skin is so bouncy, I can bounce a quarter off of it. So, I would recommend after listening to this episode to grab Just Thrive probiotics, turn your Skinny Confidential Humidifier on and pop your probiotic.

It's like the perfect morning routine. What's better? I also want to note that the Just Thrive team was kind enough to extend a discount to our audience.

You can use code SKINNY for 15% off site-wide. I personally would recommend starting with their probiotics. I take one every single morning.

Michael's taking them. They also, and I'm kind of obsessed with this, have a pet probiotic. So I give one to Boone.

I sprinkle it in his food and he is good to go. His gut is in check. I think you are going to love this episode.

Like I said, it is full of so much value. So let's give a little intro, shall we? Kiran Krishnan, who is a microbiologist, and Tina Anderson of Just Thrive Probiotics are on the show.

To give you a little background, Tina began her career as a trial lawyer before becoming the in-house counsel for a family pharmaceutical company after the birth of her second child. As soon as she got a glimpse into the many abuses in the pharmaceutical industry, she turned towards the field of natural health and discovered her passion. She put all her energy and focus into studying disease prevention and good health maintenance, which led her to discover the importance of gut health and how it is the root of overall health and wellness.

Tina and her husband created a unique supplement to improve gut health and help others live their best physical and emotional life. We also have Kiran. Kiran's a microbiologist who's been involved in the supplement and nutrition industry for the past 17 years.

He knows his shit. You guys are going to be so impressed with both of them together. And on that note, let's welcome Tina and Kiran to The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Show.

This is The Skinny Confidential Him & Her.

Okay, so we did a whole episode dedicated to probiotics and everything you needed to know about the gut, but we wanted to get more granular. So today we have a little plot twist for you. But before we get into that, what was Tina's episode that she was on in case they want to listen to the person?

Well, Tina, I was asking the last time we saw you. You're right, November 13th, 2020, episode 307. That's the one.

Why don't you guys both give us some background on yourself so the audience can just... I know they've met Tina, but just a little summary would be great.

Sure. I am the co-founder of Just Thrive Health. And we were in the phar...

My husband and I were in the pharmaceutical industry before we launched Just Thrive. And we just weren't pharma people. You know, we were more into natural health and wellness.

We were really more into getting to the cause of a problem rather than just treating symptoms. And so through kind of being at the right place at the right time, we actually met Kiran, who is another guest here today. And we were able to license these really incredible strains from London University that are game changing.

We launched a completely different category of probiotics to the market. And it's been incredible.

And Kiran, tell us a little bit about your background and how you started working with Tina in Just Thrive.

Yeah, so I'm a research microbiologist by training. Got into that field by watching a movie, which is really important to note. So you learn a lot of things from movies.

Do you guys remember that old movie Outbreak with Morgan Freeman, Dustin Hoffman?

That is vintage. I need to watch that.

Which means I'm vintage as well, because I was almost an adult at that point. And so I was in college and I knew I wanted to go into the science field. My parents are both from the science field.

That movie was really exciting to me because they were chasing viruses, like the pandemic is today. So I decided to go into microbiology and virology at that time. So since studying microbiology, I kind of fell in love with the topic.

And it's this invisible world around us that we know little about. And what we know about it, it's really spectacular. And we now know that it controls virtually everything that happens to us.

And so to me, that's like an endless, deep abyss of discovery that's waiting to happen. And that suits my mindset so well. And so I dove in headfirst into microbiology with a focus on human health.

And then my goal has been something, this is a fancy term, bridging the translational gap. And we can talk about how this happens. So there's the academic track of research, which is where most of the research happens in the world today, that creates scientific discoveries.

And then there's the commercial side of things. But between the two, there's this massive gap of information where rarely are the things being studied in the academic world ever translated to things that will actually impact people. So that's called a translational gap in science.

Can you give maybe a simple example?

Yeah. So let's say a researcher is studying cell biology, and they make some really interesting discoveries on how your mitochondria, the engines of your cell, function. The goal of that researcher is to continue to do research, because that researcher, him or her, are motivated by obtaining grants.

That's how they're paid, that's how they function professionally. So their goal is to continue to ask questions and get deeper and deeper and deeper into that subject and gain more and more grant research. So millions of dollars are being spent for them to just go deeper and deeper and deeper into that field without any of the discoveries that are made along the way actually becoming things that impact people.

Because their job is not to figure out how do I take the science that I figured out and make it a product that actually helps people. Somebody has to notice that, understand that science, and go, here's how we translate it into a product. So bridging that translational gap becomes really important.

So what typically happens then with those researchers? Do they have, I guess, maybe a group of people like yourself that are watching those discoveries and saying, okay, now that we have this information, we can go and create X, Y, and Z to apply to bettering human existence?

That's exactly right. So you take one university system, for example, like University of California systems, right? They have a number of schools.

The University of California owns more patents in biological sciences than almost any company could ever dream of owning. They literally own thousands upon thousands of patents, and they have full-time people whose job it is just to manage those patents. But the vast majority of them go expired, never becomes a product, right?

Because nobody is there to go in and go, what can we utilize this to actually make and impact people's lives, right?

So wouldn't they want to use those patents, though, for them, one, having the research, but two, wouldn't they want to use those patents and, let's say, simple word, monetize them in a way by licensing them out?

The university would, right? They don't have the capacity and resources to know how to do that. They're so focused on their lane and their track, and so they're great at doing research.

They're great at filing the patents, but they have no idea what to do with it after that, right? That takes a commercial bridge, and the commercial bridge also has to be a unique bridge because it has to be somebody or a company that understands the science at that level, but then also understands the market opportunity for the science, right, and how to translate that. So one of my goals became when we started doing all this microbiome research.

The microbiome was at the risk of following that same track, right, where we can make these amazing discoveries and learn more about ourselves than we ever knew. And we are, and we can talk about some of that, like what have we learned about ourselves in terms of being a human, things that we had never dreamed about before, but so little of it will actually become products to impact people, right? So right away my vision was, well, we've got to bridge that translational gap, right?

So working with companies like Just Thrive and, you know, doing the research and coming up with products and working with researchers along the world became the big passion.

What's the most interesting thing that you've found through your job about the gut?

So the biggest thing is that the gut is a central command center for everything that happens in your body, right? It doesn't matter if it's something that's happening in your brain, on your skin, in your urogenital tract, in the vaginal canal, in the birth canal, everything is controlled and at the least there's a checkpoint in the gut for how things are translated through the rest of the body, right? I'll give you a simple example of that.

Stress, right? We all experience stress on a daily basis. External stress, right?

Whether it's driving to work and somebody cuts you off or your colleague or your spouse, whatever it may be. When you get an exposure to external stress, the first thing that happens is your HPA axis called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis kicks on. That's your body's flight of fight response, right?

That's how you trigger that flight of fight response. So that external stress comes in, that external stress is perceived by your brain, in that, in your adrenal cortex, you kick off the release of something called cortisol, cortisol being the stress hormone. Now, what's supposed to happen at that point is cortisol is actually supposed to increase your blood flow and your blood pressure and all that, and your heart rate so that you can run away from whatever the stress may be, so you could flight or you could fight.

But once the perceived danger goes down, it's also supposed to trigger a mechanism that brings down the inflammation, brings down the heart rate and makes you calm again, right? But as it turns out, the gut microbiome controls that checkpoint. Now, if you have a dysfunctional gut microbiome, what happens is when that external stressor comes in, it elevates everything, puts you in that flight or fight response, but that signal gets amplified through the gut even more, so it makes it so much harder to come down.

I think that you need a probiotic. You might need one today.

Or two or three, you know? But that's the thing. So what happens then is you actually get less and less sensitized by the glucocorticoids.

These are the compounds that will help you come down or elevate. So what happens is you always end up in that really sensitive activated state. So smaller and smaller stressors get you more and more worked up, and it's harder and harder to come down, right?

And that's all checkpoint through the gut. The gut microbiome controls that cycle. So you can actually completely shift your personality, whether you're like a really obsessive A type personality, to being much more relaxed by changing the bacteria in your gut.

So can you look at someone because of what you do and be like, oh, they're not taking care of their gut? And if you can, what are those signs?

Yeah, so there's a number of different signs, right? So because the gut microbiome controls lots of things, you can tell, number one, by people's skin. So people, if they have acne, if they have rosacea, if they have redness in the skin, if they have thinning of the skin, that's another physiological change.

You know that the gut-skin axis controls a lot of the outcome on the skin, right? So you can tell right off the bat that they're not taking care of the gut. You can tell by body composition, a lot of people's weight is dependent on what the gut microbiome looks like.

So metabolically, if they're struggling, that's a gut microbiome issue. You can tell by energy and mood levels, right? So people tend to be really lethargic, really tired, not sleeping well.

All of that is controlled by the gut microbiome. You can tell by people that have really bad allergies and sensitivities, right? So they're sniffling all the time, they're sensitive, they're itchy, they've got runny noses all the time.

You can tell that their microbiome is unhealthy.

So would some easy tools be, obviously, to take a probiotic, eat more kimchi, eat more sauerkraut? Are those some very easy things that people can do?

Yeah, we can list a bunch of things that people can do.

Yeah, that would be amazing.

So one of the most important things you can do is of course taking the right probiotic. And I don't just say that from a commercial standpoint. The research is pretty clear.

If you have the right probiotic, it can make a huge impact on your microbiome, right? Because it can shift the ecosystem within your gut microbiome. So that's one of the most impactful things we can do.

The second thing is eating a more diverse diet. So early humans ate upwards of 600 different types of foods annually. We eat maybe 20, 25 different foods, right?

We're not foraging and gathering and hunting and all that like we used to. So our diversity in our microbiome, which dictates a lot of our health and wellness and also dictates how long we live, comes from diversity in diet. So that's a very simple thing people can do, is eating a diverse diet.

Number two, fasting. So adding some periods of fasting throughout the day or throughout the week, right? Our system is designed as something called a diurnal system, meaning we have a 24-hour clock, both in our microbiome and of course in our circadian rhythm as well.

Can we stay on fasting for a second because it's a topic? And Tina, I think we talked about it last time you came on, that comes up a lot on this show. And we've had a diverse set of opinions when it comes to this topic.

What I have read and what I intuitively feel is that if you are going to intermittent fast, that doesn't mean that you then restrict all of your calorie or food intake. It just means you're eating in a set window of time, but it's the same amount. Is that correct?

That's exactly right.

Because I think a lot of people, they run into trouble and they get hormone imbalances, especially, I don't want to generalize, but a lot of women, they go these long fasting periods and then they don't eat what they would normally eat throughout a whole day in that fast period. And then all of a sudden, you're not eating enough, you're not eating as frequently, and your hormones are out of whack, and you're like, what the hell happened? Intermittent fasting doesn't work.

And you're eating an imbalance of the right things, right? And in fact, there are clinical trials specifically on women in fasting, because that has come up a lot. Is it safe for women to fast?

As if during the course of evolution, men were like, we can fast, we'll wait to eat, and the women somehow had access to food all the time. So we both as women and men evolved the same way, right? And fasting was a necessity, not a luxury at the time, right?

Because we just didn't have accessibility to food all the time. That's part of why the hunger signal is so strong in the human system, because it was supposed to motivate us to go out into the elements, into the danger and find food, right? And for sustenance, if not, we'll just kick back and sit back in the cave and hang out, right?

In both of your perfect worlds, what is the perfect amount of time for fasting? Is it a 12-hour window? What do you suggest?

For me, if you can get to 14 to 16 hours in a daily period, you're doing really well. If you can do above 12, there's still benefits to it. If you do too much fasting, if you do 48 hours and longer, then there's some diminishing return in that, right?

Because now you're causing changes in the microbiome that may not be favorable. And if you do it for too long, that can certainly create issues within the microbiome itself. So 16 hours is that magic number where you get all of the cell repair benefits.

You get all of the metabolic benefits. You get the human growth hormone levels at skyrocket. So you get all of this physiological correcting in the body.

And then your microbiome turns on cleanup systems. So the housekeeping genes within your microbiome kick on to go and clean up your cells of broken DNA and mitochondria that are dysfunctional and all of that. So you get this housekeeping system that kicks on.

Yeah, and I've always done... I do 16 hours now, but I swore I could never fast. I thought there was no way I could ever do it.

And I just started one day. And I think that's the key with people is just starting slowly. Maybe do it three days a week.

And then start with 12 hours. You know, a 12-hour fast is really beneficial just to get started. You know, even if you just stop eating after dinner and, you know, maybe have breakfast at 7 or 8, you should be fine.

But I really was one of those people that never thought I could. And now I'm... now I don't ever want to eat breakfast because it's like it's a hassle to make breakfast.

It's just easier.

We were talking off air about something that's so interesting to me. I mentioned that I can never take an antibiotic without doing a probiotic. If I do that, it's yeast infection central.

I mean, like, whatever I think, and I can say this blankly, I feel you take a probiotic or you take an antibiotic, you should balance it with a probiotic. I would love for you to talk about that, but you guys said something interesting. You said if you're on an antibiotic, the other people who live in your house get effects of that.

Can you kind of speak on all of that? Sure.

Yeah, so that's your microbiome cloud, right? That is such an interesting concept when you think about it, but it makes perfect sense when you really dig into it. So to begin with, the studies around antibiotics and probiotics, sorry, antibiotics and your microbiome are pretty clear.

So even as far back as five, six years ago, they published a study showing that even a seven-day course of an antibiotic like a clindamycin affected your microbiome for up to two years, right? So you could see the negative changes in the microbiome up to 24 months after stopping the antibiotic. And there have since been a number of those kind of studies that have occurred.

But this study from a researcher, I think, out of Johns Hopkins was really interesting because what he did was he took patients who were prescribed antibiotics and he would test their microbiome before they started the antibiotic, then test it while they're on the antibiotic, and then up to six months after they stopped the antibiotic. But what he did in addition that other studies didn't do was he also tested the microbiomes of the household companions of the person. And these were both platonic, non-platonic, intimate partners, non-intimate partners and so on.

And what he found was that, of course, after starting the course of antibiotics, the microbiome gets disrupted quite a bit. And then up to six months after stopping, that same disruption was still present. And then in the household companions, he found a very similar disruption to the microbiome even though they weren't taking the antibiotic.

That is so crazy. So if I'm on an antibiotic and I'm not taking care of my gut, there's a cloud that goes around me. Tell me if I'm saying this right.

That you and Zaza get the...

How does that happen?

So here's a good... That's a great question. Now, there are things happening in the microbial world that we don't really understand how, right?

But in this one, we have some clues. One example of things that happen that we don't understand how, like if you get exposed to a virus, a respiratory virus, take the influenza virus, the first thing that detects the presence of the virus are the microbes that live in your lungs, right? And the microbes that live in your lungs send a signal to the microbes that live in your gut saying to the gut microbes, hey, there's a virus in the lungs.

Then the gut microbe talks to the immune system and says, hey, there's a virus in the lungs, you've got to get to the lungs. How does the microbe in the lung talk to the microbe in the gut? 

We're not really sure, right?

But they do that. We know that the evidence is there that they do that. So same thing with this microbiome cloud.

We know that we exchange bacteria every minute of every day, especially within the same household, even right now as we all sit here in this office, right? One way that we exchange it, and this is super exciting to think about, is when you go poop and you sit in the toilet and you've got fecal matter now in the toilet.

Oh my God, get your own fucking toilet, Michael. Wait, what?

Well, here's what happens. So when you flush the toilet, it vortexes, right? It spins everything.

The surface layer on the fecal matter poop rise up into the air, right? Get sucked into the air conditioning system and blown throughout the rest of the house.

So is there just fecal matter going through the house?

Your fecal matter is circling throughout the house.

I can get some kind of commercial grade filter or what?

It's a new product idea.

So there's fecal matter circulating throughout our air conditioning.

Who's got the power to that thing?

There is a university that has it.

I'm sure. I'm shutting this business down.

We need our fecal matter to be really great.

So we can circulate it appropriately.

I'm going to need you to take a probate out of here.

So if you have poor gut health or compromised gut health, Your fecal matter is poor and then it gets into the air conditioning.

Now let's say because you're on an antibiotic.

Is that the only way that it gets around?

No, there's other ways too. So one of the things that you look at is, if you don't dust your house for a couple of days, you see all this dust everywhere. 90% of dust is human skin cells.

And for every one human skin cell that's in dust, you have about 35 microbes sitting on that cell. 

So whatever you can physically see in dust, there's 35 times that in bacteria that you're shedding from your skin. And your skin microbes are dictated by your gut microbes.

So if your gut is compromised, you're going to start getting overgrowth of organisms on your skin that are opportunistic. And you're going to be shedding that to all the people that live within your household. And they're going to pick it up from the counters, they're going to eat it, you know, it's going to be, you're going to breathe it in and so on.

So it's an endless treasure trove of exchanging bacteria that we don't know, we don't realize, right?

Michael's probably so glad he doesn't live in that frat house anymore. Can you imagine the fecal matter in your frat house that was going through the air conditioning?

A lot of dust in there.

There was all kinds of different things mixing.

And a very, very poor ventilation system.

I'm glad I did not live in that frat house.

But there's a benefit to some of that, right? So there's studies that show that households that have six, seven or more people tend to have people overall with healthier immune systems, because we're exchanging microbes on a daily basis. That's a positive thing, as long as not two or three of those individuals are really unhealthy and providing a negative input into that ecosystem.

Same thing when you get a dog, right? Studies show that when you get a dog, you improve your diversity of the microbiome significantly, and the kids in the household with the dogs actually have better immune systems, less viral infection, less allergies and asthma and things like that. In fact, in 2020, studies showed that if you get a dog into your household, it actually increases your longevity significantly, and in part because the dog helps diversify your microbiome and a more diverse microbiome means you live longer.

That's a big determining factor of how long you're going to live.

And then if I could just go back to the vaginal or the yeast infections that you were talking about. I mean, when you're on an antibiotic, you are destroying the good bacteria, and therefore you're allowing that yeast to overgrow in your gut, and so your vaginal microbiome is dictated by the health of your gut, and so that's why people seem to get yeast infections after being on a course of antibiotics and why it's so common and why it is so critical to take a probiotic at the same time.

Also, you guys have this product that's for UTIs, and I would love to get into how that works. I always got UTIs my entire life, and everyone was like, well, pee after sex, take a shower, blah, blah, blah. I did all that.

The only thing that really started working for me was when I used coconut oil, and now woo, the lube. But the other day I did get one because I traveled without woo on accident. And thank God I had your product with me.

And it really made the duration of the UTI, it was not as long as normal and it was not as intense. What is in this UTI product that is so magical?

Yeah, we have an ingredient called Pat Cran. So a lot of UTI products have the cranberry juice. 

Well, this one actually has like the flesh, the skin, the seeds, all parts of the cranberry extract is in the product, is in this ingredient.

Then we also have hibiscus, alerose is the name of the ingredient and that's the fast acting portion that you experience. It allows the E coli to not adhere to the lining. And then we have black cumin seed in there too, which are all ingredients that will help the E coli not adhere to the lining.

Why are so many people getting UTIs nowadays? Is it because of our gut?

Yeah, like I just mentioned, the vaginal microbiome is dictated by the health of our gut microbiome. And because we live in this world that's so offensive to our gut health, we're dealing with issues that are in vaginal issues and more UTIs. We talked about UTIs well before we launched our UT123 product.

The probiotic alone is just so beneficial to help support the track of the vaginal microbiome. And then we just did something that was a little bit more hands-on for when somebody has constant urinary tract issues.

Let me ask a controversial question. Does COVID have anything to do with our gut, or do you guys not know?

No, it's not controversial at all.

To you guys, it's not controversial. To a lot of people, you can't say the word COVID.

Some people hear the word COVID, their heads start spinning.

Let's talk about it in the context of just a viral infection in general. COVID, even though it's on center stage right now, it's really not that much different from a lot of other viral infections. The motivations of the virus are the same, the pathology, how it functions are the same.

There are four big studies that looked at the risk factors for having really bad response to the virus, that is getting hospitalized or even dying from it. These four studies concluded pretty clearly that if you had a dysfunctional gut microbiome, and I can talk about what it means to have a dysfunctional gut microbiome.

Maybe we define that a bit more.

Yeah, what it means, right? So what they looked at was diversity in the gut microbiome, which we've already mentioned. So diversity among all of the, something like 100,000 research papers so far on the microbiome, diversity of the gut microbiome is one of the most important characteristics.

And we could talk a little bit more about enhancing diversity.

You achieve that by introducing different types of foods.

And fasting. Fasting actually increases diversity quite a bit. Engaging in nature.

So spending some time outside. Being prescriptive about it. I like to almost prescribe for myself like three times a week, 30 minutes a day, I'm going out like into the woods or hiking and being around that.

Reducing the amount of antimicrobial products you use for household cleaning. And we could talk about a massive allergy study out of Finland that showed some really interesting things about that. With kids especially.

Having your doors and windows open as much as you can. Letting in microbes from the outside. Getting a dog that has a huge impact.

Not Cloroxing and sanitizing every surface in your house. We could talk about that as well.

Poor Michael grew up in a Clorox den.

I think my pillow was made of Clorox.

Michael's mom was Windexing his teeth.

I would love actually to talk about the household cleaners because I recently just switched all my products to Thieves. Michael thinks I'm crazy, but I would love to know from a science level.

I don't think, I kind of know.

I mean, like your household was like super Windex-y.

Sure, but let's jump to that, but I also do still want to stay on the topic.

Finish of the virus, right?

Don't forget to tell us about the household cleaner.

For sure. Because that's super important. And that's something that people can make a change tomorrow, right?

To really make a difference. So going back to that diversity, that's one thing they measured. And then within your microbiome, there are species called keystone species.

And the reason they're called keystone species is they're so important to the structure and function of the ecosystem within the gut. And what they find is that if you have low diversity and low keystone species, your risk for getting hospitalization and dying from the virus is way higher. In fact, vast majority of people that were hospitalized that they tested had really low diversity and low keystone species within the microbiome.

And again, that's because the microbiome controls immune response, right? Virtually 80% of your immune tissue is in your gut. And so, in order for your body to deal with something like a virus, especially a new one that your body hasn't seen before, your immune system really has to be functioning on every level, and that means coming from the gut.

So if your gut is dysfunctional, your immune system cannot function the way it should. And the thing I try to tell people is you can't take enough vitamin C, zinc, vitamin D. As important as those are, you can't take enough of those to overcome a dysfunctional gut because that cripples your immune system, right?

Your gut microbiome are the eyes and ears of your immune system. Your immune system would cease to function without it being in proper order. So then going back to the household cleaners.

So there are studies that show that the households that use Clorox-based cleaners or Chlorine-based cleaners more appropriately tend to have kids with much higher rates of allergies, asthma, viral infections, and so on. So they become compromised. And there was a big study out of Finland that was looking at why are they seeing such crazy allergy and asthma rates in Finland.

There's a town in Finland that relatively close proximity to a town in Russia. So geographically, they're very similar in terms of their situation. But the town in Russia has much lower incidence rates of allergies and asthma and so on.

So then the government of Finland said, we're going to invest in this and study, figure out what is the difference here. What are we doing wrong? What they came up with after a long study was that the people in Finland over sterilized their home.

Their windows and doors were closed much more often than the town in Russia, which did not sterilize all the surfaces. They had the doors and windows more open. And so being a country with their version of socialized medicine, they said, okay, we're going to try to impact this in some way.

So they mandated that a certain number of daycare centers in Finland would have dirt piles. And the kids would have to play in the dirt piles X number of times a week, right? So that they're getting exposure to dirt.

And sure enough, following that, after a few years, they're finding that the kids that are getting that exposure are dropping their incidence rate of allergies and asthma.

My husband doesn't like to open the windows in the house, and I...

Hold on. No, I do.

No, you don't.

But we're in the Texas of summer right now.

I don't care.

I don't care.

Next time you say something, I'm going to say, I'm looking out for ZOZZ's microbiome.

Let me ask you this. This is, again, like some people may not like this topic, but I think what we're doing, right? We have a young child.

And one thing that worries me, especially with a lot of the restrictions that we've been put under the last few years, is like, I agree with you, getting her outside, playing in the dirt, meeting other kids, getting these back. What's going to happen four or five years down the line to some of these young kids that aren't exposed to some of these elements that later are?

So the good news is, because the microbiome is an ecosystem, you can almost always affect the ecosystem, right? So it's not like there's ever going to be a point that it's too late. So yes, they might have a disadvantage because they went through this 18-month-plus period of really lack of interaction, oversterilization, and so on.

But you can always recover that. You know, even people in nursing homes, it's not too late to help fix their microbiome and improve their outcomes. So it's an ecosystem you could absolutely take her in.

Up to the age of seven, their microbiome is quite flexible. You can do a lot of changes at that point. So she's only 18 months, right?

So yeah, get her riding a horse, get a dog, take her outside, and she'll be perfectly fine.

I agree. Like, I'd let her dig her face into the dog and get on the grass. Michael's a little scared of mosquitoes.

When I was a kid, I would basically see my parents, they'd be like, all right, I would wake up, see them, and then I wouldn't see them until they would scream in the neighborhood, come back, right? I was just like out there doing...

They'd say, come back to the Clorox and Windex.

Come back, we'd sterilize you now that you've been out.

Do you guys by any chance have any household cleaners that you would recommend? I would love to hear what you guys use since you're so immersed in this industry. You must be really strategic about what you use.

Yeah, well, Kiran actually taught me this is just some water and essential oils is really what we use most of the time. And I have a couple like Branch Basic is a brand I use once in a while. But for the most part, it's just water and some essential oils.

And that was because of Kiran's advice.

Okay, I got so thieves is good. That's what I just bought. It's actually very expensive to I bought like the pure thieves.

It was like 120 bucks or something. But I guess you just dilute it with water.

Totally.

So it's okay.

Yeah, I mean, I do like a big sprayer of water that may be 24 ounces and I put like four or five drops of the essential oil in it. And it's really just for the smell. It's not for the antimicrobial effect of the essential oil.

It's just because we all need some smell. We're programmed that way, right, to feel like something's clean.

Any essential oil or is there specific ones you use?

The Thieves is fine, yeah. Thieves is known as an antimicrobial. So it's got an antimicrobial effect.

So you don't need to use a full concentration. Just use a few drops. We're working on, we're doing a lot of research right now on a probiotic cleaner because we have a number of strains, including some of the strains that are in Just Thrive, that we show when you put it on surfaces will produce enzymes, amylase, protease, lipase, and actually break down biological matter, proteins, fats, carbohydrate, biological matter, without killing microbes.

So they'll break down and clean the surface without the sterilization aspect of it.

What's some shit that we're doing in our house that we could change like that? For instance, is laundry detergent screwing with our gut? Is there little tiny things that we can change throughout our household that makes a big difference to the gut over time?

I think one of the first things you can do is stop sterilizing all the surfaces in your home. I think if you want to sterilize your toilet, fine, right? Your shower, the mildew grows after a little while.

We'll sterilize, you can sterilize that. But most surfaces in your home don't need to be sterilized. 

So we don't need to use an antimicrobial cleaner to clean our desks and our countertops and the mantle, things like that.

So the less we can do of that, the better. If you bring home a raw chicken and you get raw chicken juice on your counter, then you might want to sterilize it. It's salmonella, it's E coli from raw beef, right?

So be smart about that part of it. But most contact surfaces, you don't need to sterilize. That's one big thing you can do.

The second thing, if you don't have a dog, bringing a dog into your home is a great addition to the microbiome of your home. Cats work or no? Cats work if they go out and in.

The reason why the cats don't work as well is because they tend to stay inside the house, right? And then they are succumbed to our over sterilization and the poor things don't get enough microbes. But I have friends, certainly in Singapore and Malaysia and where I grew up, the cats go out, they spend the whole day outside and they come back in at night and they look at you like they don't want you to know what they've been doing out the whole day.

You know, they've been up to no good, but they're very healthy.

Maybe I'm related to a cat.

So those are two simple things. And the other thing is your personal care products. That makes a big difference, right?

I took on a project to find a clean deodorant that worked for me for two years. And then I finally found one, and my assistant actually makes it, so she makes it at home. So it's not a commercial product, but she's like, she's, ah, I've been making deodorant.

I'm like, well, let me try yours, and that seemed to work the best for me. But lotions and shampoos and all things without antimicrobials in it, the cleaner you can go on these personal care products, the bigger of a difference it makes.

Bread can paste is not on the list of antimicrobials.

I know, but sometimes you gotta make sacrifices.

That's true. One thing that I love about your guys' brand is that you also have a probiotic for pets. My dog Boone was having a little bit of diarrhea, and the vet recommended that we implemented a little bit of probiotic into his diet.

The diarrhea is gone. Can you, we didn't get to talk about this enough, I feel like, the last episode. Can we talk about how important it is to give our pets probiotics?

Yeah. So the thing is with pets like Kiran says, they're outside all the time, and they're being faced with all the glyphosate, the Roundup that's being sprayed all over our lawns. And so their microbiome is getting compromised just like human microbiomes are.

So that's why they may have leaky gut just like humans have leaky gut. And so that's one of the cool things about our probiotic for the dogs is we actually have not a human clinical trial, but a clinical trial on leaky gut with dogs. And it's incredible that we are seeing that these strains are actually helping with the leakiness of the gut of the dogs.

And when you look at the closest relative to our canines today are the gray wolf. So when you look at gray wolf and then their ancestry, they don't suffer from the things that our dogs suffer from, which is cancers and thyroid dysfunctions and diabetes. The most common in household pets is atopic dermatitis, which is a massive allergy type of issue.

And so our thinking was if our animals are suffering from the conditions that we suffer from, it's likely for the same reasons, the same pathology. And we know that in humans, leaky gut drives the vast majority of chronic illnesses. And so our thinking was there's got to be severe leaky gut in dogs and probably for the same reason that we all get leaky gut, the dysbiosis, the exposure to chemicals and so on.

But when we looked into the research, nobody had studied leaky gut in dogs to figure out if that's what's causing the disease. So we did the first clinical trial in dogs in leaky gut, and we showed that sure enough, they actually get severe leaky gut. And that leaky gut is significant in a way that it creates immunological markers that are associated with lots of conditions.

And our thinking was, okay, our dogs give us so much. We've talked about dogs quite a bit on this show already. They bring so much to us, and what we're giving them instead is leaky gut, chronic illness, and just a really poor quality end of life.

And so we're thinking the least we can do is try to protect them from the leaky gut. Let's develop a product so that everybody in the household has a healthy microbiome.

How easy is it to just start a probiotic? Is it something that you can just wake up and take tomorrow? Can anyone take it?

Is everyone a candidate? Who's not a candidate? Can you take it when you're pregnant, breastfeeding, all the things?

Yeah. Funny enough, when you asked that question right off the bat, the first part of the question, I thought you were leaning towards, how easy is it to start a probiotic product, right?

I'm going to answer for you.

And I was like, oh my God, how long is the show?

Last time Tina came on the show, we talked a lot about the origins of how you develop this brand. So I think people should go back and listen to that one for that story. But for this one, for people that are ready, they want to take the next step and they want to start jumping in, they want to learn more about the gut, like back to Lauryn's question.

So at the end of the day, right now, as it stands today, there are very, very few exceptions of people that shouldn't take a probiotic or should maybe be cautious about it, right? The vast majority of people, 99.9% of people, can start it the next day and likely see benefits in a relatively short amount of time if they're taking the right probiotic. That's, of course, a lot of nonsense out there too, which is true for the supplement industry in general.

There's good stuff and there's stuff that's not really as good. So assuming you're taking a good probiotic, virtually everyone can start it tomorrow without consideration for what is going on in their life. The only people that I would be cautious about are people on really heavy immunosuppressant drugs who just had a kidney transplant, for example, and they're being heavily managed by a team of doctors because the probiotics will enhance your immune system in a positive way, but nonetheless, your transplant surgeon may not want that kind of enhancements.

So talk to them about it. But outside of that, everybody should be and can be taking probiotic.

This is a question that I would love to know. I see all different kinds of vitamins and supplements and probiotics on Instagram and Facebook. What are some things that you want to avoid when you're getting a probiotic?

Is there words that are just like, ugh?

On the labeling of the probiotic?

On the labeling of maybe the ingredients, like does it need to be non-GMO? What are we looking for that we should avoid?

I would say, I mean, one of my big push for the marketplace is to start to look for and utilize probiotics that have studies on them, right? On the finished product, and that's a really important part of it.

How do you know they're not paid studies?

Well, so all studies are paid to some degree, right? But if they're published, then more than likely they've gone through some rigor of making sure there's scientific scrutiny to it, right? Because in order for a study to get published, you disclose all of the conflicts of interest, like who paid for this study and so on, and then there are outside experts, peer-reviewed experts that read the study, look at the protocols, figure out how it's done, and then they question anything that may be an issue.

So if it's published in a peer-reviewed journal, in scientific journal, then you know it's pretty good. The data is pretty good. If there's multiple studies published, that's even better.

So one of the things that we've always said is that you can't just take any mix of bacteria and assume it's going to be beneficial to you because on one end of the spectrum, it's going to do either nothing or on the other end of the spectrum, it can actually cause disruption within your microbiome. And there's been a couple of studies that have showed that. There was a study published by the Israel Academy that showed that people who were taking antibiotics, if they took this hodgepodge mixer of probiotics, I think it was like a 50 billion CFU probiotic, it actually slowed down the recovery from the antibiotic.

Those probiotics competed with their own endogenous bacteria to survive through the system, right? So that can be a negative thing. So one of the problems in our industry is there's no pre-approval for products coming out of the market.

So anyone can put anything together and call it a probiotic, right? So what we really want to do is focus on ensuring that the finished products have been studied to understand what it actually does in the microbiome, because bacteria are so complex, right? Taking a bacteria every single day through a capsule, the big question is what is it doing to the rest of the bacteria in your gut, right?

Over time, how does it impact those bacteria? Whether it's weeks or months, how does it impact your endogenous bacteria? And if it does so in a negative way, you may not realize that for a year, two years, right?

It may be really far gone before you even realize it's doing something in a negative way. So having probiotic products studied is critical. There used to be these like assumptions that you have to have a product with 15 strains in it or 50 billion CFUs.

There's no scientific rationale to any of that. There are lots and lots of products where one strain is far more powerful than 15, right? It's the quality of the strain.

I want to know, and Tina, you talked a little bit about this on the first episode, but I'd love to go deeper about babies and probiotics and kids and probiotics, because I know you have two daughters.

And a son.

And a son. Shout out to your son, too. So I would love to know how you've implemented that into their diet, if they do take probiotics, how young.

So I am a huge fan. I am very passionate about the kids' aspect of it, just because I think what I had mentioned last time was that when I was in school, K through 12, I never knew anybody with an allergy, and now there's peanut-free tables all the time. And so our kids are growing up, they're born into this very sterile environment in the hospital.

They're not getting exposed to the microbes. They're not getting exposed to bacteria that they need. And so they are now developing allergies at such a higher rate.

They're developing asthma and all these other autoimmune issues that are going on. So I feel passionate. As soon as we launch the product, I put all my kids on it, and they take it religiously every day.

My son just went to college, and he's making sure that him and his basketball team all have it. So it's really important for kids to be taking it. And with babies, I think it's really important.

And all you need to do is open the capsule and mix it with food. You know, even for younger babies, if you just want to sprinkle a little on... If you're nursing, you could sprinkle it on the mother's breast, or you could put it on the finger, and you could just have the baby suck on it.

But really, really important to be supporting babies and children's microbiome, because they are being attacked more than ours were, certainly more than mine was when I was a child.

Is this true? I heard through my doula that having a baby vaginally is really good for the baby's gut. Is that true?

Oh, yeah, there's lots of studies that show that actually.

Why is that true?

First, we should mention that Nina and Cassie, who are her daughters, are huge fans of the show.

Nina and Cassie, what you got, Zaza, is so cute. The dress is so adorable. We're obsessed.

They're going to die hearing the names on your show, so that's awesome. So yes, there's studies that show that C-section born babies have a much higher incidence rate of allergies, asthma, obesity, diabetes later on in life, and even trauma-related disorders.

Careful, Michael's a C-section baby.

And a lot of us were, especially if you were born 30, 40 years ago, it's very common practice to just schedule it, right? Because that became more convenient for the whole industry. Now, even today, somewhere around 33% of births are C-section.

And it makes a big difference because think about the way the system is designed, right? The vaginal canal is such an amazing, mystifying place. As boys and everyone else, we learn about it early on and we're obsessed with it for the rest of our lives.

I dedicated my life to studying it.

Just studying it and observing it. It's a really awesome thing. But it's also the cradle of life, right?

And so the baby's first exposure to the outside world comes through the vaginal canal. So as it turns out, mom's vaginal canal in the second trimester will actually start to change to prepare for the right types of bacteria for the baby to be exposed to. There are microbes in the vaginal canal that don't normally exist when mom is pregnant, when she's not pregnant, because these microbes focus on milk digestion.

But by the second or third trimester, the milk-digesting microbes start to proliferate in the vaginal canal. Of course, mom's not drinking milk in her vagina, so why would she need them there? They're there specifically to inoculate the child as the child comes out.

Now, there's the other part of it, is the anus is so close to the vagina, which causes a lot of problem for women down the road. But during birthing, it's an important thing because most women defecate during birthing, right? And so the baby gets exposed not only to the lactobacilli and all the good bacteria coming out of the vaginal canal, but they also get a huge dose of bifidobacteria through the fecal matter.

And that's a really important touch point because the predominant bacteria in the early part of the microbiome for the baby are bifidobacteria, right? So there are some bacteria in the vaginal canal that will go in, inoculate the baby's gut, eat away all the oxygen because the gut is predominately a non-oxygen environment, and then the bifidobacteria the baby gets exposed to takes over and becomes a predominant group of bacteria for the first six to eight months. Now, if the baby comes out in C-section, the baby's not getting any of that exposure.

The first exposure the baby gets are the microbes from the surgeons, the nurses in the room, and on all the equipment.

And they try to put like all this shit on the baby. I was like, no, they try to put eye goo on the baby. I'm like, just let the baby be natural how it's supposed to be.

Even wiping off the baby.

I said, don't wipe her off, just leave it on. I don't think we bathed her for like five days. I was like, just let it sit there.

It's so great, it's so good. From what I've read, and I'm not a doctor or a scientist, so don't take my word. I just felt like leaving all of that good bacteria on her for as long as possible was amazing.

I mean, it's not like Michael hasn't smelled my vagina. He's fine.

They said it's been a lifetime study.

And there's two researchers at NYU that did a study showing that C-section babies, obviously we know from lots of studies that C-section babies have dismantled microbiomes and have much higher risk for all kinds of issues. So what they started doing is during the pregnancy process, during surgery, they would impact mother's vaginal canal with sterile gauze, and then pick up all of that vaginal goodness. And then as soon as the baby was pulled out C-section, they would wipe the baby down with the vaginal gauze.

Oh my god, that's genius.

And that would alleviate all of the problems.

So if you have to have a C-section and you want to get these benefits from the vagina, they can take it out of the vagina and put it on the baby.

They can.

Which I totally do.

The husband or the partner can do it.

Great, Michael, you can do it.

Exactly. You can, in fact, you can even just use Q-tips, right? So you can go in there as far as you can and then inoculate around the baby's eyes, nose, mouth, and so on, or gauze if you can.

And more and more hospitals are supporting this, which is a good idea.

Can I ask you a random question? I feel like you'll know this. I ate my placenta.

What are your thoughts on that?

Oh, that's super interesting.

In capsule form.

In what?

In capsule form.

I mean, I would have eaten it as a steak. I just did the capsule. Yeah, I would have done.

I would have eaten it in a smoothie with my Just Thrive probiotic.

Well, next time around, let's see it.

I did the capsules.

You did the capsules, okay. So somebody encapsulated it for you in raw form?

Yes.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's a significant move either way, like you're missing out on something if you don't or you're gaining something significant if you do.

The placenta is really just kind of a filter for transmitting nutrients and all to the baby, right? And the placenta is like a critical component. It's really the baby's gut at that point because it's filtering the world to the baby through the placenta.

So your immunological antibodies are going through the placenta, your nutrients. And in fact, there are microbes that pass through the placenta, specifically to inoculate the baby in utero. We used to think in utero, in the womb, everything is sterile, but now there's evidence showing that your immune cells have been going to your gut and grabbing good bacteria and taking it past the placenta into your baby in utero to inoculate the baby even before she came out.

That's how important it is for her to get microbial exposure early on.

I'm so happy to have this conversation because I wasn't a nut. I mean, I am a nut, but I wasn't too nutty.

From a scientific perspective, are there things when it comes to gut health that you look at and say, that's a big no-no, would not do that, would eliminate that, and things are like, okay, it's not the best, but you can do it in moderation? Say you're consulting someone and say, hey, I need to get my gut health in order. What are those things if there are any?

There's a couple of things that always make me nervous, looking at it from a microbiologist's standpoint. Overuse of things like binders. So when people take loads and loads of charcoal and diatomaceous earth and all that for long periods of time, that can have really deleterious effect on the microbiome, because those things, yes, they may bind some toxins and things that are causing problems, but they're also binding good stuff and taking it out, and that's not at all a normal process.

The other thing is the overuse of antimicrobials. We all know the dangers of antibiotics, but antimicrobials, the natural versions, quote unquote, are fine for people. That's not true.

Antimicrobials, whether it's a garlic extract or a celery extract or whatever it may be that people are taking as antimicrobials, they're just as strong, and they don't selectively kill good bacteria, bad bacteria. They kill everything, right? So I've known so many people now through our clinics, and we work with a lot of clinics as well, that have been on antimicrobials, like oregano oil, for example, for like a year.

And now their gut microbiomes are dismantled, right? So just because it's a natural antimicrobial doesn't mean that it's necessarily good for you to be on it for a long time. And the other thing that people do that I think are, could probably be harmful if you do it a lot, is if you do a lot of colonics, right?

That's kind of an unnatural thing to shoot water up your butt all the time.

What's a lot of colonics in your definition?

I know people that do it like twice a month.

That's too much in your opinion.

What would you say is okay?

I've never done one. I've never felt the need to do one. I'm curious to do one once just to see how I feel about it.

I wanted to do it once.

I'm curious to do it once. I think any more than... So when you disrupt your microbiome, it usually takes about three or four weeks if you're supporting it for it to bounce back, right?

So I would say if you did a colonic, I wouldn't do it again within at least a month. But even that, I don't know... There's very little science behind what it's actually doing in the large bowel, right?

Because it's an unusual process for something to go in there, swish around and come back out.

That's why I only did it once because I did feel like it was not natural. Like it felt like I was doing something... And listen, I do stuff that's not natural, so I'm not like judging anyone that does, but it was just something that felt really uneasy and not natural to my body.

But if you think about just evolution in general, and you talked about animals earlier, the wolf being, you know, not having the same problems as a dog. I think it's obviously clear that human beings create a lot of the problems for ourselves, right?

We do.

Technology is great, but it also can work the other way. And if you think about how human beings evolved, it's not likely that we had a device to shoot coffee up our ass. Right.

So it seems like genetically and through evolution, your body would be designed to function the way it's supposed to be designed. So I get why what you're saying makes sense. I look at everything from that perspective.

Is this, does this make sense? Does it not? Is the body designed to do this?

Is it not designed? A probiotic to me makes a ton of sense, because like you said, we don't get as much diverse foods as we used to. So maybe you need to supplement with things, because we just don't have access like we used to.

But the other thing too with the spores is that these strains were actually the same strains our ancestors used to get when they ate off the land. They would eat roots and tubers off the land, and they would get these exact type of strains, these spore based probiotics. So when Lauryn, you had asked earlier about like, can everyone take it?

For the most part, yeah, everybody can take it, because they were, you know, we evolved that way. We evolved eating these, you know, bacteria off of our food on a daily basis.

And didn't we talk last time about the soils and how the soils are different now than they used to be? Is that true?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that was with you.

Yeah, over farmed, depleted of nutrients.

Why is your product superior to other probiotics? Because I know, because I've done a lot of research on all different companies, and obviously we stuck with you guys, but I would love to know from your point of view, why it's superior.

Yeah, the biggest thing is its ability to survive the gastric system. Most probiotics will die through that journey from swallowing it, going through the stomach. They're going to hit the stomach, and the stomach is very acidic.

It's known as the gastric barrier, and it generally kills most of the probiotics that are on the market, and they never get to the intestines alive. The whole point, the whole definition of a probiotic is to arrive alive in the intestines and confer a benefit to the host, which is the body. And so these probiotics actually get there 100% alive, and then they work there, they stay there for about 21 to 28 days where they're actually making a change in the microbiome.

So the spore base is really, really, it's just a totally different category of probiotics on the market. I don't know, you could probably expand on that.

Yeah, I mean, we could talk for a moment just the scientific philosophy around creating a probiotic, right? And kind of going back to the thinking of what is a probiotic, what should it be to a certain degree. One of the important things for your audience to note is that the human is wholly inadequate to be a human, right?

When we look at our genetic material, we've got these genes in our system. And for the longest time, we thought our genes coded for everything that we do, right? Including all the diseases that we suffer from and everything.

There's a gene in there that's messed up, and that's why you have heart disease, or there's a gene for pancreatic cancer and it's turned on or off. Through the Human Genome Project, what we came to find out was that we have so few genes that it's inexplicable how we function the way we function. I'll give you specific numbers.

We have about 22,000 functional genes in our chromosome, and it sounds like a lot, but an earthworm has about 30,000 functional genes. We are less cool than an earthworm. A rice plant has around 35,000 functional genes.

Then the big question is how are we so sophisticated? How are we at the top of the evolutionary ladder, top of the food chain, and an earthworm is digging around in the dirt? What is the big difference there?

One of the big differences is that we house this massive reservoir of genetic capability through the microbiome where we have over 2.5 million microbial genes in our system. So the vast majority of genetic code that we use to be human comes from microbes. So we've outsourced so much of our functionality to microbes.

And that's the philosophy behind looking at a probiotic. And I know that may not make sense just yet. Hopefully, it will clear up in a second.

The idea is that bacteria do very specific functions for us. And environmental bacteria have really unique roles within our system. Our thinking was what are we not exposed to that we were exposed to through the course of evolution that we need to put back into our system.

So really going back to the basics. And our biggest goal was resolving this issue of leaky gut. And so we were thinking, are there microbes in the environment that have an impact on leaky gut?

And then fortunately for us, veterinarians have been doing studies on leaky gut since the 1960s. The first paper published on leaky gut was in 1952. So this is not a new topic at all.

This has been spoken about in the scientific literature for 60, 70 years. And so what they've been studying is animals that they farm and they grow, and how if those animals had leakiness in the gut, their mortality rates go way up, and that has a huge economic impact. So in the world of farming and veterinary science, they've been focused on leaky gut.

And they started using bacterial spores in these animals, realizing that when the animals are wild, they're grazing, they're picking up spores from all over the environment. They realize that when they put the spores back into the feed, that it actually sealed up the leakiness in the gut, right? And so then you go through the scientific literature and you see that these spores have a unique capability of going into the system, identifying dysfunctional bacteria.

They'll sit next to the dysfunctional bacteria, and they'll bring down the growth of the dysfunctional bacteria, and then they'll identify really good beneficial bacteria that are underrepresented. They'll sit next to them and produce compounds to regrow your good bacteria. So they're orchestrating a change in the ecosystem of your microbiome.

At the same time, they're causing an increase in the expression of the proteins that keep our gut sealed. And we don't have genetic code to express those proteins ourselves. So there's these things called the tight junction proteins.

There are 40 different proteins in the tight junctions that keep your gut lining sealed and closed. And if those proteins aren't expressed properly and not functioning properly, over time, they open up, and then the spaces in between your intestinal cells open up, and everything becomes leaky. Now, you would think to fix that, we just have to express the tight junction proteins and close those up.

We don't have a gene to do that. In our measly 22,000 genes, we're basically coding for hair color and height and eyeball shape and so on. We're not coding for sealing up the gut.

Yet there are the microbes that can come in and turn on genetic expression to seal up the gut lining. And these spores do that. So over the millions of years that we've co-evolved with these organisms, we've outsourced that job to them, right?

Because Mother Nature assumed we would always be in constant contact with these organisms. Mother Nature didn't foresee that we would create these walls and barriers and be in a sterile environment, right? So through the course of evolution, something called symbiogenesis, we got forced to work together in a symbiotic fashion.

And when we reintroduce those organisms back into our system, it creates all kinds of functionality.

Wow, if people don't need a probiotic after that, I don't know what to say.

Before we go, I'd be remiss not to ask you, especially in this time that we're in, and this topic may really make some people's heads spin, but I think we have to address it. Imagine we're in a world where there is no vaccine availability and we're just talking about, again, people calm down, just talking about the best way to boost your immune function and be as healthy as possible, right? And the only thing you can rely on is, again, no vaccine, just boosting your own immune...

Let's pretend we're in the beginning of 2020. What could people have done to create the most armor for their immune system?

Yep. So here's what the sign says, and it says it very clearly, right? One of the things that kept me up at night when 2020 started was looking at how the virus infects and who it infects in the worst way.

It infects people with certain pre-existing conditions in the most significant way, right? People with things like heart disease, diabetes, obesity, age-related disorders. Why does it affect those individuals much more than somebody at the same age that doesn't have those conditions?

It's because these individuals here have something called chronic low-grade inflammation. And then there was a big study called the Boston-Dublin study that looked at biomarkers that could predict how severe of an infection somebody was going to get, whether they were going to hospitalize or die from this virus. And the one thing that they found that was predictive was a cytokine, and I'll explain what that is.

It's an inflammatory marker. It's called interleukin-6, right, IL-6. If that was elevated when you got exposed to the virus, your chances of getting hospitalized and dying from it were way higher, 10, 20-fold higher.

And for the dumb people in the room myself, what is IL-6?

Yeah, so it's an inflammatory marker. So when your body has lots of low-grade inflammation constantly, then IL-6 is going to be elevated all the time.

So how do you get that down so you don't get hospitalized or die?

Yes, so then the first question is, what is the biggest driver of elevated IL-6, right, low-grade inflammation? It's also the same things that drive those pre-existing conditions, like diabetes, heart disease, and so on, and that's leaky gut.

Wow! Look at that wrap. That wrapped it all around.

It wrapped it all up. So leaky gut is the number one driver of diabetes, heart disease, age-related disorders, obesity, right? And these aren't controversial in any way at all, right?

These are studies by the American Diabetic Association, the NIH, CDC-sponsored studies, WHO studies. So this is not at all controversial or fringe. This is absolutely mainstream.

They talk about this at the American Heart Association meetings, the American Diabetic Association meetings. Intestinal permeability and the resulting chronic low-grade inflammation that occurs is the number one driver of all of those chronic conditions that were the biggest risk factors for the worst responses to this virus. And the same thing that biomarker IL-6, which is present at high levels in all of those conditions, was also shown to be the best predictor of how bad you're going to respond to the virus.

All of that is driven by a dysbiotic gut, which results in leakiness in the gut. So one of the best things you can do is to seal up your gut and improve the diversity and health of your microbiome. Hands down.

So get outside, take walks, get a dog, eat some kimchi, have your Just Thrive probiotic.

Don't sterilize your house too much.

Get some thieves oil.

Get some thieves oil

I wrote all this down.

Start looking for personal care products that are cleaner. And you don't have to revamp your entire cabinet. Start with one thing.

Start with a deodorant, a toothpaste. And one more simple thing that's really, really, really important is stress management. Because the reason is stress is the number one driver of leaky gut.

There was a paper published in 2015 in the Journal of Frontiers of Immunology that looked at a meta-analysis. That means an analysis of all the papers on this topic. And they concluded that stress-related leaky gut was the number one driver of morbidity and mortality, that's disease and mortality, in the modern world.

The number one driver.

People get really, I mean, not everybody, but a lot of people get really upset with me because I am constantly pushing back on the mainstream narrative and constantly pushing back on the fear narrative. And it's not only, there's multiple reasons, but you could just add that, you could take the reason you just mentioned and just say there is no other reason other than it's going to impact your health, your immune response, your stress, all of these things and just say, you know what I mean? And people sometimes don't like that.

It's a weird time where people almost want you to be more scared than you are and if you're not, that upsets people. And it's very strange to me when people get upset about somebody not being more afraid than they should be.

Absolutely. I mean, one thing we know in the political landscape and all that is fear drives action, right? So everyone wants to use fear in that way, but being informed rather than being fearful is far better.

I don't see the benefit of fear from a health living...

Definitely not from a health perspective.

I don't really see the benefit of fear.

Again, if we go back to it, fear was used as a fight or flight mechanism to help us avoid... Yes. But elongated, prolonged periods of fear and stress don't seem to serve the human on any level.

Absolutely, yeah. So managing that stress, right? Programs like this help people stay informed to a certain degree.

So what people should know is that they shouldn't be afraid. They should be informed. And that's a big difference, right?

Being informed, like, I'm not afraid. Why is that? Because I'm informed.

And then you can make decisions.

Information is power. Speaking of being informed, can you leave our audience, each of you, with a book, a podcast, a resource, besides Outbreak, that you think would bring our audience value on this topic? Like, whether they want to know more about the gut or probiotic, is there anything that you would direct them to?

Well, I'm going to go back with my same answer. I love Katie's podcast, Wellness Mama. I just feel it, because she does talk about the gut, but she talks about so many relevant topics that have to do with natural health and wellness and easy to implement ideas.

And I listen to it religiously.

I would double down on that. She is an incredible resource. She's so well researched.

She has really interesting people on her podcast.

We spent some time with Katie. We actually went to Finland with her. It was our first time we went.

We were out in the freezing cold.

Hopefully we weren't where they were closing the doors and cleaning things. I should have gotten in the soil.

She's an individual that really, really knows her shit and really takes the time to really research and go in depth. We love Katie.

Yeah. No, she's fantastic. We've had the pleasure of doing her show a couple of times.

It was always a great conversation. So from a book standpoint, there's a book called The Missing Microbe, which is a book by Martin Blazer, which is an NYU professor on microbiology. And one of the key topics there is the idea of the lack of exposure to microbes, and what impact that has for us.

There's another twist on that, which I want people to think about a little bit. There's a mass extinction going on right now that we're not aware of, that will have a bigger impact on the human species than anything else that's happening in the environment, in our whole world. And that is the loss of critical microbes.

I talked about earlier how the vast majority of genetic code in being human comes from the microbes that we house, right? So through the course of evolution, our ancestors have collected all of these microbes for us, created a home for them, and passed them on to us so that we can function as a human being, right? But what we're doing today is we are eliminating large groups of those microbes.

The number of microbes that we are passing on to our kids each generation is lessening significantly from generation to generation. So if you look at studies on the current Hadza tribe of Tanzania or the Papua New Guinea tribes, they have twice the microbial diversity in the microbiome than we do, two times, right? So we've lost hundreds of species of microbes in our gut that affect function.

So it's the same if I told you that the next generation of kids would be born without a spleen because of what we're doing now. And the generation after that would be born without a spleen and only half a liver, right? We would be alarmed because we would understand the impact of that.

But being born with a hundred fewer species of microbes in your gut is tantamount to being born with missing an organ system, right? So we have to be so conscious of preserving this amazing treasure trove of microbes that evolution and our ancestors have gone through literally hell for to preserve for us. It's our job to preserve it, to pass it down to the next generation.

Now, is there a book that talks about that? No, but I might write one at some point. But I do talk a lot about that if they want to engage with me on Instagram.

I think my handle is now K-I-R-A-N-BIOME, B-I-O-M-E.

We'll link it in the show notes.

Okay, I try to put a lot of research and talks and all that out there. And there's a blog that's launching in about a month called Biome Hackers. There's going to be all of this relevant research and all that as well.

At the end of 2022, 2021, sorry.

Where can everyone shop Just Thrive, pimp everything out? Maybe we can do a code, a giveaway.

And we also have a lot of blog posts too, which is a lot of the research too. And I think our code is skinny.

Use code skinny at checkout. You get 15% off. I would personally start with the probiotics.

That's what I take every single day. And if you are prone to UTIs like me, get the UTI.

It's called UT123.

That product, I used that the last time I got a UTI, and it helped so much. So those are the two products I would start with. Also, a fun one if you have a pet is the Pet Probiotic.

Let's do a giveaway. Can we give away some of my favorites and your favorites, Tina?

I love that idea. Yeah, let's give them away.

So all you have to do is tell us your favorite part of this episode on my Instagram, at LaurynBosstick, and follow at Just Thrive Health. Super easy. Definitely will check out your Instagram, too.

Thank you guys for taking the time. Come back any time you want.

Thank you, both. Thank you.

Thank you, guys.

Tina and Kiran were kind enough to give away a huge Just Thrive basket. All you have to do is tell us your favorite part of this podcast on my latest Instagram, at LaurynBosstick, and then make sure you're following Just Thrive Health. I think you're going to love this basket.

It's honestly everything you need, supplement-wise, to support the gut. Like I said, just leave your favorite part of this episode on my latest Instagram, and we will see you next time. Before we do a giveaway, I want to give you a code.

You're going to go to justthrivehealth.com and use code SKINNY for 15% off. That's justthrivehealth.com, use code SKINNY for 15% off.

Thank you.